Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion.

Gemie, Sharif

Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion (New York: St Martin's Press 2006)

THIS IS A COMPLEX, awkwardly structured work, with some strengths and some failings. Mark Leier begins with a good point: the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s has re-kindled an interest in anarchism. Often, unfortunately, this takes the form of sloppy, hostile media stereotypes produced by the type of "instant expert" (xi) who claimed to see similarities between Bakunin and Osama Bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11. Leier proposes a more challenging, more accurate portrayal of anarchism, more relevant to the political culture of the anti-globalization activists. So far, so good. However, the next step is more worrying: Leier sets out to make such connections through a new political biography of Michael Bakunin.

Why Bakunin? One could make strong cases that, among the classical anarchist thinkers, Godwin, Stirner, and Kropotkin were probably more original, more coherent, and more interesting thinkers. Bakunin's importance is more contingent: he was the man who was in the right place (sometimes the wrong place) at the right time. He was the figure who represented the anti-authoritarian forces in the First International against Marx's embryonic attempts to create a centralized political organization. Intellectually, Bakunin's thought was varied and constantly changing: he wrote some fine polemical pieces, and was certainly capable of sharp, perceptive, pointed criticisms of political authorities, economic despotism, and clerical power. But he was also clearly a nineteenth-century thinker, often influenced by ideas of nationhood and ethnicity, with only partial awareness of ecological issues or sexual politics, and a curious, incoherent attitude to the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism. Why does Leier propose this figure as the means by which to connect the anarchisms of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries?

In practice, this book dissolves into a number of strands. Leier produces some sharp, clear chapters on Bakunin's early life. In these sections he opens a dialogue with hostile critics who have reduced Bakunin's political passions to a sexual dysfunction, and debates such issues in a sensitive, convincing, and comprehensible manner. Leier is to be given credit for his constant wish to make nineteenth-century political and social issues relevant and comprehensible to the nonspecialist. However, in the course of the book, this imperative comes to divert attention from the structure and the substance of the arguments.

Within chapters one and two the strands of Leier's writing are carefully pulled together. But problems begin to emerge. On pp.16-17 there is an attempt to summarize the political issues of the French Revolution in one paragraph, reducing it to a contest between, on the one hand, moderates and, on the other, radicals, workers, and peasants. This is simplistic: it ignores, for example, the massive counter-revolutionary movements supported by peasants, the independent petit-bourgeois radicalism of the sans-culottes and the patriarchal values of many Jacobin radicals. The French Revolution is simply too complex an event to be reduced to a fight between the good guys and the bad guys. Possibly a skilled writer could weave such political dimensions into an analysis of a single person's itinerary: Leier is not such a person. Simplistic, misleading, one-paragraph summaries of complex social and political issues disrupt the narrative and, in the long run, make this a weaker work. In particular, one notes that Leier rarely refers to recent critical works on these episodes. The assumption seems to be that the history of this period is obvious or easy, and therefore has no reason to be debated. One unfortunate result of this attitude is that, in this book, the workers and peasants remain as anonymous masses on whom history is written. In fact, Leier's bibliography is quite short. He demonstrates that he has carefully studied Bakunin's own works, some relevant works by other nineteenth-century thinkers, and some of the many "works concerning Bakunin's thinking. What he clearly has not done is to consider in any depth the historical and socio-political context in which Bakunin developed.

When Leier sticks to the main topic, Bakunin, his writing is generally clear and perceptive. Leier is a competent guide to Bakunin's awkward political development, from Hegelianism, through nationalist-tinged Republicanism, to worker-based revolutionism, and finally to anarchism. However, there is little here which is original. While Leier is effective when debating Bakunin's psychology and biography, he is less impressive as a political analyst.

What of Leier's main project: to connect Bakunin to the anti-globalization movement? This has to be seen as one of the book's great failings. Instead of drawing up a substantial analysis of political themes (which would have also involved interrogating, critically, the anti-globalization movement itself), Leier makes some silly, even patronizing, gestures. In an effort to help--presumably--young, ignorant, and American anti-globalization activists, Leier tells us that Hegel had an accent like "Jed Clampett," (72) that Bakunin criticized empiricists who adopted the "Joe Friday school of history," (84) and that stirner's true character is revealed by his real name (Johann Kasper Schmidt--97). This tendency reaches a ridiculous level on p.151. One point which emerges--incidentally--from this work relates to the dreadful conditions of Tsarist prisons. This book includes a number of photos: the difference between the upright, smart young man of the 1840s and the haggard wreck, with horrible sunken cheekbones, of the 1860s is striking. Leier points out that Bakunin suffered from scurvy while in prison. How does he explain this point? "Today one hears the word usually in pseudo-pirate patois, that is to say, in growled expressions like, 'Avast there, ye scurvy dogs!' " (151) Does anyone really believe that this type of reference will help a reader better understand a relatively important point?

The idea of a work that will connect nineteenth-century and twenty-first century anarchism is a good one. Whether this can best be done through a biographical work is open to question. What is clear is that this work clearly fails in its prime function. While Leier does present some sensitive and well-focused passages concerning Bakunin's biography, he adds nothing new to the debate concerning Bakunin's thinking.

SHARIF GEMIE

University of Glamorgan