Nikolay Danilevsky

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

8 min readNov 29, 2023

Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (Никола́й Я́ковлевич Даниле́вский — 28 November 1822–07 November 1885)

Today is the 201st anniversary of the birth of Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (Никола́й Я́ковлевич Даниле́вский — his name is transliterated from the Cyrillic script in various ways; 28 November 1822–07 November 1885), who was born in the village of Oberets on this date in 1822.

Nikolay Danilevsky is best known as a Slavophile philosopher of the 19th century. The Slavophiles rejected Peter The Great’s campaign of Westernization for Russia, and sought to delineate a specifically Slav identity and destiny, with Russia at the head of the Slav peoples as its spiritual and political leader. There is little information available on Danilevsky in English, but recently two of his books have been translated into English, Russia And Europe: The Slavic Worlds Political And Cultural Relations With The Germanic-Roman West (1869) and Woe To The Victors! The Russo-Turkish War, The Congress Of Berlin, And The Future Of Slavdom (1878).

Danilevsky is often compared to Spengler, as in Robert E. MacMaster’s paper, “Danilevsky and Spengler” (1954), in which MacMaster writes:

“Critics and admirers alike addressed themselves almost exclusively to the theory of cultural-historical types, to what they regarded as Danilevsky’s denial of the possibility of human progress, and to the sociological implications of his theories. Today the chief component of his historical reputation is that he was a forerunner of Oswald Spengler. The present discussion is no exception; for it is the purpose here to examine critically the latter view, now undoubtedly the most important and persistent line of interpretation of Danilevsky’s philosophy of history.”

In noting that Danilevsky is seen as a forerunner of Spengler, he implicitly acknowledges the differences between the two. MacMaster also wrote a book about Danilevsky, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher (1967). Calling Danilevsky a totalitarian seems like rather strong rhetoric for a scholarly book, but we have come to expect such things in the conflict between east and west, and the book was written during the Cold War. Much of the book is like this, but at least we know hwere MacMaster stands, which is helpful. In between the outbursts, and sometimes as part of an outburst, MacMaster comments on Danilevsky’s philosophy of history:

“There is a whole relatively consistent, finished Panslavist and utilitarian philosophy of history on the surface, as it were, of Russia and Europe. The completeness of this philosophy together with the presence in Danilevsky’s work of much more, indeed of things which are utterly contradictory, raises questions about his goals: whether he really wanted a Panslav Union for the merely political and cultural reasons he stated; or whether he had in mind higher aims, like spiritual fulfillment, the harmonization of man with God, nature, his fellows, and himself; and, if such was the case, why he did not say so more openly. The middle chapters of his book raise such questions particularly cogently, for one has to do very little probing beneath the surface to see that Danilevsky had a deep commitment to spiritual ends, to a theological-metaphysical view of history, and to the Russian traditions he so heartily decried in his typal, Panslavist theory.”

And…

“Had Danilevsky lived on and extended his biological ideas into the philosophy of history, it seems quite probable that he would have developed an outlook similar to that of Herzen or, with a Christian bent, of Dostoevsky, whom he occasionally cited in these years. That is, he would have posited (in a mythopoetic but responsible, nontotalitarian fashion) an immanent, divinely instituted or at least objectively existent teleologica! principle in world history; and, on this basis, he would have viewed the developments, sequential or contemporaneous, of nations and civilizations as orderly steps in a progress toward an all-human, Christian (or Utopian) socialist civilization and an end of history, a sort of Joachite new dispensation. Russia would have been assigned a messianic role in the last stage of history. As his commentaries on Humboldt and Fourier suggest, Danilevsky had been groping for something like this since the forties. Behind the utilitarian, Darwinian facade, there is in Russia and Europe such a view of history. The evolutionary theory in Darwinism, though relating only to organic nature, is even similar in spirit to some of the less prominent historical theory in Russia and Europe. There was a marked consistency of sorts in Danilevsky’s most fundamental philosophical convictions throughout his life.”

A review of MacMaster by Alfred A. Skerpan (The Historian, Vol. 30, №2, February, 1968, pp. 266–269; linked below) addresses MacMaster’s effort to cast Danilevsky in the totalitarian role:

“MacMaster’s argument is largely based on what Danilevsky wrote in the last chapters of Russia and Europe, in which he comes closest to playing the role of totalitarian philosopher that MacMaster assigns to him. But even in these chapters it is questionable whether Danilevsky is really the leftist and radical MacMaster would like to make of him. Furthermore, Danilevsky is supposed to have remained essentially a ‘totalitarian philosopher’ throughout the seventies and into the early eighties. Here MacMaster seems to be on especially shaky ground, for he adduces only a few passages from articles Danilevsky wrote concerning the Russo-Turkish War to illustrate Danilevsky’s continued ‘totalitarian’ tendencies during these years. MacMaster also mentions the book Darwinism and the articles Danilevsky then wrote about nihilism, tariffs, constitutionalism, and religion; and he even describes Darwinism as being ‘philosophic and humanistic in spirit’ and the nihilism article as an expression of ‘an incipient sense of responsibility.’ But he does not discuss the book and articles in their relationship to the spiritual and political crisis Russian society and autocracy were experiencing in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Danilevsky, as Darwinism and the articles (as well as the corrections he prepared for Russia and Europe around 1880 and shortly before his death in 1885) make clear, responded to this crisis in much the same conservative and humanistic spirit that his friend Strakhov and other neo-Slavophiles did. That Danilevsky did respond in this manner suggests that MacMaster’s classifying him as a leftist and radical totalitarian philosopher of the ‘Russian type’ does not (though it seems to be a useful concept in regard to the last chapters of Russia and Europe) help us very much to reach a better understanding of Danilevsky’s entire career as a Russian scientist and publicist.”

Russia and Europe is a remarkable work, comparing Russian civilization to the civilizations of the West, and while part of the purpose of the book is to discuss Slav identity and destiny in such a way as to provide an aspiration for Slavic peoples, part of the book is analytical and philosophical, and well worth reading. The impact of this book is yet to be fully felt in the Western world, if indeed Danilevsky’s distinctive arguments ever get a hearing, which they should. Russia and Europe is perhaps best known for Danilevsky’s schematism of “cultural-historical” types, which resembles in some ways the familiar lists of civilizations in Spengler, Toynbee, and others.

“These cultural-historical types or distinct civilizations, ranked in chronological order, are the following: 1) Egyptian; 2) Chinese; 3) Assyrian-Babylonian-Phoenician, Chaldean, or ancient Semite; 4) Indian; 5) Iranian; 6) Jewish; 7) Greek; 8) Roman; 9) neo-Semitic or Arab; 10) Germanic-Roman or European. To those can be added, perhaps, two American types: the Mexican and the Peruvian, which died a violent death and did not manage to complete their development.”

Danilevsky also propounded laws for the development of these cultural-historical types:

I will start right off by explaining some general conclusions or laws of historical development, derived from the grouping of historical phenomena into cultural-historical types.
Law 1. Any tribe or family of peoples characterized by a separate language or group of languages with similarities that can be readily detected without deep philological investigation constitutes a distinct cultural-historical type, if it has already grown out of its infancy and is inclined toward and generally capable of historical development.
Law 2. For the civilization of a distinct cultural-historical type to be born and develop, the peoples belonging to it must have political independence.
Law 3. The principles of civilization for one cultural-historical type are not transferable to the peoples of another type. Each type produces its own, influenced more or less by foreign civilizations preceding or contemporary to it.
Law 4. The civilization of each cultural-historical type only attains fullness, diversity, and richness when its diverse ethnographic elements, independent but not combined into a political whole, form a federation or political system of states.
Law 5. The course of development for cultural-historical types closely resembles that of perennial plants that bear fruit only once, whose period of growth is indefinitely long, but whose period of flowering and bearing fruit is relatively short and exhausts its vitality once and for all.
The first two conclusions cannot be doubted and do not require much explanation.

Much of the book is taken up with characterizing the nature of Western civilization, especially vis-à-vis Slavic civilization, and looking forward to the Slavic civilization that is yet to be. As a strongly ethnocentric work, I can understand why some, like MacMaster, have reacted against Danilevsky, but I found Danilevsky’s work not only valuable, but something that can still be taken up and built upon. I have cited Danilevsky in my my recent paper, “The Develes Engynnes: Technological Textures of Life on Earth and in Space,” essentially in relation to what could be called Danilevsky’s implicit philosophy of technology. There is much more in Danilevsky that remains interesting and useful to philosophy.

Further Resources

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