[1336] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. iii, p. 51.
[1337] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. iii, p. 55.
[1338] “In general we may say that man’s general life is almost entirely governed by what we call good sense.” (Ibid., vol. iii, p. 50.)
[1339] Ibid., vol. iii, p. 51.
[1340] La Société future, p. 303.
[1341] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. i, pp. 286, 298, 277.
[1342] Bakunin on his death-bed confessed to his friend Reichel that “all his philosophy had been built upon a false foundation. All was vitiated because he had begun by taking man as an individual, whereas he is really a member of a collective whole” (quoted by Guillaume, Œuvres, preface to vol. ii, p. 60). In his Philosophie du Progrès (Œuvres, vol. xx, pp. 36-38) Proudhon writes as follows: “All that reason knows and maintains is that the individual, like an idea, is really a group. All existence is in groups, and whatever forms a group also forms a unit, and consequently becomes perceptible and is then said to exist. In accordance with this general conception of being, I think it possible to prove the existence of positive reality and up to a certain point to demonstrate the laws of the social being or of the humanitarian group, and to establish a proof of the existence of an individuality superior to collective man and still quite other and different from his individual self.” The same idea frequently comes up in different connections, e.g., in the Petit Catéchisme politique at the end of vol. i of La Justice dans la Révolution, and in Idée générale de la Révolution.
Kropotkin thinks that man has always lived in society of one kind or another. “As far back as we can go in the palæo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies, in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals.” (Mutual Aid, p. 80). “Man did not create society; society is older than man.” (The State, its Historic Rôle, p. 6; London, 1898.) Jean Grave, on the other hand, thinks that “the individual was prior to society. Destroy the individual, and there will be nothing left of society. Let the association be dissolved and the individuals scattered, they will fare badly and will possibly return to savagery, their faculties will decay and not progress, but still they will continue to exist.” (La Societé future, pp. 160-162.) Grave’s view is essentially his own and does not square with those of either Kropotkin, Bakunin, or Proudhon, the real founders of anarchy. It is, moreover, quite obvious that their theories are really much nearer the truth, for it is as impossible to conceive of society without the individual as it is to conceive of the individual without society. The individual, as Bakunin emphatically declares, is a fiction, or an abstraction, as Walras would say. Many people find it difficult to accept this doctrine. But it seems the only one that tallies with the facts, whether of nature or of history. We can no more imagine the individual without society than we can a fish without water. Deprived of water, it is not only less of a fish, but it is no longer a fish at all—except a dead one.
[1343] Bastiat speaks of this error of confusing government and society as being the worst that has ever befallen the science. The State problem he defines as follows: “How to inscribe within the great circle which we call society that other circle called government.” Dunoyer in so many words expresses the same idea.
[1344] Memoirs of a Revolutionist, p. 414. Cf. also Paroles d’une Révolté, p. 221.