The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution

Bakunin Library

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. 

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Bakunin Library

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 […]