Bakunin, Mikhail

BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL. - Famous 19th-century Russian anarchist, b. at Pryamukhino (province of Tver'), in 1814, d. in the hospital of Bern in 1876. Son of a landowner and firstborn of eleven children, he began his career in 1833 as an artillery officer, but after two years abandoned it to devote himself to the study of philosophy. Through Kant and Fichte he arrived at Hegel and enthusiastically professed his ideas. Documents of his Hegelian faith of this period are the introduction to his translation of Hegel's Gymnasium Discourses, in which B. adopts the idea of the rationality of all that is real, and an article On Philosophy, published in 1840 in the St. Petersburg journal Notizie patrie. The Hegelian categories presented in these two writings still have a certain religious coloring, although B.'s religiosity at that time already shows the irrepressible spirit of freedom and the clear intolerance of every authority and every dogmatic limit, which are one of his principal characteristics.

In the autumn of 1840 B. went to Berlin, where he followed in the wake of the left Hegelians. God is for him the supreme freedom. This, however, cannot be comprehended through speculation, but only through freedom and action: "Life, love and action can be known only through life, love and action." But freedom is now understood by B. ever more in a political sense: "Ethical freedom, without external freedom, is only an inconsistent specter." Particularly significant for B.'s development in this period is his famous article Reaction in Germany, published under the pseudonym of Jules Elysard in the Deutsche Jahrbücher of 1842, in which B. seeks to demonstrate that antithesis is the fundamental element of the Hegelian dialectic. The article closes with the celebrated finale: "The passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion."

In the years that followed we find B. ever more taken up with revolutionary action, in which he had as his first goal the liberation of the Slavs and particularly of the Poles. This made a return to Russia impossible for him. The year 1848 finds him in Paris, in Germany and in Prague among the most heated agitators and promoters of the revolution. When this was suppressed B. was arrested at Chemnitz and, by a court of Saxony, condemned to death. The sentence, however, was not carried out and he was handed over to Austria, which in 1851 handed him over in turn to Russia. In Russia he was held until 1857 in prison, where he composed and addressed to Tsar Nicholas I his Confession. In 1857 he was confined to Siberia, but after four years he managed to escape, and to make his way through Japan and America to London. Here he collaborated with Marx in the First International. But his anarchist tendencies and his aversion to every form of state organization soon brought him into conflict with the latter, and the conflict went on growing sharper until it provoked B.'s expulsion from the First International (1872). In 1870 B. took part in the revolt of Lyon and in 1874 in the disturbances of Bologna. The failure of the one and of the others led him to doubt the revolutionary spirit of men. Death overtook him poor and disillusioned in a hospital of Bern.

The most fertile period of B.'s literary activity is the one that followed his imprisonment. It was in fact at that time that his most famous works were composed: The German Empire of the Whip and the Social Revolution (1871); God and the State (1870-71); State and Anarchy (1873). At first, in 1848, B. had sought God in the revolution. It is precisely around that time (probably in 1849) that he writes to a friend: "You are mistaken if you believe that I believe in no God. I have sought God in men, in their freedom; now I seek God in the revolution." The violent hatred he had of every limit imposed on human freedom, however, led him in the end to a radical hostility toward every form of religious faith. God's sovereign being seems to him to absorb everything: "If God exists, man is a slave; but man can and must be free: therefore God does not exist."

B. is in the history of Russian culture one of the most significant figures. His anarchism links him - according to Berdyaev - to other figures of the same type such as Sten'ka Razin and Pugachev, and also connects him to the Slavophiles with their profound aversion to every form of State. Bakuninian ideas are also found in the novels of Dostoevsky. His concept of negation as the fundamental element of the Hegelian dialectic and of reality has its continuation in Lenin's exaltation of Hegel's dialectic, in which he saw a justification of revolutionary action.

Among the editions of the works (a complete edition is lacking) the following should be noted: Oeuvres (6 vols., Paris 1895-1913). In Russian: Opere scelte (3 vols., Moscow-Petrograd 1910-22). For the letters there is only Correspondance de M. B., Lettres à Herzen et à Ogaroff (1860-74), publiées avec préface et adnotations par M. Dragomanov (Paris 1898).

Gustavo A. Wetter