Bakunin: The Creative Passion#A Biography
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1583228942
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The spellbinding story of both the man and the theory, Bakunin chronicles one of the most notorious radicals in history: Mikhail Bakunin, the founder of anarchism, here revealed as a practical moral philosophy rooted in a critique of wealth and power.
Mark Leier corrects many of the popular misconceptions about Bakunin and his ideas, offering a fresh interpretation of his life and thoughts. Bakunin is an insightful read for all those who wish to better understand the fundamental basis of modern radical movements.
Leo Strauss, Education, and Political Thought
Kant and the Philosophy of History
A Companion to Rawls (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy)
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (Routledge Classics)
International came from French and British workers who sought to express their solidarity with the ill-fated Polish uprising of 1863. They were unable to do much for the Poles, but it was obvious that international cooperation was crucial for workers in an age of transnational capital, colonization, and empire. The following year the International Working Men’s Association was created, and Marx was asked to join. He was reluctant at first. He had not been active in any political organization
to take up jobs in the civil service to serve society by becoming functioning parts of it. Unlike Bakunin, Belinsky insisted he was a man of feeling, not of intellect, and so was superior. “My strength, my power, is in my direct feeling,” Belinsky insisted, while Bakunin was “a man with a marvelous head but decidedly without heart, and, moreover, with the blood of a rotten salt cod.”26 This appeal to feeling rather than reason hardly suggests that Belinsky was the rational realist of the two.
original message of Christianity and reestablished the principle of conscious, rational, human activity in both the spiritual and the material worlds. With the Reformation, the chief human task became the reformation of the world in accordance with the principle of freedom, and thus Hegel insisted that it was not enough to understand the world; it was also necessary to act in it. But how could individuals agree on what was to be done? How could anyone know what actions were in tune with the
overstate their differences. Those who argue, for example, that Marx was essentially a liberal democrat in this period are surely mistaken. Those who insist that he was a technological determinist, that is, someone who believed that history was essentially a process of technological change in which human activity mattered little, depend on a reading that is too narrow and selective to be persuasive. At the same time, Bakunin’s position has often been parodied as an idealist belief in willpower,
subject to seizure by the autocracy, he continued, and the rights of all should be protected from tyranny. The clergy in deeply religious Russia should be cleansed of superstition so that the arts and sciences would not be impeded by outmoded thought, while the economy, chiefly based on agriculture and the export of raw materials, should be modernized so trade and industry could flourish. Perhaps most trenchant was Alexander’s assessment of serfdom, the very basis of Russia and Priamukhino’s