This book presents a full-length, scholarly study of the life of the nineteenth-century anarchist Michael Bakunin. It gives full and fine treatment of Bakunin's life, his relations with other revolutionary figures such as Alexander Herzen, Pierre Proudhon, Sergei Nechaev, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels; of his involvement in various revolutionary organizations and uprisings (not to mention the hard prison time he served as reward for these efforts); and of his elaboration of anarchism as the anti-authoritarian wing of socialism, opposing capitalism and religion as well as the state, and favoring their replacement with voluntary, collective self-organization.
While Leier includes endnotes and a full scholarly apparatus, he tells the story in a colloquial style and often jocular tone, so that he refers to Bakunin and Marx engaging in a "flame war", for instance. Some readers might dislike this, but to my taste Leier carries it off very well, and for me it only adds to the book's readability.
I cannot refrain from quoting the following, concerning Bakunin's stay with the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
"The poet, grief-struck by the tragic death of his wife just four months earlier, nonetheless pronounced Bakunin 'an interesting man . . . of education and ability . . . with a most ardent, seething temperament.' Longfellow's youngest daughter, Annie, the 'Laughing Allegra' of his poem 'The Children's Hour,' recorded a rather different impression. As the six-year-old came down for dinner, she saw at her usual place at the table 'this big creature with a big head, wild bushy hair, big eyes, big mouth, a big voice and still bigger laugh." She recognized the creature instantly from her close appreciation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. It could only be, she realized, an 'ogre. . . . I had no doubts. Some things you don't have to be told, you just know. No entreaties or persuasion could induce me to cross the threshold of that door. I stood petrified and while I resented his having my place at dinner, what was dinner to me as long as he didn't make his dinner off me? So I vanished dinnerless.' No doubt the encounter scarred both for life. But Bakunin and Annie pressed on, and as far as can be determined, only Bakunin was driven to anarchism as a result of the trauma." (ellipses in Leier)
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