Such strange, paradoxical doctrines are irrefutable if we accept Stirner’s postulates. But we must reject his whole point of view and dispute the stress laid upon the individual as the only reality, as well as his denial of the reality of society. Granting that the individual is the only reality, then society and the nation are mere abstractions created by man and removable at his pleasure. But that is just the mistake. The individual has no existence apart from society, nor has he any greater degree of reality. He is simply an element, not a separate entity. His existence or non-existence does not depend upon himself. Nor is society merely an idea. It is a natural fact. The individual may be quite as appropriately described as an abstraction or a mere phantom.
The fundamental difference between Stirner and the other anarchists who will engage our attention is just this recognition of the reality of the social fact which Stirner denies in toto. It also marks the cleavage between literary and political anarchism.[1303]
II: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ANARCHISM AND THE CRITICISM OF AUTHORITY
Stirner spent his life between his study and the Hippel Restaurant, the rendezvous of his friends. Bakunin and Kropotkin are men of a different stamp who have risked their freedom, and even their lives, for the sake of the cause which they have at heart. It is true that the seed sown in the mind of the ignorant as the result of their teaching has often had most deplorable results, but no one can deny the quality of courage to either Kropotkin or Reclus, or withhold from them the title of greatness both of mind and character.
Bakunin was reared in much the same intellectual atmosphere as Stirner.[1304] By birth he belonged to the Russian nobility, and spent the earliest years of his life in the Russian army. In 1834, at the age of twenty, he resigned his commission in order to devote himself to the study of philosophy, and, like Proudhon, Stirner, and Marx, he came under the universal spell of Hegel. In 1840 he proceeded to Berlin, where he became acquainted with the school of young Radicals of whom we have already spoken. From 1844 to 1847 we find him in Paris, where he used to spend whole nights in discussion with Proudhon. Proudhon’s influence upon him is very marked, and one constantly meets with passages in the writings of the Russian anarchist which are nothing but paraphrases of ideas already put forward by Proudhon in the Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXe Siècle. The year 1848 revealed to the dilettante nobleman his true vocation, which he conceived to be that of a revolutionary. He successively took part in the risings at Prague and in the Saxon Revolution at Dresden. He was arrested and twice condemned to death, in Saxony and again in Austria, but was finally handed over to the Russian authorities, who imprisoned him in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, where an attack of scurvy caused him to lose all his teeth. He was exiled to Siberia in 1857, but managed to escape in 1861. Making his way to London, he undertook the direction of a vigorous revolutionary campaign, which was carried on in Switzerland, Italy, and France. During the years 1870 and 1871 he successfully planned a popular rising at Lyons. Bernard Lazare has graphically described him as “a hirsute giant with an enormous head which seems larger than it really is because of the mass of bushy hair and untrimmed beard which surrounds it. He always sleeps rough, has no roof above him, and no homeland which he can call his own, and like an apostle is always prepared to set out on his sacred mission at any hour of the night or day.”
The most striking fact in his history was his rupture with Karl Marx at the last International Congress, held at The Hague in 1872. Bakunin joined the International in 1869. Disgusted with the pontifical tendencies of the General Council, which was entirely under the heel of Marx, he proposed a scheme of federal organisation under which each section would be left with considerable autonomy. The Jura Federation supported his proposals, and so did several of the French, Belgian, and Spanish delegates, as well as all the Italian. But he was expelled from the International by Marx’s own friends. The official rupture between Marxian socialism and anarchy, grown to considerable proportions since, dates from that very moment. That Hague congress marks also the end of the International. Marx soon afterwards transferred the centre of the administration to the United States, and no conference has been held since. Bakunin also retired from the struggle about the same time, but not before he had set up a new association at Geneva, composed of a few faithful friends. In 1876 Bakunin died at Berne.
It was in the region of the Jura, in the neighbourhood of Neuchâtel, where Bakunin had still a few followers among the extremely individualistic but somewhat mystical population of those parts, that Kropotkin in the course of a short stay in the district in 1872 imbibed those anarchist ideas to the propagation of which he has so strenuously devoted his life.[1305] Although personally unacquainted with Bakunin, Kropotkin must be regarded as his direct descendant.
Prince Kropotkin is also a Russian aristocrat, and he, like his master, joined the army after a short period of study. He attracted public notice first of all as the author of several remarkable works dealing with natural history and geography, which showed him to be a confirmed disciple of Darwin. But science was by no means his only interest. By 1871 Hegelian influence was on the wane in Russia, and the more thoughtful of the younger generation turned their attention to democracy. The new watchword was, “Go, seek the people, live among them, educate them and win their confidence if you want to get rid of the yoke of autocracy.” Kropotkin caught the inspiration. He himself has told us how one evening after dinner at the Winter Palace he drove off in a cab, took off his fine clothes, and, putting on a cotton shirt instead of his silk one, and boots such as the peasants wore, hurried away to another quarter of the city and joined a number of working men whom he was trying to educate. But his propaganda proved short-lived, for one evening when he was leaving the headquarters of the Geographical Society, where he had just been reading a paper and had been offered the presidency of one of the sections, he was arrested on a charge of political conspiracy and imprisoned in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. He managed to escape in 1876, and found refuge in England. Afterwards he was wrongfully condemned to three years’ imprisonment at Clairvaux on account of his supposed complicity in an anarchist outbreak which took place at Lyons in 1884. But there was something extraordinary about a prisoner who could get the libraries of Ernest Renan and the Paris Academy of Sciences placed at his disposal during his term of imprisonment in order to enable him to pursue his scientific investigations. During his previous imprisonment in Russia the Geographical Society of St. Petersburg had extended him a similar privilege. Kropotkin has since lived in England.
The best known French anarchists, Élisée Reclus, the geographer, and Jean Grave, simply reproduce Kropotkin’s ideas, with an occasional admixture of Bakunin’s or Proudhon’s.[1306]