Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, the Russian editor, essayist, and social philosopher, was the illegitimate son of I. A. Iakovlev. Herzen was graduated from the faculty of physics and mathematics of Moscow University in 1834 and was promptly exiled to the provinces for radicalism (1835–1840, 1841–1843). He emigrated from Russia in 1847 and spent the remainder of his life in western Europe. In London he founded the first "free Russian journal," Kolokol (The Bell), in 1852. There, during the 1850s he published, in eight parts, his Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), a brilliant personal memoir and history of nineteenth-century ideas.

Herzen's first essay in philosophy, "Diletantizm v Nauke" (Dilettantism in science), was published as a series of four articles in Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the fatherland) in 1843. Herzen used the term science (nauka) in the broad sense of G. W. F. Hegel's Wissenschaft and focused his critique...