Dosoyevsky, Brownson's junior by eighteen years, would write on a theme similar to Brownson's concerns about humanitarian democracy. Just as Brownson worried that North American progressives would sacrifice men on the altar of the abstractions known as “Man” and “The Rights of Man,” Dostoyevsky feared that the European progressive's equivalent idealism, “Reason,” would demand bloodshed and the trampling of individual's natural rights. Dostoyevsky was always concerned about the individual man–his real sufferings, his real relationship to Christ, his intimate friends and families–as opposed to the radicals of his day who derided such things as secondary to the creed of progress. In his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, his character of penetrating intellectual insight, Ivan Karamazov, says of the progressive dreams to build an earthly paradise for man, “I don't want my body, with its sufferings and shortcomings, to serve simply as manure for the future harmony.” Likewise, in The Possessed, Dostoyevsky pokes fun at a progressive named Kirilov and others of his progressive ilk: “Mr. Kirilov has already demanded that more than one hundred million heads roll so that reason may be introduced in Europe, and that considerably exceeds the figure proposed at the last peace conference. In that sense, Alexei Kirilov is ahead of everyone.”
