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social science should point to "the general causes of individual suffering" and
" the general conditions necessary to the real emancipation of individuals
living in society ," life is constantly revolting against science and asserting the
rights of individuals against the abstractions in whose name governments
everywhere are constantly inflicting sufferings .
Like many intellectuals of his generation-he was born in 1814-
Bakunin was overwhelmed by the ideas of Hegel, and these continued
throughout his life to affect his own views and the language in which he
expressed them. What is perhaps his most famous phrase, "The passion for
destruction is a creative passion, too " comes at the end of one of the most
Hegelian of all his writings , the early fragment (1842) on
The Reaction in
Germany ;
and it is in terms of the Hegelian dialectic that it has to be
understood . When it is read in the context of the immediately preceding
sentence-' 'Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and
annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source
of all life ' '-it acquires a more metaphysical and less revolutionary meaning.
This is by no means the advocacy of blind physical destruction which has
sometimes been associated with Bakunin, and indeed is not far from the ideas
of Herbert Marcuse about' 'the liberating function of negation ."
Did Bakunin change his attitude to violence later in his life? It was long
believed by some writers (including the present one) that, in the 1860s, under
the influence of the young Russian student revolutionary Sergei Nechaev,
Bakunin became an advocate of terrorist tactics as a means of achieving the
revolution and that he collaborated with Nechaev in drafting the notorious
Catechism ofthe Revolutionist
(not to be confused with the text published in
this volume under the heading "Revolutionary Catechism" in the
Principles
and Organisation ofthe International Brotherhood),
with its open advocacy
ofextermination by ' 'poison, the knife and the rope etc ." Arthur Lehning has
long denied that Bakunin was ever a supporter of terrorist methods; and his
views have been given some support by the recent researches of the Israeli
scholar Michael Confino in his
Violence dans la Violence
(Paris, 1973) and
DaughterofaRevolutionary
(London , 1974). Confino suggests that there are
good grounds for supposing that Nechaev alone was responsible for the
Catechism of the Revolutionist
and that Bakunin went out of his way to
disassociate himself from the violent methods it advocated .
Yet Bakunin 's attitude to violence remains ambiguous . For all his love of
the excitement of the barricades , he remained reluctant to spell out just what
revolution might mean in practice . " In order to launch a radical revolution, it
is .. . necessary to attack positions and things and
to
destroy property and the
State, but there will be no need to destroy men and condemn ourselves to the
inevitable reaction that is unfailingly produced in every society by the
