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'When you don't know where you're going it's important to remember where you came from. ' African Proverb
PROLOGUE
In the opening pages of Bakunin: the Philosophy of Freedom I offered a quote from the Ghanaian poet Ayi Kwei Armah: 'The present is where we get lost - if we forget our past and have no vision of the future'. This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Michael Bakunin and he is certainly a figure from our past that we should not forget. In this essay, I want to pay tribute to Bakunin by exploring his understanding of the human subject.
What initially prompted me to defend Bakunin's legacy was the welter of abusive and dismissive critiques published by liberal and Marxist scholars: Isaiah Berlin and Aileen Kelly; Hal Draper, George Lichtheim and Pat Stack. These critics said very little about Bakunin, but a lot about the political bias, naivety and the intellectual shallowness of liberal and Marxist scholarship (Morris 1993: 136-50, McLaughlin 2002: 2-12, Leier 2006: 177-208). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two very different currents have emerged. On the one hand, Bakunin's legacy has been acknowledged and re-affirmed (Cutler 1992, McLaughlin 2002, Leier 2006). On the other hand, Bakunin has been subjected to yet another barrage of dismissive critiques, this time by postanarchists. Like Bakunin's earlier critics, postanarchists imply that Bakunin was a philosophical waif and they dismiss his humanism and naturalism as hopelessly out of date (Rousselle 2012: 120). One of the most misleading and oft-repeated criticisms that postanarchists have levelled at Bakunin is that he held a 'humanist' or 'essentialist' conception of the human subject. In this essay I shall challenge this one-sided misreading of Bakunin's work and discuss Bakunin's complex triadic ontology of the human subject with reference to three key concepts - nature, society and liberty.
EVOLUTIONARY NATURALISM AND THE HUMAN SUBJECT
Postanarchists express their critique of Bakunin's 'essentialist' or 'humanist' concep- tion of the human subject in two contrasting forms. The first is that Bakunin posits the human person as having a fixed, immutable, benign metaphysical 'essence' (May 1994: 63, Newman 2004, Patton 2000: 8, Koch 2011 and critiques, Morris 2004:187, Antliff 2011:165, Franks 2011: 173). The second is to dismiss Bakunin...