Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, the anarchist writer and revolutionary leader, was born on the estate of Premukhino in the Russian province of Tver'. His family were hereditary noblemen of liberal political inclinations. His father had been in Paris during the French Revolution and had taken his doctorate of philosophy at Padua. His mother was a member of the Murav'av family; three of her cousins were involved in the earliest Russian revolution, the December rising of constitutionalists in 1825. Bakunin was carefully educated under the supervision of his father, who regarded himself as a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; later he was sent to the Artillery School in St. Petersburg. He received his commission and went on garrison duty in Lithuania. An awakening taste for literature made him discontent with military life, and in 1835 he obtained his discharge from the army and went to Moscow to...