With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

Herzen (or Gertsen) was an illegitimate son of a rich Russian landowner, Ivan Yakovlev, and Henriette Wilhelmina Luisa Haag from Stuttgart.

[2] He was first cousin to Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky, considered the patriarch of Russian photography and one of Europe's most important early photographic pioneers, inventors and innovators.

His father, after a personal interview with Napoleon, was allowed to leave Moscow after agreeing to bear a letter from the French to the Russian emperor in St. Petersburg.

In 1834, Herzen and his lifelong friend Nikolay Ogarev were arrested and tried for attending a festival where verses by Sokolovsky, that were uncomplimentary to the tsar, were sung.

Upon arrival, he was appointed as secretary to Count Alexander Stroganov[6] in the ministry of the interior at St Petersburg; but due to complaining about a death caused by a police officer, was sent to Novgorod where he was a state councillor until 1842.

[8] Herzen spent time in London organising with the International Workingmen's Association, becoming well acquainted with revolutionary circles including the likes of Bakunin and Marx.

[9] It was during his time in London that Herzen began to make a name for himself for "scandal-mongering" when he told Bakunin, freshly arriving after having escaped imprisonment in Siberia, that Marx had accused him of being a Russian agent; in reality, the two were on very good terms.

He fought for the emancipation of the Russian serfs, and after that took place in 1861 he escalated his demands regarding constitutional rights, common ownership of land, and government by the people.

In his early writings, he viewed the French Revolution as the end of history, the final stage in social development of a society based on humanism and harmony.

However, he would always reject grand narratives such as a predestined position for a society to arrive at and his writings in exile promoted small-scale communal living with the protection of individual liberty by a non-interventionist government.

His literary career began in 1842 with the publication of an essay, in Russian, on Dilettantism in Science, under the pseudonym of Iskander, the Turkish form of his Christian name.

Some of these were essays, such as his Baptized Property (1853), an attack on serfdom; others were periodical publications, the Polyarnaya Zvyezda (or Polar Star), the Kolokol (or Bell), and the Golosa iz Rossii (or Voices from Russia).

Writing in 1857 Herzen became excited by the possibility of social change under Alexander II, "A new life is unmistakably boiling up in Russia, even the government is being carried away by it".

Alexander II granted serfs their freedom, the law courts were remodelled, trial by jury was established, and liberty was, to a great extent, conceded to the press.

[20] Liberals led by Boris Chicherin and Konstantin Kavelin believed individual freedom would be achieved through the rationalisation of social relations.

Their statist variety of liberalism was opposed by Herzen as it supposed that Russian society would evolve to an ideal state based on a Hegelian view of reason.

Radicals such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov wanted more commitment to violent revolution and the withdrawal of any hope in the reformist Tsar.

He argued that the Russian Radicals were not united and strong enough to create successful political change, stating, "You want happiness, I suppose?

[26] Herzen came to believe the complex questions of society could not be answered and that Russians must live for the moment and not a cause, essentially life is an end in itself.

Herzen found greater understanding by not committing himself to an extreme but rather lived impartially enabling him to equally criticise competing ideologies.

The words of Herzen that Berlin repeated most insistently were those condemning the sacrifice of human beings on the altar of abstractions, the subordination of the realities of individual happiness or unhappiness in the present to glorious dreams of the future.

"[27] Russian Thinkers (The Hogarth Press, 1978), a collection of Berlin's essays in which Herzen features, was the inspiration for Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays performed at London's National Theatre in 2002 and at New York's Lincoln Center in 2006–2007.

Set against the background of the early development of Russian socialist thought, the Revolutions of 1848 and later exile, the plays examine the lives and intellectual development of, among other Russians, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the novelist Ivan Turgenev and Herzen, whose character dominates the plays.