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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE REVOLUTION THAT NEVER WAS
MICHAEL BAKUNIN : SELECTED WRITINGS .
Ed ited and intro–
duced
by
Arthur Lehning. Evergreen Edition , Grove Press. $4.95.
Of the great revolutionaries, Michael Bakunin was surely the least
successful. The actual revolutions in which he took part-in Dresden in 1849,
in Lyons in 1870, or the last pathetic fiasco at Bologna in 1874-all were either
defeated or did not even start. In the struggle with Marx within the First
International, Marx was the victor. The secret societies Bakunin founded often
existed only in his own head, and even the anarchist groups in Spain, Italy and
Russia which were the most concrete achievements of his disciples eventually
lost out to their Marxist rivals .
Yet the myth ofBakunin remains a powerful one. Is it because of what he
was or because ofwhat he wrote?
It
is only recently that it has been at all easy to
read what he wrote, especially in English translation, and this has perhaps led
us to overestimate Bakunin' s personality and to underestimate his ideas.
However Bakunin' swritings are now becoming more available, thanks largely
to the dedicated scholarship of Mr. Arthur Lehning, the editor of the present
volume ofextracts, who is preparing a massive complete edition of Bakunin' s
works under the auspices of the admirable Institute for Social History in
Amsterdam. Moreover, in 1972 Sam Dolgoff published a selection of
Bakunin's writings in English translation,
Bakunin on Anarchy,
with a
preface by Paul Avrich . Lehning's volume overlaps with this to some extent,
but it prints longer extracts from the most important texts, though it leaves
out the famous
Appeal to the Slavs
of 1848, and the notorious
Confession of
the Tsar
of 1851, from both of which Sam Dolgoff prints short passages.
Students of nineteenth-century revolutionary thought will be glad of both
books.
Bakunin was not a natural writer: his talents were those of a militant
organizer and inspirer of revolutionary movements, with a rare gift of
transmitting his revolutionary enthusiasm to others. Yet his writings have a
freshness and vigor which convey something of his personality, his violence,
his charm, his dedication to the revolutionary cause . "History," he wrote , "is
made not by abstract individuals but by acting, living and passing
individuals ." He was just such an individual, and he made no attempt to
produce, as Marx was doing, a systematic scientific theory of society. Indeed,
he was sceptical about scientific systems, about the doctrinaire pretensions of
, 'popes and priests . . . even if they call themselves Social Democrats. " While
