Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814–1876)
Russian revolutionary and anarchist
Bakunin was the eldest son of a small landowner
whose estate was near Moscow. He was educated at a
military school in St. Petersburg and later served as an
officer in the emperor’s army stationed on the Polish
frontier. He resigned his commission in 1835 and
spent the next five years in Moscow studying philoso-
phy, literature, and politics. In 1840, Bakunin traveled
to Berlin to continue his education and there became
engaged with the YOUNG HEGELIANS. After brief visits to
Belgium and Switzerland, Bakunin settled in Paris and
became involved with a network of French, German,
and Polish socialists, including Karl MARXand Pierre-
Joseph PROUDHON. Inspired by the movement for
national liberation in central and Eastern Europe,
Bakunin participated in the revolutions of 1848.
Arrested for his role in the Dresden insurrection of
May 1849, Bakunin was returned to Russia, where he
remained imprisoned until 1857 when he was exiled
to Siberia. He managed to escape in 1861, traveling
first to London, then to Italy, and finally to Geneva in
1864.
At this time, Bakunin began to articulate his partic-
ular version of ANARCHISM, the main points of which
drew him into a conflict with Marx while both were
members of the International Workingmen’s Associa-
tion, or “First International,” an organization of work-
ing-class parties seeking to transform the capitalist
societies into socialist commonwealths and to oversee
their eventual unification in a world federation.
Although for Marx the first goal of the revolution was
the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bakunin believed
that the centralization of power had to be abolished in
all its forms. For Bakunin, the centralization of author-
ity signifies the delegation of power from one individ-
ual or group to another, which raises the risk of
EXPLOITATION by the individual or group to whom
power has been ceded. The state must be the primary
object of criticism because it is the ultimate form of
centralized authority that will invariably use its enor-
mous power to subject and exploit the people.
Bakunin argued that for liberation to occur, individu-
als and groups must retain their power in terms of
their ability to determine political matters for them-
selves. This position contrasted sharply with the Marx-
ist notion of a single revolutionary class (proletariat)
that was to be represented by a unitary vanguard party
established to assume control of the state.
Bakunin’s contention was that political power must
be kept at the local level through the utilization of
small administrative bodies. For him, FEDERALISMwas
to be the key to building new forms of EGALITARIAN
social arrangements committed to the freedom of all
individuals, who were seen by Bakunin as naturally
social. The destruction of the old society and the cre-
ation of the new must begin with the abolition of the
right of inheritance and the subversion of private
property, which is the key to the capitalist exploitation
of the working class. To promote his anarchist ideas,
Bakunin formed the semisecret Social Democratic
Alliance in 1869, which he conceived as a revolution-
ary avant-garde within the First International. This
brought to a head the dispute between Marx and
Bakunin, and in the ensuing power struggle at a con-
gress of the First International at The Hague in 1872,
Marx secured the expulsion of Bakunin and his follow-
ers from the International. Bakunin’s followers, called
the autonomists, were active in Spain and Italy for
some time thereafter. Bakunin himself spent the last
years of his life impoverished in Switzerland.Further Reading
Saltman, R. B. The Social and Political Thought of Michael
Bakunin.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.Baptist
A CHRISTIANchurch denomination noted for emphasiz-
ing the separation of CHURCH AND STATE, a highly DEMO-
CRATICform of church government, and an individual,
personal relationship to God. English and American
Baptists derive from European “Anabaptist” Protestant
Christians, and their ideals of religious FREEDOMand
LIBERTYof conscience greatly affected political and reli-
gious life in Britain and America. JEFFERSON’s Virginia
statute for religious freedom and later U.S. constitu-
tional freedom of religious belief embodied Baptist
ideals for liberty of individual conscience and church
independence from STATEcontrol.
Baptists now constitute the largest Protestant
church in the United States of America. Each Baptist
church is independent but usually is a voluntarily part
of an association. The individual church is run demo-
cratically, with each member having a vote, and minis-
ters are elected by the congregation. This democratic
kind of church government helped the Baptists grow
rapidly in America. During the Second Great AWAKEN-
ING(1790–1830), a Christian revival that spread across28 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich