Mikhail Bakunin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration:Liberty Leading the People (1831, detail) by Eugène Delacroix.
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (30 May 1814 – 1 July 1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism, and one of the principal founders of the "social anarchist" tradition. Bakunin's enormous prestige as an activist made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, and he gained substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe.
Bakunin studied philosophy and began to read the French encyclopédistes, leading to enthusiasm for the philosophy of Fichte. From Fichte, Bakunin went on to immerse himself in the works of Hegel, the most influential thinker among German intellectuals at the time. That led to his embrace of Hegelianism, bedazzled by Hegel's famous maxim, "Everything that exists is rational."
When he arrived in Paris, where he met Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx. Bakunin's increasing radicalism – including staunch opposition to imperialism in east and central Europe by Russia and other powers – changed his life, putting an end to hopes of a professorial career. He was eventually deported from France for speaking against Russia's oppression of Poland.
In his 1842 essay The Reaction in Germany, he argued in favor of the revolutionary role of negation, summed up in the phrase "the passion for destruction is a creative passion."
Cultural references
- Bakunin is a character in Tom Stoppard's 2002 trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia.
- After the first ever TV appearance of the Sex Pistols, on the Granada Television show So It Goes in August 1976, presenter Tony Wilson's immediate reaction to their performance of 'Anarchy in the UK' was: "Bakunin would have loved it."
- Bakunin, along with Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky is one of the existing last names in the novel Brave New World.
- Revolutionary Chinese writer Ba Jin took his nom de plume from the first syllable of Bakunin, and the last syllable of Kropotkin.
See also
