Mikhail Bakunin was the foremost exponent of revolutionary anarchism in the nineteenth century. He was politically active from the 1840s to the 1870s, a turbulent period in European history in which efforts were made to extend the democratization begun by the French Revolution, industrial workers emerged as a significant social force, and movements arose for national unification or independence. Bakunin participated in all these developments. His most important writings elaborated the social and political principles of anarchism, and his organizational and propagandistic efforts laid the foundations of an international anarchist movement. His anarchist views were the product of a long intellectual and political evolution, however, and appeared in fully developed form only in the last decade of his life.

Bakunin was born Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, the son of a Russian noble landowner, on 18 May 1814 at Priamukhino, the family estate in Tver province. His father, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Bakunin, had...