Today the only certain thing that most people know about Mikhail Bakunin is that he was an anarchist. The only certain thing they know about anarchism is that it is opposed to all government. So defined, the subject does not seem a serious one.
But look again. Bakunin during his lifetime was more popular than his contemporary Karl Marx. Few at the time understood Marx’s densely argued theories, but Bakunin dashed off eloquent pamphlets, speeches and letters by the hundred. The man Alexander Herzen described as “a blue-eyed giant with a leonine head and a tousled mane” entranced crowds across Europe with his erudition and warmly inflected voice. He repeated—in five languages—a forthright message: human beings are oppressed by the coercive power of the state. But a non-coercive society is possible.
Never the twitchy bomb thrower of popular myth, Bakunin argued that violence should be directed against institutions rather than persons. He correctly predicted...
Ray Conlogue is a former arts writer for The Globe and Mail and author of The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec (Mercury Press, 1996), an analysis of the cultural and historical dimensions of Quebec’s independence movement, as well as being a translator, teacher and author of a young adult novel.
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