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Title: Bakunin and the Historians Author: Jon Bekken Date: 1992 Language: en Topics: Mikhail Bakunin, history, Libertarian Labor Review Source: Retrieved on April 19, 2005 from https://web.archive.org/web/20050419151213/http://www.syndicalist.org/archives/llr1-13/13i.shtml Notes: From Libertarian Labor Review #13, Summer 1992
“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.
Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1980.