all the dissonances will fiow into one harmonious whole -the democratic and universal church of human freedom. '1 Once launched upon the waves of this type of mid-nineteenth-century radical patter, one
knows only too well what to expect. To paraphrase another passage,
I am not free if you, too, are not free; my liberty must be 'reflected'
in the freedom of others-the individualist is wrong who thinks that
the frontier of my liberty is your liberty-liberties are complementaryare indispensable to each other-not competitive.2 The 'political and juridical' concept of liberty is part and parcel of that criminal use of
words which equates society and the detested state. It deprives men
of liberty for it sets the individu;ll against society; upon this the
thoroughly vicious theory of the social contract-by which men have
to give up some portion of their original, 'natural' liberty in order to
associate in harmony-is founded. But this is a fallacy, for it is only in
society that men become both human and free-'only collective and
social labour liberates [man J from the yoke of . . . nature', and without
such liberation 'no moral or intellectual liberty' is possible.3 Liberty
cannot occur in solitude, but is a form of reciprocity. I am free and
human only so far as others are such. My freedom is limitless because
that of others is also such ; our liberties mirror one another-so long
as there is one slave, I am not free, not human, have no dignity and
no rights. Liberty is not a physical or a social condition but a mental
one: it consists of universal reciprocal recognition of the individual's
liberties: slavery is a state of mind and the slaveowner is as much a
slave as his chattels." The glib Hegelian claptrap of this kind with
which the works of Bakunin abound has not even the alleged
merits of Hegelianism, for it contrives to reproduce many of the worst
confusions of eighteenth-century thought, including that whereby the
comparatively clear, if negative, concept of personal liberty as a
condition in which a man is not coerced by others into doing what he
does not wish to do, is confounded with the Utopian and perhaps
1 Quoted by A. Ruge in his memoirs of Bakunin, in Ntut Frtit Prtsu,
April/May r 876.
2 'Three Lectures to the Workers of Val de Saint-lmier', in J. Guillaume
(ed.), op. cit. (p. r o6, note 1 above), vol. 5, pp. 23 1-2.
8 M. Bakunin, 'The Knouto-German Empire and the Social Revolu tion',
Iz6rannyt Jochintniya, vol. 2 (PetrogradfMoscow, 192 2), pp. 2 3 5-6.
4 ibid., pp. 236-8.
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
unintelligible notion of being free from laws in a different sense of
'law' - from the necessities of nature or even of social coexistence. And
from this it is inferred that since to ask for freedom from Nature is
absurd, since I am what I am as part of her, therefore, because my
relationships with other human beings are part of 'Nature', it is
equally senseless to ask for freedom from them-what one should
seek is a 'freedom' which consists in a 'harmonious solidarity' with
them.
Bakunin rebelled against Hegel and professed to hate Christianity;
but his language is a conventional amalgam of both. The assumption
that all virtues are compatible, nay, mutually entailed by one another,
that the liberty of one man can never clash with that of another if
both are rational (for then they cannot desire conflicting ends), that
unlimited liberty is not only compatible with unlimited equality but
inconceivable without it-; reluctance to attempt a serious analysis of
either the notions of liberty or of equality; the belief that it is only
avoidable human folly and wickedness which are responsible for
preventing the natural goodness and wisdom of man from making a
paradise upon earth almost instantaneously, or at least as soon as the
tyrannical state, with its vicious and idiotic legal system, is destroyed
root and branch-all these naive fallacies, intelligible enough in the
eighteenth century, but endlessly criticised in Bakunin's own sophisticated century, form the substance of his st"rmons urbi et orbi; and in particular of his fiery allocutions to the fascinated watchmakers of La
Chaux-de-Fonds and the Valley of Saint-lmier.
Bakunin's thought is almost always simple, shallow, and clear; the
language is passionate, direct and imprecise, riding from climax to
climax of rhetorical evidence, sometimes expository, more often
hortatory or polemical, usually ironical, sometimes sparkling, always
gay, always entertaining, always readable, seldom related to facts of
experience, never original or serious or specific. Liberty-the wordoccurs ceaselessly. Sometimes Bakunin speaks of it in exalted semireligious terms, and declares that the instinct to mutiny-defiance-is one of the three basic 'moments' in the development of humanity,
denounces God and rays homage to Satan, the first rebel, the true
friend of freedom. In such 'Acherontic' moods, in words which
resemble the opening of a revolutionary marching song, he declares
that the only true revolutionary element in Russia (or anywhere else)
is the doughty (likhoi) world of brigands and desperadoes, who, having
nothing to lose, will destroy the old world -after which the new will
1 08
H E RZ E N AN:p BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
arise spontaneously like the phoenix from the ashes.1 He puts his
hopes in the sons of the ruined gentry, in all those who drown their
sorrows and indignation in violent outbreaks against their cramping
milieu. Like Weitling, he calls upon the dregs of the underworld, and,
in particular, the disgruntled peasants, the Pugachevs and Razins, to
rise like modern Samsons and bring down the temple of iniquity. At
other times, more innocently, he calls merely for a revolt against all
fathers and all schoolmasters: children must be free to choose their
own careers; we want 'neither demigods nor slaves', but an equal
society, above all not differentiated by university education, which
creates intellectual superiority and leads to more painful inequalities
than even aristocracy or plutocracy. Sometimes he speaks of the
necessity for an 'iron dictatorship' during the transitional period
between the vicious society of today with its 'knouto-German' army
and police, and the stateless society of tomorrow confined by no
restraints. Other times he says that all dictatorships tend inevitably to
perpetuate themselves, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is
yet one more detestable despotism of one class over another. He cries
that all 'imposed' laws, being man-made, must be thrown off at once;
but allows that 'social' laws which are 'natural' and not 'artificial'
will have to be obeyed-as if these latter are fixed and immutable and
beyond human control. Few of the optimistic confusions of the
eighteenth-century rationalists fail to make an appearance somewhere
in his works. After proclaiming the right- the duty-to mutiny, and
the urgent necessity for the violent overthrow of the state, he happily