Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
The Young Satan
By Sidney Monas
Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism
by Aileen Kelly
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 320 pp., $29.95
In spite of his origins in a Russian landholding family and his early involvement with German idealist philosophy, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) is best known as a revolutionary socialist, the founder of an important branch of the anarchist movement, and one of the earliest critics, from the revolutionary perspective, of an authoritarian streak running through the ideas of Karl Marx and Marxism. Whether seen as a Promethean or as a satanic figure, he came to represent the spirit of rebellion, extreme revolutionary activism, a love of popular uprisings and the barricades. Biographers have tended to concentrate more on his activities than on his ideas, except for the details of his controversy with Marx. Aileen Kelly's long interpretative essay, while it does not contain any specifically new facts about Bakunin, makes excellent critical use of recently published documents on his life and attempts to relate the old Satan to his background as a young Russian nobleman and to the formation of the Russian intelligentsia during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855).
Review, 3121 words
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