Mikhail Bakunin
For Bakunin, freedom is impossible as long as there is a state or a church above people – and a revolutionary state would simply create new masters.
Placement
Russian revolutionary and Marx’s great opponent in the First International: freedom is only possible without the state and without God; a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would become the rule of a new elite.
Key ideas
- Freedom against state and church
- Critique of the dictatorship of the proletariat
- “The passion for destruction is a creative passion”
Influence
Influenced by 4
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
influenced by
In his Moscow years Bakunin translated Fichte’s lectures on the vocation of the scholar (1794) into Russian (1836) and passed through a Fichtean idealism before turning to Hegel. J. G. Fichte, Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794), Russian tr. M. Bakunin (1836); E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (1937); A. Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin (1982)
Evidence: AI draft
Johann Gottlieb Fichte › 1762–1814
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
influenced by ✓
In ‘The Reaction in Germany’ (1842) Bakunin turned Hegel’s dialectic into a philosophy of negation, ending: ‘the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too’. M. Bakunin (as Jules Elysard), “Die Reaction in Deutschland”, Deutsche Jahrbücher (1842); E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (1937)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Ludwig Feuerbach
influenced by ✓
Bakunin took up Feuerbach’s critique of religion as the projection of human qualities onto God and turned it against the state (God and the State, 1882). M. Bakunin, Dieu et l’État (written 1871, publ. 1882); P. McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Theory of Anarchism (2002)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Ludwig Feuerbach › 1804–1872
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
influenced by ✓
Bakunin, who knew Proudhon in Paris in the 1840s, took up his anti-statism and federalism but joined them to collective ownership (Statism and Anarchy, 1873). M. Bakunin, Gosudarstvennost’ i anarkhiia (Statism and Anarchy, 1873); P. McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin (2002); SEP “Anarchism”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon › 1809–1865
Influenced 2
Peter Kropotkin
influenced ✓
Converted to anarchism among the Bakuninist Jura watchmakers (1872), Kropotkin kept Bakunin’s anti-statism but replaced his collectivism with anarchist communism (The Conquest of Bread, 1892). P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899); La Conquête du pain (1892); SEP “Anarchism”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Peter Kropotkin › 1842–1921
Emma Goldman
influenced ✓
Goldman took from Bakunin the view that the state and organised religion keep people dependent and a free society rests on voluntary association (Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910). E. Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910); Living My Life (1931); M. Bakunin, Dieu et l’État (1882)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Emma Goldman › 1869–1940
Criticism
Criticizes 2
Giuseppe Mazzini
criticised
Bakunin answered Mazzini’s condemnation of the Paris Commune and the International by attacking his ‘political theology’ of God, duty and nation (La théologie politique de Mazzini, 1871). M. Bakunin, La théologie politique de Mazzini et l’Internationale (1871)
Evidence: AI draft
Giuseppe Mazzini › 1805–1872
Karl Marx
criticised
Bakunin warned that Marx’s workers’ state and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would produce a new privileged minority of former workers ruling over the masses (Statism and Anarchy, 1873). M. Bakunin, Gosudarstvennost’ i anarkhiya (Statism and Anarchy, 1873); K. Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874–75; MECW 24)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Works
Against Marx and the German Social Democrats: a workers’ state would be ruled by a privileged minority of former workers and scholars.
Fragment published after his death: belief in God means the enslavement of human beings – “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him”.
Position
Bakunin began as a left Hegelian: his essay of 1842 ends with the line that “the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too”. From the 1860s he developed a collectivist anarchism. Freedom is not the property of the isolated individual; it grows in society and exists only when all are free. The state and the church are the two great powers that keep people under tutelage, and God and the State reverses Voltaire: “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” Against Marx he argued that the conquest of state power by a workers’ party would not abolish domination but hand it to a new minority of former workers and scientific experts; in Statism and Anarchy (1873) he warned against the rule of “scholars” in the name of the people. The quarrel with Marx was personal as well as theoretical, and in texts of 1869–1872 written during it, such as a reply to Moses Hess intended for the Paris paper Le Réveil, he depicted Jews as a nation of exploiters and tied Marx’s politics to his Jewish origin. Historians disagree about how central these views were to his thought. His collaboration with Sergei Nechayev in 1869–70 and the Catechism of a Revolutionary, whose authorship is disputed, have also coloured his reputation.
Life & context
Mikhail Bakunin was born in 1814 on his family’s estate at Pryamukhino in Tver province. He trained at the artillery school in St Petersburg, left the army in 1835 and in Moscow became one of the leading Russian readers of Fichte and Hegel. In 1840 he went to Berlin, and in 1842 published “The Reaction in Germany” under a pseudonym. In Paris in the 1840s he befriended Proudhon and met Marx. He fought in the uprisings of Prague in 1848 and Dresden in 1849, was twice sentenced to death, handed over to Russia and held in the Peter and Paul and Shlisselburg fortresses, where he wrote a Confession for the Tsar. Exiled to Siberia in 1857, he escaped in 1861 via Japan and the United States. He joined the First International in 1868, was expelled at the Hague Congress in 1872 and died in Bern in 1876.
Further main works
- The Reaction in Germany (1842)
- Confession (1851, published 1921)
- Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism (1867)
- The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution (1870–71)
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