1. Mikhail Alexandrovitch Bakunin was born in 1814 at Pryamukhino, district of Torshok, government of Tver. In 1834 he entered the Artillery School at St. Petersburg; in 1835 he became an officer, but resigned his commission in the same year. He then lived alternately in Pryamukhino and in Moscow.

In 1840 Bakunin left Russia. In the following years revolutionary plans took him now to this part of Europe, now to that; in Paris he associated much with Proudhon. In 1849 he was condemned to death in Saxony, but was pardoned; in 1850 he was handed over to Austria and was condemned to death there also; in 1851 he was handed over to Russia and was there kept a prisoner first at St. Petersburg, then at Schluesselburg; in 1857 he was sent to Siberia.

From Siberia Bakunin escaped to London in 1865, by way of Japan and California. He took up his revolutionary activities again at once, and thereafter lived by turns in the most various parts of Europe. In 1868 he became a member of the Association internationale des travailleurs, and soon afterward he founded the Alliance internationale de la dÉmocratie socialiste. In 1869 he came into intimate relations with the fanatic Nechayeff, but broke away from him in the next year. In 1872 he was expelled from the Association internationale des travailleurs on the ground that his aims were different from those of the Association. He died at Berne in 1876.

Bakunin wrote a number of works of a philosophical and political nature.

2. Bakunin's teaching about law, the State, and property finds its expression especially in the "Proposition motivÉe au comitÉ central de la Ligue de la paix et de la libertÉ"[317] offered by him in 1868; in the principles[318] of the Alliance internationale de la dÉmocratie socialiste, drawn up by him in 1868; and in his work "Dieu et l'Etat"[319] (1871).

Writings which cannot with certainty be assigned to Bakunin are here disregarded. Among such we may name especially the two works "The Principles of the Revolution"[320] and "Catechism of the Revolution,"[321] in which Nechayeff's views are set forth. They are indeed ascribed to Bakunin by some,[322] but their matter is in contradiction to his other utterances as well as to his deeds; he even used vehement language on several occasions against Nechayeff's "Machiavellianism and Jesuitism."[323] Even on the assumption that they are by Bakunin, they would at any rate express only a very insignificant chapter in his development.

3. Bakunin designates his teaching about law, the State, and property as "Anarchism." "In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, all privileged, chartered, official, and legal influence,—even if it were created by universal suffrage,—in the conviction that such things can but redound always to the advantage of a ruling minority of exploiters and to the disadvantage of the vast enslaved majority. In this sense we are in truth Anarchists."[324]