The Legacy of Bakunin
1970; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/127358
ISSN1467-9434
Autores Tópico(s)Anarchism and Radical Politics
ResumoA century ago anarchism was emerging as a major force within the revolutionary movement, the name of Bakunin, its foremost champion prophet, was as well known among the workers radical intellectuals of Europe as that of Karl Marx, with whom he was competing for leadership of the First International. In contrast to Marx, however, Bakunin had won his reputation chiefly as an activist rather than a theorist of rebellion. He was not one to sit in libraries, studying writing about predetermined revolutions. Impatient for action, he threw himself into the uprisings of 1848 with irrepressible exuberance, a Pronetlhcan figuree tioving withi the tide of revolt from Paris to the barricades of Austria Germany. Men like Bakunin, a contemporary remarked, grow in a hurricane ripen better in stormy weather than in sunshine.' Bakunin's arrest during the Dresden insurrection of 1849 cut short his feverish revolutionary activity. He spent the next eight years in prison, six of them in the darkest dungeons of tsarist Russia, when he finally emerged, his sentence commuted to a life term in Siberian exile, he was toothless from scurvy his health seriously impaired. In 1861, however, he escaped his warders embarked upon a sensational odyssey that encircled the globe made his name a legend an object of worship in radical groups all over Europe. As a romantic rebel an active force in history, Bakunin exerted a personal attraction that Marx could never rival. Everything about him was colossal, recalled the composer Richard Wagner, a fellow participant in the Dresden uprising, and he was full of a primitive exuberance strength.' Bakunin himself speaks of his own love for the fantastic, for unusual, unheard-of adventures which open up vast horizons, the end of which cannot be foreseen.3 This in turn * Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association,
Referência(s)