Word: bakunin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bookstacks, he had read Bakunin, who dreamed of absolute freedom; Marx, who dreamed of absolute politico-economic science; and Rousseau, who dreamed of justice. More important, he had read the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, who dreamed of power. The more Lenin schemed and struggled (in the bookstacks) for the revolution, and was thwarted, the more he thought of power. He made marginal notes on Clausewitz. "How true!" Lenin wrote. "Clever and witty." Admiringly, he summed up a Clausewitzian point: "War as a part of a whole, and that whole-politics...
...bewhiskered giants of 19th Century socialism, Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, split over the issue of compulsory state planning v. the free action of voluntary associations of workers. Said Bakunin in 1872: "Marx is an authoritarian and centralizing communist. He wants what we want: the complete triumph of economic and social equality, but he wants it in the state and through the state power, through the dictatorship of a very strong and, so to say, despotic provisional government, that is, by the negation of liberty. . . . We want the reconstruction of society . . . not from above downward . . . but from below upwards...
...intelligent Communist leader. Marx falsely accused Weitling of being a literary crook and hounded him to the U.S. Another target was Ferdinand Lassalle, brilliant founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx somewhat inconsistently referred to Lassalle as "Baron Izzy" and "the little Jew." Another victim was Michael Bakunin, an ardent Russian anarchist who threatened Marx's, control of the First International (founded in 1864 in London). Marx charged Bakunin with shady financial dealings and with being a Czarist agent. He could not make the charge stick, but Bakunin withdrew to lick his wounds...
...more violent theories of socialism were already supplanting these gentle persuaders whom Karl Marx contemptuously dubbed "the Utopians." P.J. Proudhon, self-taught son of a barrelmaker, declared: "Property is theft." Burly, bearded Russian Michael Bakunin was transmuting his biologic impotence into an ardent anarchism-of-the-deed that longed to send the whole world up in smoke. "The desire to destroy," wrote Bakunin, "is also a creative desire." Finding some peasants milling around a German castle one day, he hopped out of his carriage, filled them so quickly with creative desire that when he took his seat again, the castle...
Skimming through history and throwing off such names as Proudhon, Bakunin, Sorel, Kropotkin, like a shower of sparks, Chamberlain contrasts the lively diversity of pre-war political theory with the postwar hypnosis of Marxism. He thinks most liberal thinking since 1933 has been "pretty silly" because merely a reaction from that spell. As for effective liberal organizations, the Democratic Party has been the best of a bad lot: "a loose federation of southern cotton snobs, western dirt farmers (the real heirs of Jefferson) and the machines of Jersey City's Frank Hague, Chicago's Pat Nash...