This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
God and the State was never finished. Bakunin drafted it around 1871, in French, as part of a larger, also unfinished manuscript, and left it mid-argument; his literary executors published the fragment on its own in 1882, six years after his death, and it is this incomplete piece, not any polished treatise, that became one of the defining texts of anarchist thought.
Its central move is to treat theology and political authority as two names for the same psychological submission. A believer who accepts an all-powerful, all-knowing God accepts, in the same gesture, that human reason and human freedom are permanently subordinate to a will outside themselves; a subject who accepts the authority of a state accepts the same subordination, transferred from a divine ruler to a human one. Bakunin argued that the two submissions reinforce each other historically, church and state have propped one another up across most of recorded history, and that abolishing one while leaving the other standing does not free a person, it simply relocates the habit of obedience. The line most often quoted from the book, that if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him, is a deliberate inversion of Voltaire's famous remark that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him: where Voltaire treated belief as a social necessity, Bakunin treated it as the single clearest model of the domination he wanted human beings to outgrow entirely.
The book is also, more quietly, an argument against a purely political anarchism that stops at attacking the state and never asks why people submit to authority of any kind in the first place. Bakunin wanted the abolition of political government and the abolition of religious authority to be understood as the same project, because in his account both rest on the same demand, that a person accept an external will as binding on their own reason and conscience. Unfinished as it is, the fragment has outlasted most of the finished books written against it, still cited whenever anarchism's argument against authority as such, not just the state's particular form of it, needs its clearest statement.