God and the State

Contents

1. Preface to the First French Edition 9 min 12

   Carlo Cafiero and Élisée Reclus introduce the first edition (Geneva, 1882), six years after Bakunin’s death in Bern. They praise his life of rebellion, imprisonment and exile, and his influence on revolutionaries in many countries, mostly through letters. They explain that the text is an unfinished fragment of a longer report, and single out its argument against government by science: knowledge is always incomplete, and savants given power would corrupt themselves and keep the people ignorant. They close by predicting that, with God dethroned, states will break up and human justice replace divine justice.

2. 1 Idealism and Materialism 35 min 19

   Bakunin sides with the materialists: ideas grow from material conditions, and humanity is the highest development of animal nature, distinguished by thought and rebellion. He reads the Fall in Genesis as humanity’s emancipation through disobedience, with Satan as the first freethinker. He mocks the idealists’ notion of inert matter and their inexplicable leap from perfect God to world. Belief survives among the people through ignorance and misery, which only social revolution can cure, and among the rulers as a means of control. Against Mazzini and others who cite the antiquity and universality of belief, he argues that error is old and universal too, and must be explained historically.

3. 2 God, Liberty and Authority 33 min 14

   Religion, Bakunin argues, is humanity’s own image projected and enlarged into a master, so that heaven grows rich as the earth grows poor. Revelation needs revealers, and so God leads to priests, Church and State. Hence: if God exists, man is a slave; man must be free; therefore God does not exist, and if he did he would have to be abolished. Natural laws are no master, since freedom is knowing them. But no academy of savants or elected assembly may impose laws. He accepts the bootmaker’s or engineer’s authority only as advice freely taken, recognizes science alone as authority, and calls himself an anarchist.

4. 3 The Idealists 42 min 18

   The modern idealists, Mazzini above all, call everything noble divine and so need inspired men of genius to govern a people kept forever at school. Bakunin argues that idealism in theory ends in brutal materialism in practice: Rome against Greece, Prussian Germany against Italy, the wealth-seeking Church, and the courts and bourgeois politicians who defend God. Materialism, starting from the animal, ends in liberty. He parodies the idealist story of a God fallen into matter, which divides humanity by degrees of inspiration into Church and State, and argues that science grasps only the general, so savants, positivists and German communists alike are unfit to govern life.

5. 4 Science and Life 21 min 12

   Bakunin turns from theology to science. The savants form a caste like the priesthood, and science, which can grasp only general laws, never living individuals, would sacrifice real people to abstractions if it governed. He preaches “the revolt of life against science”: science must light the road, never rule. The antinomy is to be solved by dissolving the savants’ separate corporation through equal instruction for all; until then the people should rely on their own traditional experience and on bourgeois students who desert their class, not on an aristocracy of learning, Social Democrats included.

6. 5 The Making of a Spiritual God 24 min 14

   Mind is a property of the brain, and the gods are human abstractions that people, unaware of their own authorship, took for real beings. Religion, a collective insanity, reproduces economic and political relations, and moved from fetishism through polytheism to monotheism. Roman conquest destroyed national gods, Greek metaphysics spiritualised the divine, and in Alexandria the personal Jehovah of the Jews met Plato’s impersonal idea. Hegel undermined God, and Feuerbach and Comte reduced metaphysics to psychology. What turned these elements into a religion was the preaching of Jesus to slaves, women and the poor.

7. 6 Christianity and the Bourgeoisie 27 min 19

   Christianity triumphed because it spoke to the suffering masses, though its dogma, the abstract God, was an absurdity worked out by neo-Platonist theologians. For ten centuries it ruled Europe’s mind unchallenged. The revolutionary bourgeoisie broke with it, but after 1793 and again after 1830, as a new ruling class, it needed religion to keep the people quiet, since the State needs moral sanction as well as force. Unable to return to Catholicism or turn Protestant, the French bourgeoisie invented “doctrinaire Deism,” the official spiritualism of Victor Cousin, at which point the fragment breaks off.