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Libertarian Labor Review #13
Summer 1992, pages 30-32
Bakunin and the Historians
Review Essay by Jon Bekken
"Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, the anarchist, was a political
thinker; his reputation, based partly on his appetite for action
and partly on unsympathetic historiography, obscures this..."
Robert Cutler opens the introduction to his anthology of Bakunin's
writings with these words. Another historian, Nunzio Pernicone,
deplores the modern fashion of "Bakunin-bashing." And Arthur
Lehning, in a 1978 review of the historical literature, refers to
a conspiracy of silence, suggesting that studying Bakunin
inevitably raises basic questions confronting working-class
movements--dictatorship vs. liberty, centralism vs. federalism,
self-organization vs. a domineering political party.
When Lehning wrote, only the Marxist E.H. Carr's 1937
biography was available in English (aside from historical sketches
in pamphlets, journals, and collections of Bakunin's work) and few
of Bakunin's writings had been translated into English. But today
a substantial number of biographical works, at least compared to
the paucity of Bakunin's own writings, are available in English. In
addition to E.H. Carr's dated but still standard biography,
reissued in 1975, readers have been subjected to two popular
biographies (Masters, Mendel), a new scholarly biography by Aileen
Kelly, a very useful look at Bakunin's pivotal role in organizing
the Italian socialist movement (Ravindranathan), and Thomas' rather
intriguing examination of the way in which Marx borrowed his ideas
from, and shaped his arguments in response to, anarchist thinkers
including Bakunin and Proudhon.
Masters', Mendel's and Kelly's biographies are quite poor,
especially when compared to Carr. Mendel argues (unconvincingly,
and on the basis of remarkably few sources) that Bakunin's
revolutionary career and ideas were fundamentally authoritarian and
resulted from deep-seated psychological problems. Masters is
friendlier to his subject (but sees anarchism as at best a
beautiful but impractical dream), but draws almost entirely upon
English-language sources, especially Carr, and is written more in
the style of a novel than a work of history.
Aileen Kelly's biography, the newest of the three, purports to
be an intellectual biography but (in Cutler's words) "treats
Bakunin as a case study in the social psychology of millenarianism"
(p. 234). Kelly is unabashedly hostile, painting Bakunin as an ill-
meaning buffoon, misrepresenting key aspects of his life and
thought, and disguising missing evidence with circular footnotes.
Although historians of Spanish (Esenwein) and Italian
(Ravindranathan) anarchism point to the organizational and
propagandistic skills Bakunin displayed in those settings, Kelly
refuses to allow the historical record to stand in the way of her
thesis.
Ravindranathan, however, has written an outstanding book
focussing on one of Bakunin's most productive efforts during his
ten years or so as an anarchist (for most of his revolutionary
career, Bakunin was a pan-Slavist). Bakunin played a key role in
disabusing the nascent Italian revolutionaries of patriotic
illusions, and persuaded them that a social, not merely a
political, revolution was necessary. As the American Historical
Review's (Dec. 1990, pp. 1576-77) reviewer put it, "Thankfully,
Ravindranathan does not indulge in the Bakunin-bashing that has
become so fashionable in recent years. Although he does not
hesitate to note [indeed, to exaggerate-jb] the Russian's
ideological inconsistencies and personal failings, Ravindranathan
portrays Bakunin as a serious and devoted revolutionary, an acute
thinker capable of extraordinary insights... and a master
propagandist."
Kelly and Mendel attribute responsibility for Nechaev's
Catechism to Bakunin, even though it has been proven that Bakunin
not only did not write it, but vigorously denounced it. (Carr,
writing before the evidence was in, makes the same argument on the
basis of stylistic similarities and turns of phrase, apparently
never considering the fact that authors borrow from, and are
influenced by, one another. Avrich's collection of Anarchist
Portraits contains an essay reviewing the evidence on this, and
another which attacks Bakunin on scant evidence indeed.) Aside from
Carr, the biographies focus their attention on Bakunin's pre-
anarchist period, whether because it was the greater part of his
life (though it is his anarchist years for which Bakunin is best
remembered, and that account for the continuing historical
interest) or because it enables biographers to indulge in their pet
theories about why Bakunin turned out so badly.
And make no mistake about it, in the eyes of his biographers
(at least his English-language biographers) Bakunin turned out very
badly indeed. For Carr, Bakunin is a tragic-comic figure, albeit
very human. Masters suggests a greater degree of grandeur in his
rewriting of Carr's work. For Mendel, Bakunin is a villain of the
highest order, with an egomaniacal will to dominate and to destroy.
Kelly softens this portrait somewhat, leaving Bakunin quite
inscrutable. For if he were truly the ineffectual buffoon she
describes, he would surely have long since passed into obscurity.
Readers interested in learning the details of Bakunin's life
would do better to look at Guillaume's highly partisan account,
which opens Dolgoff's anthology, or Shatz's briefer biographical
sketch in the Introduction to his edition of Statism and Anarchy.
While Carr is by no means friendly to anarchism, his account too is
worth reading. But Ravindranathan's account, while covering
Bakunin's life from 1814 through 1863 (Bakunin moved to Italy in
1864) in just 16 pages, offers the best book-length English-
language biography, covering the years when Bakunin developed and
began to propagate his anarchist ideas. Despite its focus on Italy,
Bakunin & The Italians illustrates both Bakunin's methods and his
ideas during this vital period (Bakunin retired in ill health in
1874, his final two years receive little attention).
In order to read Bakunin himself, one still often needs to be
proficient in French or Russian (preferably both), but there are
now four widely-available English-language anthologies of Bakunin's
writings (Dolgoff, Cutler, Lehning and Maximoff), alongside the
long-available God and the State (published by Dover in 1970) and
Marshall Shatz's new translation of Statism and Anarchy--one of
Bakunin's few more-or-less completed books, and his last major
theoretical work. (An earlier translation of Statism and Anarchy by
C.H. Plummer was published in 1976 by the Revisionist Press. I have
been unable to locate a copy, but it is reputedly much inferior.)
Also available in English is an annotated edition of The Confession
of Mikhail Bakunin (written from a Russian prison), and excerpts in
several anthologies and pamphlets.
These translations and anthologies fall into two broad
categories: scholarly editions (Cutler, Shatz), and more popular
translations (Dolgoff, Maximoff; Lehning falls somewhere in
between) intended to present Bakunin's ideas to contemporary
readers. The popular editions often delete references to often
obscure controversies or persons Bakunin was responding to and seek
to simplify his often difficult prose in order to make it more
accessible to modern readers. The resulting works are generally
more readable than are their scholarly counterparts, though some
readers prefer (or need) the deleted material in order to place
Bakunin's writings in their specific, historical context, which
often shaped not only the concerns addressed but also the form they
took.
Dolgoff's anthology is the most useful and comprehensive,
although Cutler has unearthed several interesting texts. Maximoff
is useful primarily as a concordance--he has organized very brief
excerpts by subject, in order to enable readers to readily
ascertain, say, Bakunin's views on human nature. But while
translators such as Cutler and Schatz tend to present Bakunin's
writings as historical artifacts, Dolgoff sets out to illustrate
the basic themes of Bakunin's anarchist philosophy, and has
carefully selected his texts "in order to enable the reader to
grasp the essence of Bakunin's views" (p. 21).
(For readers interested in comparing different translations,
Cutler [pp. 32-33] provides a useful list of the editions and pages
upon which other English-language translations of the same works
can be found. Similarly, compare Dolgoff's 25 pages of excerpts
from Statism and Anarchy to Shatz's 218 page translation. Dolgoff
extracts the core of Bakunin's devastating critique of Marxism and
his discussion of the preconditions for social revolution; while it
is certainly useful to have the complete work available, it is
largely devoted to a detailed analysis of contemporary political
currents which adds relatively little--with some exceptions, most
notably the "Appendix" and its discussion of revolutionary
strategy--to our understanding of Bakunin's philosophy.)
Sadly, many anarchists know little more of Bakunin than a few
aphorisms (the urge to destroy is also a creative urge, "I shall
continue to be an impossible person so long as those who are now
possible remain possible") and perhaps a general sense of his
critique of, and battle against, Marxism. For example, a writer in
The Raven recently argued, on the basis of her reading of God and
the State, that Bakunin was uninterested in the liberation of
women. Clearly she was unfamiliar with Bakunin's "Manifesto of the
Russian Revolutionary Association to the Oppressed Women of Russia"
(excerpted in Dolgoff), of his defense of his sister's right to
escape a love-less marriage, etc. Similarly, recent writers in the
anarchist press have attributed a wide variety of conflicting
economic views to Bakunin. Without doubt, Bakunin had many faults
and inconsistencies--even during the years when he was developing
anarchism as a political philosophy. But he played a vital role in
the evolution of our movement and our ideas, and deserves to be
better, and more accurately, remembered.
Works Cited:
Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988. (Reviewed LLR 7)
Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Introduced and Edited by
Marshall Shatz). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
E.H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (Revised Edition). New York:
Octagon Books, 1975.
Robert Cutler (translator and editor), From out of the
Dustbin: Bakunin's Basic Writings, 1869-1871. Ann Arbor,
MI: Ardis Publishers, 1985. (Reviewed LLR 2)
Sam Dolgoff (editor), Bakunin on Anarchism (Expanded edition).
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980.
George Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class
Movement in Spain. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989. (Reviewed this issue)
Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and
Politics of Utopianism. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,
1982.
Arthur Lehning, Michel Bakounine et les historiens. Geneva:
C.I.R.A., 1979.
----- (editor), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (Translated
by Steven Cox and Olive Stevens). London: Jonathan Cape,
1973.
Anthony Masters, Bakunin: The Father of Anarchism. New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1974.
G.P. Maximoff (translator and editor), The Political
Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism. Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1953.
Arthur Mendel, Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse. New York:
Praeger, 1981.
T.R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians. McGill-Queen's
University Press (3430 McTavish St., Montreal, Quebec H3A
1X9), 1989, $44.95.
Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1980.