Mikhail Bakunin

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mikhail Bakunin did not arrive at anarchism from a professorship. He arrived at it through a life spent, by his own choice, on the losing side of one uprising after another. Born into the Russian nobility and trained as an artillery officer, he abandoned both a military career and an early stint studying Hegelian philosophy in Moscow and Berlin for a life of direct political agitation, drawn first to Pan-Slavism and then to revolution as such. He took part in the 1848 uprisings that swept across Europe, was captured after the 1849 Dresden insurrection, and was sentenced to death in Saxony, a sentence commuted and followed instead by extradition to Austria, another death sentence, another commutation, and finally extradition to Russia, where he spent years in the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Schlusselburg Fortress before being exiled to Siberia.

In 1861 he escaped Siberia by a route almost too improbable to summarize briefly: down the Amur River, by ship to Japan, across the Pacific to San Francisco, across the United States, and by ship again to London, arriving back in revolutionary Europe within the year. He spent the rest of his life doing what the escape suggested he always would, organizing secret revolutionary brotherhoods across Italy, Switzerland and Spain, and eventually joining the First International, the umbrella organization of European labor and socialist movements, where he built the anarchist wing that would clash directly with Karl Marx.

That clash reached its climax at the 1872 Hague Congress, where Marx's faction engineered Bakunin's expulsion from the International, a move Bakunin and his allies regarded, not without justice, as at least as much a power play as a principled dispute. The expulsion did not end Bakunin's influence; if anything it sharpened the line between anarchism and Marxism that has run through radical politics ever since. He died in Bern, Switzerland in 1876, largely broken financially and organizationally, but the collectivist anarchism he built, workers seizing and collectively, federally managing the means of production without a transitional state standing over them, outlived every prison, exile and expulsion that had tried to stop him.

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.