BIBLIOGRAPHIC GUIDE

The citations in each chapter will guide the reader to the sources used in this book. This essay is offered as a guide to some of the English-language work most useful in interpreting Bakunin and to indicate more generally the material I have drawn upon. Excellent annotated bibliographies and useful explanatory notes on Bakunin may be found in Paul McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism, New York: Algora, 2002; The Basic Bakunin: Writings, 1869–1871, Robert M. Cutler, trans., ed., New York: Prometheus Books, 1992; and Michael Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz, trans., ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. The latter two books also offer useful introductions to Bakunin’s life and ideas.

The standard biography is E. H. Carr’s Michael Bakunin. First published in 1937, it is an elegant book full of charming details and anecdotes, but it does little to explain the social context of the world Bakunin inhabited. Nor does it say much about his ideas; Bakunin’s book, Statism and Anarchy, is not even mentioned. K. J. Kenafick’s Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, Melbourne: A. Mailer, 1948, covers much more ground than his title implies. An anarchist activist himself, Kenafick argues that Bakunin and Marx had much in common and he offers a significant counter to Carr’s interpretation. Kenafick rejects the psychohistory hinted at in Carr and launched a preemptive strike against two biographies of Bakunin published in the 1980s, Arthur P. Mendel’s Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse, and Aileen Kelly’s Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. Mendel has read Bakunin’s letters closely and reveals much detail, but makes dubious psychological interpretations that stem from his acute distaste for the man and the ideas. The two books are critiqued in Brian Morris’s 1997 work, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993, a short volume written with considerable empathy and intelligence. It relies heavily on secondary sources, but is a provocative and lively introduction to the life and ideas of Bakunin. Paul McLaughlin launches several well-aimed attacks on Mendel, Kelly, Carr, Isaiah Berlin, and Marxist critics of anarchism in Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism. His analysis of Bakunin’s relationship to Hegel and Fichte is a useful corrective to those scholars who find nothing of value or interest in German idealism. McLaughlin also explores Bakunin’s interest in Comte. McLaughlin and I draw on the invigorating and sophisticated work of Martine Del Giudice. Her dissertation, “The Young Bakunin and Left Hegelianism: Origins of Russian Radicalism and the Theory of Praxis, 1814–1842,” Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 1981, and the article drawn from it, “Bakunin’s Preface to Hegel’s Gymnasia! Lectures: The Problem of Alienation and the Reconciliation with Reality,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 16, no. 2, 1982, are crucial to understanding Bakunin’s work in philosophy and the turn to Hegel. Another Ph.D. thesis, John Wyatt Randolph’s “The Bakunins: Family, Nobility, and Social Thought in Imperial Russia, 1780–1840,” University of California, Berkeley, 1997, is an invaluable guide to the early years at Priamukhino and the dreams, realities, and conflicts that shaped the family. Both these theses, though very different in approach and conclusions, are models of scholarship and offer vital and well-argued analyses.

In addition to translating Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz is responsible for much of the debunking of the myths surrounding Bakunin. His “Michael Bakunin and His Biographers: The Question of Bakunin’s Sexual Impotence,” in Imperial Russia, 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition: Essays in Honor of Marc Raeff, Ezra Mendelsohn and Marshall Shatz, eds., DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988, exposes the impotence fallacy. The notion that Turgenev’s character Rudin is a useful way to understand Bakunin is effectively refuted in “Bakunin, Turgenev, and Rudin,” in The Golden Age of Russian Literature and Thought, Derek Offord, ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Shatz illuminates the relationship of Bakunin to his sisters and the revolts at Priamukhino and establishes his early commitment to women’s rights in “Mikhail Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle: Love and Liberation in the Russian Intelligentsia of the 1830s,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 33, no. 1, spring 1999, pages 1–29.

Paul Avrich is the leading American scholar of anarchism, and his important essays, “The Legacy of Bakunin,” “Bakunin and the United States,” and “Bakunin and Nechaev,” may be found in his book, Anarchist Portraits, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Bakunin’s time and influence in Italy are carefully examined in T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988, and in Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Richard B. Saltman explores Bakunin’s anarchism at great length in The Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983. He outlines nicely Bakunin’s critique of Hegel, though his argument that Bakunin was essentially a Lamarckian is not, to my mind, convincing. His careful analysis of Bakunin’s ideas is a spirited critique of much of the liberal and right-wing scholarship on Bakunin. Stephen Porter Halbrook argues in “The Marx-Bakunin Controversy: Intellectual Origins, 1844–1870,” Ph.D. thesis, Florida State University, 1972, that Marx was essentially a reformist and Bakunin a violent revolutionary, and if the latter claim is vividly overstated, there is much useful information and several interesting arguments here.

The fights between anarchists and Marxists are taken up by Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Generally friendly to Marx, Thomas still states much of the anarchist case well. A thoughtful analysis that disagrees with Thomas on some significant interpretative points is Alvin Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.