Bakunin: The Creative Passion

Bakunin not only reassesses this fascinating and important character but also provides the biography of the forgotten ideology of anarchism itself. --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

About the Author :
MARK LEIER teaches at Simon Fraser University, where he is the director of the Center for Labour Studies. He is the author or co-author of four books on labor history.""He lives in North Vancouver, Canada.

Review :
Leier (director, Center of Labour Studies/ Simon Frasier Univ.) traces the experiences, politics and ideas that influenced Mikhail Bakunin, the founder of modern anarchism. This intellectual portrait is overwhelmingly sympathetic. Criticisms from Bakunin's contemporaries and later historians are often debunked before they are fully explained. The argument that Bakunin's ideology was informed by sexual dysfunction is raised, only to be dismissed out of hand. The author describes Bakunin's writings in breathless prose, as if his subject's pamphlets were clearly destined for greatness. Yet the anarchist's vision of a just, stateless communal society is not clearest in soliloquoy; it emerges more sharply in the chapters devoted to his recurring feuds with Karl Marx. Leier laments that anarchists are often misinterpreted and derided, and communism provides a sharp contrast. Bakunin detested communism as the "negation of liberty," and rather than granting even more power to the state, he ca--Kirkus "Kirkus " "The time for Bakunin--the real one, not the caricature--has come again, and Mark Leier has given us just the history that we need. Wonderfully written, scholarly but also packed with fascinating tales and fresh revelations, "Bakunin: The Creative Passion" is passion with purpose." -- Paul Buhle, co-editor, "Encyclopedia of the American Left "and "Wobblies! a Graphic History" "" "Mark Leier mounts a passionate defense of Bakunin and of his creed of anarchism. Even if you do not believe that anarchists, let alone Marxists, have the right answers, Leier's radical tract will force you to face the question posed by the millions of the world's poor who deserve a say in their fate, as they wait for the promised radiant future." - Andrew Mango, author of "ATATURK: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey"