Bakunin and his Revolutionary Organizations in the Shade

Abstract

This essay addresses one of the most complex and polemic topics in the studies on Bakunin. Using the primary sources available in the Oeuvres Completes collected by the International Institute of Social History it analyses all the secret societies promoted by Bakunin in his long life as a revolutionary. It concludes that Bakunin himself often exaggerated its real importance, but nevertheless they were joined by some of the most prominent anarchist of those times. They also pose the question of how such instruments for a “dictatorship in the shadows” could be reconciled with Bakunin’s libertarianism.