Bakunin is a many-sided phenomenon and could be studied in many aspects and from many points of view. He is-rightly, on the whole-regarded as the father of anarchism; for William Godwin, to whom the title is sometimes awarded, never left the plane of abstract theory, and the anarchism of Proudhon took on the special concrete mould of syndicalism and exercised a lasting influence on French politics and French thought mainly in that guise. Bakunin was the apostle of liberty in its absolute form-a liberty which, as M. Hepner remarks, had nothing in common with Hegel's conception of liberty realizing itself in the State. Yet Bakunin, on the strength of his emphasis on propaganda by deed and of his willingness to appeal to the "evil passions", has often been convicted of an affinity with the movements which ultimately issued in Fascism. He was always ready to subordinate theory to the spontaneous character of the revolutionary impulse; in this respect he was a revolutionary empiricist and stood at the opposite pole to Marx. When Lenin in 1917 announced that, in spite of the rudimentary progress made by the Russian bourgeois revolution, the socialist revolution was at hand, the Mensheviks-and some of his own followers-branded him as a disciple of Bakunin and not of Marx.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Bakunin is a many-sided phenomenon and could be studied in many aspects and from many points of view. He is-rightly, on the whole-regarded as the father of anarchism; for William Godwin, to whom the title is sometimes awarded, never left the plane of abstract theory, and the anarchism of Proudhon took on the special concrete mould of syndicalism and exercised a lasting influence on French politics and French thought mainly in that guise. Bakunin was the apostle of liberty in its absolute form-a liberty which, as M. Hepner remarks, had nothing in common with Hegel's conception of liberty realizing itself in the State. Yet Bakunin, on the strength of his emphasis on propaganda by deed and of his willingness to appeal to the "evil passions", has often been convicted of an affinity with the movements which ultimately issued in Fascism. He was always ready to subordinate theory to the spontaneous character of the revolutionary impulse; in this respect he was a revolutionary empiricist and stood at the opposite pole to Marx. When Lenin in 1917 announced that, in spite of the rudimentary progress made by the Russian bourgeois revolution, the socialist revolution was at hand, the Mensheviks-and some of his own followers-branded him as a disciple of Bakunin and not of Marx." in the context of "E. H. Carr, "The Pan-Slav Tradition" (1951)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.