Harassed, abused. jailed. denigrated, ridiculed, misunderstood in his own day, poor old Bakunin has long been treated by Marxists and liberal scholars alike in the most appalling and derogatory fashion. In recent decades something of an anti-Bakunin bandwagon has grown within anarchist publications as well. Derided by everyone from postmodernists to primitivists, many of these attacks have been highly personalised, petty, and largely repetitions of reactionary opinion from long ago. Such treatment motivated me a decade ago to write a short book on the remarkable life and political philosophy of Michael Bakunin, for in a real sense old Bakunin was one of the first to outline social anarchism as a coherent philosophy. I did not have any particular fondness for Bakunin — he was certainly not without his foibles, ethnic prejudices and political misjudgments — but his ideas about capitalism, state power and religion have a contemporary relevance in the same way as the ideas of Darwin still have salience for evolutionary biologists. Against the backdrop of attempts to bury him, there has been a genuine renewal of interest in Bakunin in recent years, and this is reflected in Paul McLaughlin’s excellent study. Focusing more on the philosophical foundations of Bakunin’s social thought than his anarchism per se, the book also provides a spirited and scholarly defence of these ideas against liberal and Marxist critiques. Combining the logic of negative dialectics with an ontology of evolutionary naturalism, Bakunin’s philosophy might be best described its an embryonic form of dialectical naturalism, the perspective associated with Murray Bookchin. Such ideas are therefore indicative of a stance that is far from the mechanistic materialism frequently assumed by his detractors. In my book I tried to defend Bakunin against both his Marxist and liberal critic. Marx famously described Bakunin as a philosophical “ignoramus”, and Marxists have invariably followed their mentor in describing Bakunin as a petit bourgeois ideologist like Proudhon, or as a misguided romantic with a bent for destruction and secret societies, and pour scorn on Bakunin for his “elitist despotism”. Hal Draper, for example, saw Bakunin as essentially a revolutionary brigand, whose politics involved little more than pillage, theft and murder, while Lichtheim wrote that all that Bakunin’s anarchism entailed was a ‘chiliastic vision of an armed uprising that would smash state and society’ (Morris, 1993: 13G). Thankfully, McLaughlin continues and develops my defence of Bakunin and offers a strident critique of his Marxist critics, whom he felt were critical of Bakunin mainly because the anarchist had dared to challenge the philosophical doctrines and statist politics of their hero Marx. McLaughlin notes that the Marxist scholars who dismiss Bakunin as a ‘voluntarist’ (in being ignorant of the political economy) or as an apolitical ‘bandit’, never actually studied in depth the theoretical writings of Bakunin. McLaughlin focuses his own analysis on two Marxists scholars, George Lichtheim and Francis Wheen. Lichtheim, as noted, had portrayed Bakunin as a mindless revolutionary, a misguided romantic with an insatiable faith in the goodness of humankind, yet one who, nevertheless, was bent on ‘pan destruction’. This portrait of Bakunin McLaughlin fervently critiques, suggesting that rather than being a hopeless romantic bent on destruction, Bakunin had his roots in the Enlightenment tradition, and that his main philosophical interests were in the development of Enlightenment naturalism and ‘anti-theologism’ (p4). With regard to Wheen’s biography of Marx, which includes a chapter on Bakunin entitled ‘The Rogue Elephant’, McLaughlin suggests that this chapter is simply a regurgitation of what Marxists have been writing about Bakunin for many decades, and that the truth value of the chapter approaches zero. The ‘superfluity of this work, the idiocy of its tone, and the poverty of its content overall’ meant, for McLaughlin, that Wheen’s account of Bukunin lacked any scholarly merit (pp5-6). Liberal scholars have been even more hostile to Bakunin. Eugene Pyziur also claimed that Bakunin was the ‘apostle of pan destruction’ and thereby a precursor of Bolshevism; Bakunin’s early biographer E. H. Carr thought him an advocate of ‘extreme individualism’, in essence a Hegelian idealist and a precursor of Italian fascism. The eloquent liberal scholar Isaiah Berlin, in one highly biased essay, declared that Bakunin, for all his love of humanity, was like Robespierre prepared to wade through ‘seas of blood’ to achieve his political aims, and that Bakunin was thus akin to Attila and had a ‘fascist streak’ (Morris, 1993: 73). Even more crude is Aileen Kelly’s portrayal of Bakunin as a prototype alienated individual, which is subtitled ‘a study in the psychology and politics of Utopianism’. Showing little interest in either Bakunin the person or in his anarchism — which is dismissed as of ‘little merit’ — Kelly largely repeats the oft-heard diatribe of Bakunin the fanatical, gullible idealist, completely out of touch with reality. McLaughlin’s treatment of these liberal works on Bakunin is substantial and refreshing, particularly in drawing attention to their lack of thoroughness or honesty. It is ironic, then, that Berlin’s famous distinction between positive and negative freedom is actually filched from Bakunin’s own writings (p l7). Similarly, Kelly’s apparently scholarly treatment of Bakunin as a Bolshevik in the making fails to appreciate the inherent critique of the Stalinist tendencies within Marxism that is so central to his social anarchism (p 12). McLaughlin’s book consists only of two long chapters or parts: one on Bakunin’s negative dialectics, the other on Bakunin’s naturalism and his critique of theologism — which for Bakunin meant not only religious ideologies, but also the idealist metaphysics of Kant and Hegel. I will discuss each of these in turn.

NEGATIVE DIALECTICS As one of the Left-Hegelians, like Stirner and Marx, Bakunin, of course, was steeped in the philosophy of Hegel. According to McLaughlin, and contrary to Carr, Bakunin however did not fully embrace Hegelian metaphysics, for he repudiated both Hegel’s idealism and his form of dialectics. McLaughlin suggests that Bakunin’s writings exemplify a revolutionary logic or negative dialectics in which negation is seen as a creative force — ¬implying, as Bakunin put it, a ‘sense of freedom’, and as the one ‘true expression of justice and love’ (Lehning, 1973: 43). In his well-known article ‘The Reaction in Germany’, published anonymously in 1842 — the article Lehning suggests (1973: 11) created a sensation in revolutionary circles in Germany — Bakunin offers a critique of what he calls the ‘reactionary party’. Bakunin himself advocates ‘democracy’, which for the anarchist entailed an opposition to government, and the total transformation of the socio-econom¬ic and political order, to herald “an original, new life which has not yet existed in history” (1973: 39). The reactionaries for Bakunin belonged to two types: the Consistent reactionaries (or conservatives) who stood for the complete suppression of the negative (the suppression, that is, of those like Bakunin who stood for democracy and the complete negation of the existing conditions), and Compromising reactionaries (or liberals) who attempted some sort of compromise or reconciliation between the positive (existing capitalism and government) and the negative — that is, democracy or the revolutionary critique. Discussing this article at some length, McLaughlin notes that Bakunin, using Hegelian terminology, is essentially concerned with exploring the contradiction between the reactionary principle — the positive thesis of unfreedom — and its antithesis — the negative principle of freedom. But for Bakunin, McLaughlin argues, the dialectical process is not viewed as sublation, or as a positive dialectic (as with Hegel, Marx and Comte), still less as a ‘synthesis’, but rather negation in itself is seen as an affirmative or creative principle — expressed as the principle of freedom or democracy. Contradiction for Bakunin thus represents not a mediation nor an equilibrium but the ‘preponderance of the negative’ (1973: 4c1). In Bakunin’s version of the dialectic there is no synthesis, for the negative itself is seen as an ‘affirmative, creative principle’, one that would engender a “new, affirmative and organic reality”. Thus the slogans of the French revolution, liberté, egalité, fraternité, were understood by Bakunin as implying the complete negation of the political and social world of the nine¬teenth century. The article concludes with the famous words, ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too’ (1973: 58). These words, McLaughlin argues, have been seriously misunderstood, for they did not imply mindless destruction, nor even nihilism, but rather Bakunin’s negative logic, which implied the affirmation of freedom and the democratic order (p 30). Negation for Bakunin is thus an affirmation not a mediation or sublation — an affirmation of creativity and freedom. McLaughlin thus repudiates entirely Kelly’s attempt to foist upon Bakunin a triadic conception of history, which implied a ‘Fall’ from some mythical golden age of primitive harmony, and the eventual restoration of this harmony in some vision of a utopian society. For Bakunin expressed no nostalgia for some primitive golden age, and any speculations regarding some futuristic society Bakunin regarded as reactionary (p 55). As Bakunin expressed it in Statism and Anarchy, ‘Even the most rational and profound science cannot divine the form social life will take in the future. It can determine only the negative conditions, which follow logically from a rigorous critique of existing society’ (1990: 198). McLaughlin thus regards Kelly’s attempt to portray Bakunin as a utopian thinker as quite ‘absurd’.

BAKUNIN’S NATURALISM The second part of McLaughlin’s book gives a very good outline of Bakunin’s evolutionary naturalism as well as of Bakunin’s theory of religion, for in an important sense Bakunin’s naturalism is very much bound up with his critique of ‘theologism’ — which embraces both religious ideologies and philosophical idealism. In Bakunin’s philosophy, nature — understood as universal causality — and reality are synonymous; Bakunin making a distinction between the natural world (as actualised) and nature as universal causality, that is, the possibilities inherent or imminent in the natural, materi¬al world (p 105). Materialism and naturalism, for McLaughlin, essentially have the same meaning, and he emphasises that for Bakunin nature is dynamic, with ‘movement of its own’ (p107). Influenced by Diderot, Feuerbach, Comte and Darwin, Bakunin’s dialectical or evolutionary naturalism thus repudiates both theologism (idealism) and mechanistic materialism. It is a philosophy that is characterised by the belief that ‘life always precedes thought’ and that objective or natural Being is always ontologically prior to human subjectivity; and that from an epistemological standpoint dialectical thinking precedes philosophical or theological speculation (p33). In contrast metaphysics, or what McLaughlin calls anthropocentrism, articulates the belief that thought and human subjectivity precede life and the objective natural world. Noting that Kantian metaphysics is radically opposed to naturalistic philosophy in its anthropocentrism, and given the subjectivist reactions of Kierkegaard, Stirner and the neo-Kantians against post-Hegelian philosophy, McLaughlin notes that much contemporary philosophy (whether Nietzschean, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist, pragmatist or post-Marxist), besides being scholastic and obscurantist, is ‘absolutely antithetical to the naturalist tradition’ to which Bakunin belongs. In spite of their radical pretences, much contemporary philosophy, McLaughlin affirms, is both philosophically and politically reactionary (p 68). Even Marx, McLaughlin argues, given his undue emphasis on social mediation, is essentially closer to Kant than Hegel and thus there is a Kantian strand in his materialism (p 16). Given the close association between Bakunin’s naturalism and his atheism McLaughlin devotes a great deal of discussion to Bakunin’s theory of Feuerbach’s philosophy. Indeed, Feuerbach’s religion, as well as critique of theology and speculative philosophy had an important influence on Bakunin. Although religious consciousness may have been important in the development of human culture and in the affirmation of humanity, Bakunin was highly critical of the religion of his day, particularly Christianity, and for two reasons. Firstly, it is hostile to science and entails the abdication of human reason; and secondly, it involves the negation of human liberty (p 141), particularly in having a symbiotic relationship with political power. The latter is expressed in the oppression and exploitation of the mass of people by various functionaries — priests, monarchs, gendarmes, capitalists, entrepreneurs and politicians of every shade (148). Thus although Bakunin follows Hegel in viewing religion or the ‘divine idea’ as the product of human consciousness, he also emphasises the inadequacy of religion as a form of reason, and the need for human consciousness to develop beyond religion in order to realise itself (p 160). Reason, the ability of humans to create culture — the faculty by which humans achieve the consciousness of freedom (which is how Bakunin understood the rational faculty) — and the ‘spirit of revolt’ are the two essential aspects, for Bakunin, of human nature (p 127). It should be noted that although Bakunin is better known for his critique of theologism and statism, he also opposed deterministic ‘scientism’, and was particularly hostile to the rule of scientific savants. (Charges that Bakunin embraced the ‘myth of progress’ should therefore be regarded with some caution. Making an interesting comparison between the philosophies of Marx and Bakunin, McLaughlin emphasises that Bakunin was always critical of the economic determinism that was inherent in Marx’s materialist concep¬tion of history, and that Bakunin put much more stress than did Marx on the biological aspects of human life. Puzzled on how Marx ‘can assert nature is prior to that by which it is essentially mediated’, McLaughlin interprets Marx as a Kantian idealist rather than as a ‘genuine’ materialist (p 170). But of course Marx was affirming, like later anthropologists, that nature is ontologically prior to humans, though our knowledge of the world is always socially mediated. In my earlier study I suggested that Bakunin’s philosophical writings nature presented, in embryonic form, an ecological approach to the world, one that is materialist and historical, and stresses the continuity and organic link between humans and nature (Morris, 1993:84). This ecological world view is implicit in the philosophy of Feuerbach, who wrote: Man is dependent on nature … he should live in harmony with nature … even in his highest intellectual development he should not forget that he is a part and child of nature, but at all times honour nature and hold it sacred, not only as the ground and source of his existence, but also as the ground and source of his mental and physical well-being. (p 199) For Feuerbach this did not imply a religious perspective or the deification of nature. Yet although Bakunin follows Feuerbach in his naturalism, and is not, unlike Kant and Marx, an anthropocentric thinker, McLaughlin does suggest that there is an anti-ecological strain in Bakunin’s thought, when, for instance, he writes that humans can and should conquer and master nature (p231). But it is also important to recognise that Bakunin was influenced — like Kropotkin — by Darwin’s evolutionary biology, and thus conceived of nature as a kind of evolutionary process, which ought not to be equated with the myth of progress. Thus human sociality and consciousness is seen by Bakunin as a natural development, and he denied any dualism between humans and nature, which was intrinsic to Cartesian mechanistic philosophy (Morris 1993: 79). What of course was significant about Darwin’s evolutionary philosophy is that it introduced and emphasised the crucial importance of openness, chance, creativity, and the subjective agency and individuality of all organisms in the evolutionary process. Surprisingly, McLaughlin has little discussion of Darwin or evolutionary theory. What is perplexing and frustrating about McLaughlin’s study is that it contains some fifty pages of footnotes, many of which suggest valuable discussion in their own right and could have formed another chapter. These topics include: a critique of Marx’s notion of a state ‘administered’ society, which Bakunin presciently saw as leading to despotism (p80); and Bakunin’s ‘federalist principle’, which implied that the organisation of social life was from below. Also of interest was McLaughlin’s denial that Bakunin was an anarcho-syndicalist (p232) and the discussion regarding Bakunin’s constant advocacy of true communism, which implied the unity of freedom and equality. As McLaughlin denoted, liberal critics like Berlin and Pyziur denigrate Bakunin’s socialism, while Marxists repudiate the libertarian aspects of Bakunin’s political philosophy: in essence, of course, Bakunin was a libertarian socialist. For McLaughlin, Bakunin was an heir to some of the radical aspects of Enlightenment tradition —stemming from Spinoza and Diderot — which suggests that through secular reason and empirical knowledge (and struggle) humans could create a better world — one in which liberty, equality and fraternity could be fully manifested. Like his radical contemporaries Marx and Kropotkin, Bakunin was unduly optimistic regarding the coming revolution — but to blame ‘reason’ for the ills of the twentieth century seems to me to be completely facile. Equally, to describe Bakunin as a ‘modernist’ is also rather inept, for Bakunin repudiated many of the key aspects of so¬-called ‘modernity’ — specifically the modern nation state, industrial capitalism, possessive individualism and liberal ideology more generally. No social anarchist, as far as I am aware, certainly not McLaughlin, treats Bakunin’s writings as ‘holy writ’ or with uncritical adulation, for they have long acknowledged that Bakunin’s anarchism is complex and full of contradictions. Most have approached Bakunin with an attitude of critical sympathy, recognising that for all his faults and foibles, he was the first to articulate, through his disputes with Marx, social anarchism as a political philosophy. Thus rather than viewing Bakunin as a misguided romantic bent on violence, or as having an unbalanced mind, he has been described — by, for example, Peter Marshall — as a man whose search for wholeness was a ‘bold and inspiring attempt to reclaim one’s humanity in an alienated world’ (1992: 308). McLaughlin, likewise, emphasises the contemporary relevance and critical significance of Bakunin — both with regard to his dialectical naturalism as a philosophy, and his social anarchism as a political vision.                 —   Brian Morris, Goldsmiths College

REFERENCES

Bakunin, M. (1990), Statism and Anarchism (trans. and ed. Marshall Shatz), Cambridge University Press.

Lehning, A. (1973), Michael Bakunin. Selected Writings, London: Cape.

Marshall, P. (1992), Demanding the Impossible A History of Anarchism, London: Harper Collins.

Morris, B. (1993), Bakunin. The Philosophy of Freedom, Montreal: Black Rose Books.