Philosophy for the day: Bakunin's socialist liberty

Submitted by adam ricketson on Sat, 2009-12-19 10:23.

Responding to Bakunin

#7841 On Sat, 2009 12 19 10:46 adam ricketson said,

Here's a partial transcript.

I watched part of a response to this on YouTube, and I think the author missed the point by ignoring the condition that Bakunin was in when he wrote things like this.

First, remember that he lived in 19th Century Europe (he was from the Russian minor nobility--i.e. his family had serfs). Europe as a whole was ruled by monarchical/aristrocratic governments, with only a smidgen of popular representation. The economy was greatly  restrictive; at best they were mercantilist, but they still had a lot of formal class distinctions.

Furthermore, Bakunin was a radical individualist. He would have written this to clarify the nature of his individualism (as he actually mentioned in the text).

Anyway, one thing that seems to be omitted here is that even though individuals exist within societies, individuals can leave one society to join another (sometimes by splitting an existing society). I think that anarcho-socialists are typically good at recognizing this, while statist communitarians are not. This gets even more complicated when we recognize that societies ore not coherent, distinct entities. They contain a lot of internal structure and if you try to divide humanity into societies, those societies will merge into each other.