BAKUNIN, MICHAIL. — Celebrated Russian anarchist of the nineteenth century, born at Priamuchino (province of Tver') in 1814, died in the hospital of Berne in 1876. The son of a landowner and the eldest of eleven children, he began his career in 1833 as an artillery officer, but abandoned it after two years to devote himself to the study of philosophy. Through Kant and Fichte he arrived at Hegel and enthusiastically professed his ideas. Evidence of his Hegelian faith during this period is found in the introduction to his translation of Hegel’s Discorsi ginnasiali, in which B. adopts as his own the idea of the rationality of all reality, and in an article Sulla filosofia, published in 1840 in the St Petersburg journal Notizie patrie. In these two writings, the Hegelian categories still display a certain religious coloration, although B.’s religiosity at that time already showed the irrepressible spirit of freedom and the marked intolerance of every authority and every dogmatic limitation that constitute one of his principal characteristics.
In the autumn of 1840 B. went to Berlin, where he followed in the footsteps of the Young Hegelians. For him, God is supreme freedom. This, however, cannot be understood through speculation, but only through freedom and action: «Life, love, and action can be known only through life, love, and action». Yet freedom was now understood by B. increasingly in a political sense: «Ethical freedom, without external freedom, is only an insubstantial specter». Particularly significant for B.’s development during this period is his famous article Reazione in Germania, published under the pseudonym Jules Elysard in the Deutsche Jahrbücher in 1842, in which B. seeks to demonstrate that antithesis is the fundamental element of Hegelian dialectic. The article concludes with the celebrated ending: «The passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion».
In the years that followed, we find B. increasingly absorbed in revolutionary action, whose first objective for him was the liberation of the Slavs and particularly of the Poles. This made a return to Russia impossible for him. In 1848 he was in Paris, in Germany, and in Prague among the most ardent agitators and promoters of the revolution. When it was suppressed, B. was arrested at Chemnitz and condemned to death by a Saxon court. The sentence was not carried out, however, and he was handed over to Austria, which in turn handed him over to Russia in 1851. In Russia he was held in prison until 1857, where he composed and addressed to Tsar Nicholas I his Confessione. In 1857 he was exiled to Siberia, but after four years he succeeded in escaping and making his way through Japan and America to London. There he collaborated with Marx in the First International. But his anarchist tendencies and his opposition to every form of state organization soon brought him into conflict with Marx, and the conflict grew increasingly acute until it led to B.’s expulsion from the First International (1872). In 1870 B. took part in the uprising at Lyon and in 1874 in the disturbances at Bologna. The failure of both led him to doubt the revolutionary spirit of men. He died poor and disillusioned in a hospital in Berne.
The most productive period of B.’s literary activity was that which followed his imprisonment. It was then, in fact, that his most famous works were composed: L'Impero germanico dello staffile e la rivoluzione sociale (1871); Dio e lo Stato (1870-71); Stato e Anarchia (1873). At first, in 1848, B. had sought God in the revolution. It was precisely around that time (probably in 1849) that he wrote to a friend: «You are mistaken if you believe that I do not believe in any God. I sought God in men, in their freedom; now I seek God in the revolution». The violent hatred he felt toward every limitation imposed upon human freedom eventually led him 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 one of the most significant figures in the history of Russian culture. His anarchism links him—according to Berdjaev—to other figures of the same type, such as Sten'ka Razin and Pugačev, and also associates him with the Slavophiles, with
their profound aversion to every form of State. Bakuninian ideas are also found in the novels of Dostojevskij. His concept of negation as a fundamental element of Hegelian dialectic and of reality finds its continuation in Lenin’s exaltation of Hegel’s dialectic, in which he saw a justification of revolutionary action.
Among the editions of his works (there is no complete edition), 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