Bakunin, Mikhail (Alexandrovich) | Brian Morris (essay date 1993)
Brian Morris (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Social Philosophy" and "Theory of Social Revolution," in Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, Black Rose Books, 1993, pp. 85-95, and 136-51.
[In the following chapters from his book, Morris considers Bakunin's writings in-depth in order to recuperate them from the condemnation of previous criticism, which he also reviews in detail.]
Social Philosophy
For Bakunin, human beings, like everything else in nature, are entirely material beings, and the mind, the thinking faculty with the power to receive and reflect on different external and internal sensation, is the property of an animal body. As with all animals, humans, Bakunin writes, have two essential instincts or drives: egoism, the instinct for self-preservation, and the social instinct which is ultimately concerned with the preservation of the species.2 What is called society or the human world has no other creator that the...
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