Mikhail Bakunin

Anarchist Beginnings

Mikhail Bakunin, “What is Authority” (1870)

September 7, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
NOTE: This passage is generally known as part of “God and the State” (Dieu et l’État, first published in 1882), but it appears in Bakunin’s manuscript as part of “Sophismes historiques de l’école doctrinaire des communistes allemands,” the second section of the unfinished book L’Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Révolution Sociale (The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.) This new translation seeks to clarify some passages that may appear contradictory in existing translations. In particularly the verb repousser, which previous translators have tended to simply render as “reject,” has been brought closer to its literal sense of “push back” and some […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin — A fragment on life and spirit (1837)

June 21, 2015 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] No 1 My Notes September 4, 1837 Yes, life is sheer happiness; to live means to understand, to understand life; evil does not exist, all is good; only limitation is evil, the limitation of the spiritual vision. Everything that exists is the life of the spirit, everything is penetrated by the spirit, nothing exists apart from the spirit. The spirit is absolute knowledge, absolute liberty, absolute love, and especially absolute felicity. The natural man, like everything that is natural, is the finite and limited moment of that absolute life. He is […]
Anarchism

Undated fragment on pan-Slavism and anarchism

March 30, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Manuscript fragment: …and which has consequently rendered impossible at present the constitution of a centralist, bureaucratic and military Slavic State… In the end that fine Slavic brotherhood, which could no longer exist from the moment that the Slavs, sacrificing Abel to Cain, received the latter, as their elder brother, into their midst… in a word all the precious elements that the Slavs have guarded, in the midst of the terrible vicissitudes that they have experienced for centuries, which, rendered fertile by a new spirit—that of great justice, great liberty and universal fraternity—could well become one day those of a new […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain” (1872)

March 17, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
Marx, as a thinker, is on the right track. He has established as a principle that all the political, religious and legal evolutions in history are not causes, but effects of the economic evolutions. It is a great and productive thought, that he has not absolutely invented: it has been glimpsed, expressed in part, by many others than him; but finally, to him belongs the honor of having solidly established it and having posited it as the basis of his whole economic system. On the other hand, Proudhon understand and felt liberty beaucoup much better than him—Proudhon, when he did not engage in doctrine and metaphysics, had the true instinct of the revolutionary—he adored Satan and he proclaimed an-archy. It is quite possible that Marx could raise himself theoretically to an even more rational system of liberty than Proudhon—but he lacks Proudhon’s instinct.

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Bakunin Library

Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870)

January 19, 2014 Shawn P. Wilbur
  Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (September 1-8, 1870, Locarno, Switzerland) Letter to a Frenchman ___________ My dear friend, The latest events have placed France in such a position, that it can no longer be saved from a long and terrible slavery, from ruin, poverty, and annihilation, except by a rising en masse of the armed people. Your principal army being destroyed, — and that is no longer in doubt today, — there remains to France only two outcomes: either to submit sheepishly, shamefully, to the insolent yoke of the Prussians, to bow beneath the staff of […]
Bakunin Library

Max Nettlau, “Michael Bakunin” (1914)

January 16, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[one_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”]   [/one_third][two_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”] Michael Bakunin. by Max Nettlau Most centenarians, even when born much later and still among us, are but dried-up relics of a remote past; whilst some few, though gone long since, remain full of life, and rather make us feel ourselves how little life and energy there is in most of us. These men, in advance of their age, prepared new ways for coming generations, who are often but too slow to follow them up. Prophets and dreamers, thinkers and rebels they are called, and of those who, in […]
Bakunin Library

Bakunin on Hamlet (1837)

May 18, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] Welcome to the Bakunin Library, which is part of a project to translate and publish the work of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) in English. The blog will feature news about the translation project and the eventual publication by PM Press. It will also feature working translations of previously untranslated works, transcriptions of earlier translations, and material relating to the life and thought of Bakunin. Without further ado, I would like to launch the site with a new, slightly rough translation of an early essay by a young Bakunin on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an apparently unpublished work […]
Bakunin Library

The New Adventure: Bakunin in English

April 5, 2012 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m just back from the 2012 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, which was, as usual, a lot of fun—and more than a bit exhausting. I took a much narrower slice of the Corvus Editions catalog than usual, focusing on translations and the Eliphalet Kimball collection, and was pleased with the response. Translation was also the focus of a lot of the networking this year, and several great projects should be rolling out over the next couple of months. The big project that is mine to announce is the Collected Works of Bakunin in English, which PM Press is finally ready […]