Justice & Law Quote by Alexander Herzen

Herzen isn’t romanticizing emotion; he’s staging a jurisdictional fight between two kinds of authority. Logic and law courts belong to the world of reasons, arguments, and verdicts - systems designed to sort claims, assign blame, and close the case. Passion doesn’t cooperate. It isn’t a proposition you can refute or a defendant you can cross-examine. It’s evidence of a different kind: brute, lived reality.

The first sentence is a double jab. You can’t bridle passions with logic - meaning reason can’t simply rein them in, as if feelings were horses to be trained by syllogisms. But you also can’t “justify them” in court, which takes aim at the era’s fetish for moral accounting: the belief that if something is intense enough, it must be defensible, or if it’s indefensible, it must be suppressed. Herzen denies both comforts. Passion can be irrational and still real; it can be politically inconvenient and still structurally important.

Calling passions “facts and not dogmas” is the key move. Dogma demands assent; it’s chosen, preached, policed. Facts just persist. In a 19th-century Russia of censorship, ideological camps, and revolutionary fervor, this reads like a warning to intellectuals and radicals alike: stop treating emotional energies as something you can regulate with doctrine. If you want to understand society - why people revolt, submit, love, betray - start where the court can’t reach and the logician can’t tame.