Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich

« often-expressed contempt for 'theorizers' was based on the Romantic theory of the regenerative power of primitive spontaneity.

He interpreted the unrest among the peoples of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in the 1840s as the expression of elemental forces which were destined to sweep away all the artificial systems and institutions that sought to suppress them.

This spirit of instinctive revolt, 'the sole creative force in history' , was to be found at its purest in the most primitive, and thereby the least corrupt, of the common people: the peasantry.

He placed high hopes on the Russian peasants who had a tradition of revolt, and whom he represents in his Vozzvanie k Slavianam (Appeal to the Slavs) of 1846 as a 'fiery ocean' which will engulf Moscow in blood and flame, and bury all the slavery in Europe beneath its own ruins.

This faith was based on his version of the revolutionary dialectic of the Left Hegelians.

In 'Die Reaktion in Deutschland' (Reaction in Germany) (printed in Arnold Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher in 1842 under the pseudonym 'Jules Elysard' ) he proclaims that the total destruction of the 'positive' (the existing order) by the forces of 'negation' will lead to 'a new heaven and a new earth… in which all the discords of our time will be resolved in harmonious unity' .

This essay, which gave him his entrée into radical circles in Europe, ended with the famous line: 'Die Lust der Zerstörung ist auch eine schaffende Lust! ' ('The urge for destruction is also a creative urge! ') The anarchism which became his creed in the 1860s was a logical consequence of his cult of spontaneity.

He now declared all states to be oppressive by their nature as institutionalizations of the rule of systems over life.

The infallible instincts of the masses were the only source of freedom and virtue.

These instincts had created the peasant commune which still survived in Russia: a form of self-government which could become universal once the masses were freed from the tutelage of political and intellectual elites who could teach them nothing and who sought to prolong the tyranny of theory over life: as a prime offender in this respect he pointed to the scientific socialism of Marx, although Marx's economic materialism was an important influence on his thought, along with Comtian positivism and Feuerbach's critique of religion (see Comte, A. ; Feuerbach, L.A. ). He considered himself a materialist, atheist and positivist, but the theoretical basis of his anarchism was flimsy and shot through with contradictions.

In particular, his two principal theoretical works, L'Empire Knouto-Germanique et la révolution sociale (The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution) (1871) and Gosudarstvennost' i anarkhiia (Statism and Anarchy) (1873) belie his self-image as the champion of 'life' against scientific and metaphysical abstraction.

In these works he argues that all contemporary conflicts can be traced to the opposition between 'two polarities' : the state (equated with reaction), and revolution (identified with his brand of anarchism). He defines the primary characteristic of the masses as their spirit of rebellion: this forces him to exclude from the category of the 'true' people all those not inclined to rebel.

Those who were so inclined are much idealized in Bakunin's anarchist writings, along with the revolutionary secret societies for which he tirelessly recruited, but which existed more in his imagination than in fact.. »