People

Mikhail Bakunin 1814-1876  - Russia

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Wikipedia

Columbia Encyclopedia

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Questions of 

Bakunin believed that man is inherently virtuous and deserving of absolute freedom obtained through extreme individualism. He advocated violent overthrow of existing states and institutions as a necessary step to achieving such freedom. His writings include God and the State (1882, tr. 1893).

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Reading

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Writing available on the net

English translation of "God and the State", by Bakunin 1876: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html

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Commentaries

See studies by R. B. Saltman (1983) and A. Kelly (1987).

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Quotations

• If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself. - (?)

• Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their ignorance, want and clamouring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence. -Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom (1867)

• Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying. - The Red Association (1870)

• I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. - God and the State, Ch. II (1876)

See also: Mikhail Bakunin at Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin), anarchism