God and the State
Glossary
"
- "If God Really Existed, It Would Be Necessary to Abolish Him"
- Bakunin's deliberate inversion of Voltaire's famous line, "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For Bakunin, the idea of a supreme, all-powerful, all-knowing being is fundamentally incompatible with human liberty and dignity, and must be actively opposed rather than merely disbelieved.
- Related: Voltaire, Mikhail Bakunin
A
- An Unfinished Fragment
- Bakunin died in 1876 without completing this manuscript. It was assembled and published posthumously in 1882 by his followers Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus, who noted in their preface that several pages of the original manuscript could never be found, leaving the surviving text with its own internal gap.
- Related: Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus, Mikhail Bakunin
- Anarchism vs. Marxism
- The implicit debate this text carries on with Marx and Engels: Bakunin rejects the seizure of state power by the proletariat as a necessary transitional stage toward communism, predicting instead that any new revolutionary state, however well-intentioned, would produce a new ruling class of experts and bureaucrats.
- Related: Government by Science, Mikhail Bakunin
C
- Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus
- The two anarchist followers of Bakunin who compiled and published God and the State posthumously in 1882, six years after his death, supplying the preface that explains the manuscript's incomplete and fragmentary state.
- Related: An Unfinished Fragment
D
- Doctrinaire Deism
- A moderate, respectable religious philosophy Bakunin traces to Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, adopted by the French bourgeoisie after 1830 as a way to sanction its new political power with a religion of sentiment purged of both revolutionary fervor and old-regime superstition.
- Related: Theology and the State
G
- Government by Science
- Bakunin's target in the pamphlet's second half: the idea that a class of experts or savants should govern society because they know best. He argues that science, being necessarily abstract, cannot govern the concrete, living reality of real men and women without becoming just another form of tyranny.
- Related: Positive Science, Anarchism vs. Marxism
J
- Jesus as "Preacher of the Poor"
- Bakunin's sympathetic historical account of Jesus as a genuine consoler of the wretched and oppressed, executed by the authorities of his day — a portrait he uses to distinguish the original, human figure from the institutional Christianity later built in his name.
- Related: The Revolt Against God
M
- Materialism vs. Idealism
- Bakunin's opening move: "the idealists are wrong and the materialists right." Facts precede ideas, he argues, and the whole history of humanity — intellectual, moral, political, and social — is ultimately a reflection of its economic and material conditions, not the unfolding of some prior divine idea.
- Related: Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Mikhail Bakunin
- The Russian revolutionary anarchist and author of this unfinished pamphlet, who argues that belief in God and obedience to the State rest on the same psychological logic of submission, and that both must be rejected for humanity to achieve real liberty.
- Related: Materialism vs. Idealism, Theology and the State
N
- Napoleon III and Imperial France
- Bakunin's contemporary example of idealism's political alliance with power: the Second French Empire's court, ministers, and intellectual defenders, whom he names and derides as the era's most obstinate champions of the idealist philosophy he is refuting.
- Related: Materialism vs. Idealism
P
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- The French anarchist theorist Bakunin cites approvingly at the pamphlet's opening for the image of the ideal as "but a flower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence" — an early statement of the materialist premise Bakunin builds his whole argument upon.
- Related: Materialism vs. Idealism
- Positive Science
- Bakunin's term for genuine, disinterested scientific inquiry, which he credits with real advantages over theology and metaphysics but ultimately criticizes for dealing only in abstractions and thus being unfit, in his view, to directly govern the concrete lives of individuals.
- Related: Government by Science
T
- The Divine Phantom
- Bakunin's recurring phrase for the idea of God as an inherited, illusory projection that has historically blinded idealist philosophers, leading them to reason from the abstract and supernatural downward to the human and material, rather than the reverse.
- Related: Materialism vs. Idealism, The Revolt Against God
- The Doctrinaires
- Bakunin's term for inspired religionists and ideologues whose devotion to abstract ideals — divine or political — leads them, he argues, to disregard the liberty, dignity, and suffering of actual living people in favor of loyalty to the idea itself.
- Related: The Divine Phantom, Doctrinaire Deism
- The Revolt Against God
- Bakunin's reading of the Genesis creation story as an emancipation myth: Satan is "the eternal rebel, the first freethinker," and Adam and Eve's fall is really humanity's first act of self-liberation through forbidden knowledge and disobedience to divine authority.
- Related: Mikhail Bakunin, Theology and the State
- The Savants
- Bakunin's term, borrowed from French, for the class of learned experts and scientists whose claim to rule society by virtue of superior knowledge he attacks throughout the pamphlet's second half as merely a new priesthood in secular disguise.
- Related: Government by Science, Positive Science
- Theology and the State
- The pamphlet's structural argument: religious authority and political authority run on the same logic of submission — "divine authority" underwrites all "temporal authorities." Undermining the idea of God, for Bakunin, is therefore inseparable from undermining the legitimacy of the State.
- Related: Mikhail Bakunin, The Revolt Against God
V
- Voltaire
- The Enlightenment philosopher whose famous aphorism that God would need to be invented if he did not exist Bakunin explicitly inverts, arguing instead that the very idea of God, if it were true, would demand active abolition rather than passive invention.
- Related: If God Really Existed