nevertheless continued to think in terms of nations. His longest work, "L'Empire Knouto-Germanique et la Révolution Sociale," is mainly concerned with the situation in France during the later stages of the Franco-Prussian War, and with the means of resisting German Imperialism. Most of his writing was done in a hurry in the interval between two insurrections. There is something of Anarchism in his lack of literary order. His best known work is a fragment entitled by its editors "God and the State."[1] In this work he represents belief in God and belief in the State as the two great obstacles to human liberty. A typical passage will serve to illustrate its style.
The State is not society, it is only an historical form of it, as brutal as it is abstract. It was born historically in all countries of the marriage of violence, rapine, pillage, in a word war and conquest, with the gods successively created by the theological fantasy of nations. It has been from its origin, and it remains still at present, the divine sanction of brutal force and triumphant inequality.
The State is authority; it is force; it is the ostentation and infatuation of force: it does not insinuate itself; it does not seek to convert. … Even when it commands what is good, it hinders and spoils it, just because it commands it, and because every command provokes and excites the legitimate revolts
- ↑ This title is not Bakunin's, but was invented by Cafiero and Elisée Reclus, who edited it, not knowing that it was a fragment of what was intended to be the second version of "L'Empire Knouto-Germanique " (see ib. ii. p. 283).
in part, by many others besides him; but in any case to him belongs the honour of having solidly established it and of having enunciated it as the basis of his whole economic system." (1870; ib. ii. p. xiii.)
