Nihilism
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in ordinary language, nothingness; the state or condition of beused to designate the Russian Socialist movement, which began about 1870, and may be divided into two distinct periods: (1) "The going among the peasants." A number of young men and young women of the upper class voluntarily went to work in the fields and the factories so as personally to carry on a Socialist propaganda and distribute Socialist literature. Their organs were the "Yperiod" (Forward!) of London and the "Workman" of Geneva. This lasted about six years, during which time there were 23 political trials of 417 persons, half of whom were condemned to exile in Siberia or to hard labor in the mines. (2) In 1878 the struggle with the government commenced. At a congress held at Lipezk, shortly after Solovieff's attempt on the life of Alexander II., the acquisition of political freedom was declared to be the first necessity. It was hoped to gain this by the formation of a legislative body, elected by the people, with guarantees for electoral independence, and liberty to agitate for reforms. This was demanded from Alexander III. shortly after the assassination of his predecessor as the price of cessation from violence. The Nihilist program is an agrarian socialism based on communal property. Before the rise of the Bolshe viks in 1917 the Nihilists were identified with French and Italian anarchists. Consult Kornilov's "Modern Russian History" (1917). Nihilism in metaphysics is the doctrine that refuses a substantial reality to the her way to the East, where she rendered phenomenal existence of which man is conscious.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 the word meant, first of all, a Russian political movement — the "going among the peasants" of the 1870s, the Lipetsk congress, the bomb that killed Alexander II in 1881. Historians now file those activists under other labels, chiefly the Narodniks (Populists) and the terrorist party People's Will; "nihilist" was a hostile outsiders' tag popularised by Turgenev's 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. Meanwhile the sense Collier's mentions only in a closing line — the metaphysical one — has taken over the word entirely, largely through Nietzsche, whose diagnosis of European nihilism became central to twentieth-century philosophy and to existentialism after 1945. Today a reader who meets "nihilism" expects a claim that nothing has value or meaning, not a programme of "agrarian socialism based on communal property".
Written for this edition, 2026.