SOURCE: An introduction to From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin's Basic Writing, 1869-1871, by Mikhail Bakunin, edited and translated by Robert M. Cutler, Ardis, 1985, pp. 15-29.

In the excerpt that follows, Cutler examines a selection of Bakunin's writings against the backdrop of Marxist doctrine, in order to delineate certain coherent strands in his anarchist philosophy.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, the anarchist, was a political thinker; his reputation, based partly on his appetite for action and partly on unsympathetic historiography, obscures this. Bakunin's social milieu influenced the manner in which he expressed his ideas, because he tried always to tailor them to those to whom he spoke, promoting so far as possible the revolutionary consciousness and socialist instincts of his audience. That is still another reason, without even mentioning Bakunin's unyielding antidoctrinairism, why it has been hard to delineate a Bakuninist "doctrine."

The works [Cutler includes in his anthology] . . . nevertheless...