Background

Mikhail Bakunin was born on May 18, 1814, in Premukhino in the Tver Province to a retired diplomat and landowner.

Education

Mikhail studied at the artillery school.

Career

After finishing his studies at the artillery school, he received a commission as an officer in the Guards. It is said that his father was angry with him and asked that Mikhail be transferred to the regular army.

Bakunin went to Moscow in 1836, and from that date life began in earnest for him. He had studied nothing before, he had read nothing, and his knowledge of German was very poor. But he was blessed with a gift for dialectics and for constant, persistent thinking. He mastered German to study the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, and G. W. F. Hegel. In 1842, while living in Berlin, Bakunin published an impassioned essay declaring Hegelianism a revolutionary tool and ending with the dictum that was to become the motto of international anarchism: "The passion for destruction is also a creative passion. " Bakunin participated in the Paris Revolution of 1848, made a fruitless attempt to organize a secret revolutionary international campaign for a Czech revolt, and participated in the Dresden rebellion of 1849. He was imprisoned in Russia until 1857 and then exiled to Siberia. In 1861 he escaped from Siberia to Japan, and on his way to Europe he stopped off in the United States. He declared his intention of becoming an American citizen. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow portrayed the Russian in his diary as "a giant of a man with a most ardent, seething temperament. "

In 1862 Bakunin joined the revolutionary leaders Aleksandr Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev in London. Bakunin's intention was to devote all his energies to fighting for the freedom of the Russians and all the Slavs. He had not yet devised his anarchist doctrines, and he found himself advocating some of Herzen's views. Temperamentally the two men were so incompatible that they could not be comrades-in-arms, though they remained good friends. Bakunin's instincts were all against moderation, and conspiratorial intrigue was his goal. He embraced the cause of land and liberty and plunged into plotting with immense zest. He had plans for agitating in the army and among the peasantry, and he played with the idea of a vast revolutionary organization ringing Russia with a network of agents at strategic points on the border. Siberia was to be served by a branch located on the western coast of the United States.

The failure of the Polish insurrection in 1863 was a big disappointment to Bakunin, who henceforth became absorbed in a campaign of universal anarchy. Anarchism called for the replacement of the state with a loose confederation of autonomous units that would both end the injustices of private property and assure individual freedom. The millennium was to be achieved through an international rebellion set off by small groups of anarchist conspirators. Bakunin's anarchism, in theory, meant not disorder but lack of domination, a system without political power. At the end he appears to have lost his confidence in spontaneous popular uprising as the only sure method of destroying state governments.

Achievements

• Mikhail is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism, and one of the principal founders of the social anarchist tradition. Bakunin's enormous prestige as an activist made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, and he gained substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Estatismo y anarquía (Spanish Edition)

    (Mijaíl Aleksándrovich Bakunin (Pryamukhino, Torzhok, Impe...)

  • Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

    (Statism and Anarchy is a complete English translation of ...)

  • Writings on the Paris Commune

    (The Paris Commune in 1871 played a key role in the develo...)

  • Selected Writings from Mikhail Bakunin: Essays on Anarchism

    (A collection of writings from the champion of Anarchism, ...)

  • Marxism, Freedom And The State

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Essential Bakunin

    (A compilation of Mikhail Bakunin's works and writings. Ba...)

  • Confession
  • God and the State

Religion

Bakunin was also a militant atheist and thought religion was as great an enemy of freedom as the state was.

Bakunin thought that religion originated from the human ability for abstract thinking and fantasizing. According to Bakunin, religion is sustained by indoctrination and conformism. Another factor in the survival of religion is the existence of poverty, suffering and exploitation in real life, from which religion promises the salvation in the afterlife. Oppressors take advantage from religion, according to Bakunin, because many religious people reconcile themselves with injustice on earth by the promise of happiness in heaven.

Bakunin argued in his book God and the State that "the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory and practice." Consequently, Bakunin reversed Voltaire's famous aphorism that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him, writing instead that "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him."

Politics

Bakunin's increasing radicalism – including staunch opposition to imperialism in east and central Europe by Russia and other powers – changed his life, putting an end to hopes of a professorial career. He was eventually deported from France for speaking against Russia's oppression of Poland. Although Bakunin accepted elements of Marx’s class analysis and theories regarding capitalism, acknowledging "Marx’s genius", he thought Marx's analysis was one-sided, and that Marx's methods would compromise the social revolution. More importantly, Bakunin criticized "authoritarian socialism" (which he associated with Marxism) and the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat which he adamantly refused.

Views

Bakunin reached the conclusion that revolution is necessary, regardless of the point of the critique of society from which it starts. He frequently attempted to give a philosophical foundation to revolution. The whole history of mankind appeared to him as "the revolutionary negation of the past. … Man has liberated himself (by breaking the divine commandment not to eat of the tree of knowledge); he has divided himself from animal and made himself man; he began his history and his human development with his act of disobedience and knowledge, that is, with rebellion and thought."

Bakunin held that there are principles which are the moving force of both the individual and the historical process. These are human animality, thought, and revolt. Social and private economy correspond to the first, science to the second, and freedom to the third. Man has an innate instinct for revolt. therefore, man's perpetual rebellion, which may lead to self-sacrifice and self-destruction, does not depend on either right or obligation but is immediately bestowed along with his humanity. Revolution can be looked upon as a theoretically perpetual situation or as an almost-infinite process. In theory, revolution may at some time cease and be replaced by a new order; in practice, it lasts so long that it must claim the attention of at least a whole generation. According to Bakunin, the goal of his generation was to destroy; the reconstruction would be done by others who would be better, fresher, and wiser. Bakunin never abandoned this view.

Quotations: "Everywhere, especially in France and England, social and religious societies are being formed which are wholly alien to the world of present-day politics, societies that derive their life from new sources quite unknown to us and that grow and diffuse themselves without fanfare. "

"We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. "

Membership

After renewing his acquaintance with Marx, Bakunin joined, in 1869, the International Workingmen's Association (the "First International"), an organization of heterogeneous origins which, under Marx's leadership, had adopted a revolutionary program.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• His lifelong friend Herzen once remarked about Bakunin: "This man was born not under an ordinary star, but under a comet. "

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Bakunin was influenced by the German philosophers Friedrich Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Georg Hegel, all of whom he interpreted in the spirit of the early romantic movement.

Connections

In 1810 Alexander Bakunin married Varvara Alexandrovna Muravyova who was 24 years younger than him.

Father:

Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin

Mother:

Lubov Petrovna Myshetskaya

Wife:

Varvara Alexandrovna Muravyova

Friend:

Arnold Ruge

He was a German philosopher and political writer.

References

• Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism
• Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism
• Bakunin: The Creative Passion#A Biography