FORERUNNERS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
These plans and ideas were not worked out. For Bakunin method and order existed neither in practice nor in theory. A genius, but only half educated, and that not merely through his own fault, an egoist to the point of naïveté, he would never admit the question, whether after all he, too, in his own person might not share the responsibility for the general misery. He looked for every evil and its roots only outside himself. Bakunin felt this old order and its supports, even Nature, the world, God, as personal insults and provocations: and in this mood he spent his life in wild efforts to turn the whole world upside down according to his own idea. Without the faintest conception of how the new world was to be formed, without real knowledge of the old world, Bakunin revelled in the cosmopolitan ideas of the true agitator. Working in hiding, now in England, now in France, then again in Belgium and Germany, then in Italy and Switzerland, he could not find anywhere the point from which to heave the world off its hinges. And so he fell a prey to revolutionary unrest and nervousness, mistook his agitation for action, and lost all sense of reality and all measure for judging the actions of others.
He loves ideas, not men, says Byelinski of Bakunin. Men were to this man of half ideas and half-deeds always mere means to an end. Half ideas and half deeds: Bakunin scarcely ever finished any literary work, and never set himself any practical task at which he worked with persistence and stedfastness. If Herzen called history an improvisation, then there must be improvisors of life, and Bakunin was one of these.
Bakunin tried several times to find a philosophical basis for the revolution. In his chief work the moving force of the individual and of history is found in three principles—animalism, thought and revolt: Man has a natural need for revolt, a revolutionary instinct. . . . In the programme of the “Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie socialiste” (1873) Bakunin also produced an ethical theory of revolution, which is no less characteristic than his “instinct” theory.
Starting from a materialistic determinism, Bakunin denies the freedom of the will, in order to be able to deny law, and, in particular, criminal law. The individual is the “involuntary” product of the natural and social milieu, out of which criminals and kings alike arise! Criminals and kings are thus
347
