Politics & Power Quote by Alexander Herzen

Herzen skewers a liberalism that prides itself on principle while quietly perfecting the art of self-neutralization. “Austere in political trifles” is an acid little jab: the movement that can be puritanical about minor procedural virtues somehow goes soft when power actually tightens its grip. The sentence turns on a bitter paradox - “constant protest” paired with “constant submission” - and the phrasing makes it feel less like hypocrisy than like a learned technique. “Ever more artfully” implies practice, refinement, even professionalism: dissent as a craft that reliably vents pressure without threatening the machinery.

The intent isn’t to mock protest itself; it’s to indict a social role liberals can slip into under an autocracy or a brittle state: the safe opposition that supplies moral commentary while accepting the state’s terms of reality. Herzen was writing as a Russian journalist and exile in a 19th-century landscape where censorship, police surveillance, and reform-from-above made “public opinion” both tantalizing and tightly managed. In that environment, liberalism could become a politics of posture - brave enough to complain, careful enough to comply.

Subtext: the government comes to depend on this kind of opposition. Protest becomes a pressure valve, submission the price of being allowed to keep speaking at all. Herzen’s cynicism lands because it describes a choreography many modern readers recognize: institutions that tolerate critique as long as it remains “austere” about the wrong things and obedient about the right ones.