Bakunin Library Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization” (1876)

June 17, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur

This is another impromptu translation, from the neglected non-Proudhon to-do pile. Much of the essay will be familiar from the partial translation widely available online, but roughly 5000 words of the 13,000 in the original remained to be translated.

[…]

Mikhail Bakunin, “Philosophical Considerations on the Divine Phantom, the Real World and Man” (1870)

June 13, 2025 Shawn P. Wilbur

Bakunin’s great unfinished work, The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, covers a lot of ground, but one of its more interesting sections, the “Appendix” called “Philosophical Considerations on the Divine Phantom, the Real World and Man,” is concerned with questions that will be familiar to readers of its best-known fragment, “God and the State.” It is again a question of Bakunin’s elaboration and defense of materialism, with sections on “The System of the World” and “Religion.” Much of the focus is on the nature and proper subject matter of science. Part of the account takes the form of a critique of positivist philosophy, as pursued by the followers of Auguste Comte.

[…]

Sacher-Masoch, “Bakunin” (1888)

September 28, 2023 Shawn P. Wilbur

The only one who impressed me, among the agitators and leaders of the Slavs, at the pan-Slavist congress in Prague, was Mikhail Bakunin. Like all notable Russians of that time, he was from a good family, a gentleman, an officer, very educated, rich, and therefore absolutely independent, as were Pushkin, Lermontoff, Tourguéneff. He was not bothered by any material question and was not obliged to reckon with anyone. He could be the enthusiastic idealist he remained until the end of his days.

[…]

Bakunin — Article for “Il popolo d’Italia” (1865)

April 8, 2022 Shawn P. Wilbur

A letter from Paris, published in your newspaper on September 2, contains a serious attack against a little paper by the name of Candide, written by young Parisians, whose publication was immediately interrupted by order of the imperial censor. Your correspondent, who does not seem to be an enthusiastic admirer of the illustrious exterminator of thought and freedom who reigns over France today, takes his side this time to the point of almost congratulating him on having avenged religion and public morals by suppressing a newspaper written by young people “uneducated or unexperienced, who, impelled by base culpable vanity, have dared to calmly affirm things that will sow eternal doubt in the minds of all decent people.”

[…]

Bakunin on Life, Harmony and Struggle (1872)

August 28, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

These are excerpts from a letter written by Bakunin to Celso Ceretti, in Locarno, Switzerland, March 13-27, 1872. There is a great deal more in the letter worth examining, but the translation will have to wait for another day. I have been very distressed to see that the General [Garibaldi?], dismayed by the clashing of democratic and socialist opinions in Italy, has ended, so to speak, by giving up the idea of assembling this Congress, or else putting it off to an undetermined time, when there will be more harmony in ideas. I believe that if you wish to wait […]

Mikhail Bakunin, “Le Gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie” (1878)

June 7, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

The texts presented here are two different French translations of portions of Bakunin’s 1873 work, Государственность и анархия or Statism and Anarchy. Between March 10 and October 21, 1878, a partial translation appeared in L’Avant-garde (Chaux-de Fonds, Switzerland) under the title “Le Gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie.” The parallel text includes the corresponding section from the Archives Bakounine edition. The differences in the translations raise a number of interesting questions, particularly regarding the notion of statism (étatisme), which was a relatively new concept in 1878 and may have appeared only once or twice in Bakunin’s French writings. It also seems useful to […]

Mikhail Bakunin in “The Working Man” (1862)

July 26, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] MICHAEL BAKUNIN HE Committee of the “Working Man,” on Tuesday, the 7th of January, having been informed that Michael Bakunin had arrived in London, a deputation was appointed to go and present to this martyr of human progress an address of welcome. On Friday, the 10th, accordingly the deputation waited upon Alexander Herzen, the celebrated Russian exile and “publiciste,” who introduced them to Bakunin, surrounded by a goodly staff of Russians, Poles, &c, all friends of progress, united by the brotherly love for one common mother—Liberty. The following address was then read:— The Committee of […]

Mikhail Bakunin, “The Social Revolution” (Freedom, 1910) with a corrected translation

December 19, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

[Even when we are extremely careful, it is easy for translations to become compromised by changes in the common usage of particular keywords. When we feel the pressure of translating for audiences who may be less sensitive to that development, or to nuances in the texts themselves, there is often a temptation to try to make the translation “clearer” than the original text. (The problems with the translation of anarchie in Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century of undoubtedly of this sort.) And then there are instances where translation and adaptation to new ideological purposes are […]

Welcome to the Bakunin Library

December 17, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

PROJECT PAGES: Bakunin Library translations Bakunin Library: projected volumes Strategies of Interpretation Strategies of Presentation Bakunin Library Updates Bakunin Library category feed Library Update — July 1, 2017 Today is the anniversary of the death of Bakunin in 1876. It seems like as good an occasion as any to update folks on the progress of the library (particularly as I had really hoped to do an update back at the end of May, on the anniversary of his birth.) It’s been a comparatively quiet year for the project, with much of the work focused on how best to frame the […]

Louise Michel, “Nadine”

November 5, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

A Corvus Edition [pdf] NADINE by Louise Michel CHARACTERS Michel Bakunin. The Prince. Serge, his aide de camp. The Count Toscof, exile, father of Serge. Patelski. Belly. Miérolowski. Jacques Széla, patriot. Alexander Herzen. Count Wodzicki. Wolf, banker. Kokoski, police officer. Popof, police officer. Two Frenchmen. Two Bourgeois from Krakow. Two Officers. A Sentinel. A Herald. Two Guards. A Miner. Two Krakuses. Princess Nadine. The Countess Sophia Pouskine. Two Women of the People. Soldiers, police officers, peasants, Krakuses, men of the People, miners, bourgeois, valets, officers, lords. TABLEAUX THE REBELLION. THE SPY. THE BAILIFF OF DAMBIEC. THE MINES OF WIÉLICZKA. THE […]