Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary widely considered one of the most influential figures in the history of anarchism. His reputation as a leading ideologue made him a household name across Europe, though his activism often came at a high personal cost. He was expelled from France for opposing the Russian Empire’s occupation of Poland, later arrested in Dresden for participating in the Czech rebellion, and eventually exiled to Siberia in 1857. Today, his intellectual legacy continues to be celebrated by thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin and Noam Chomsky.

Bakunin’s political philosophy centered on the rejection of all hierarchical systems, regardless of their form. In his seminal work, God and the State, he argued that "the liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or collective, individual or particular."

He fundamentally rejected the notion of privileged positions, asserting that the social and economic inequalities inherent in class systems are incompatible with individual liberty. For Bakunin, both capitalism and the state were inherently oppressive to the working class. As he pointed out, "It is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart."

This conviction led to his fierce opposition to Karl Marx’s concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Bakunin argued that any state, even one claiming to represent the workers, would inevitably lead to new forms of tyranny. While anarchists and Marxists share the ultimate goal of creating a free, egalitarian society without social classes or a central bureaucracy, they remain fundamentally divided on the methods used to achieve it.