Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/477

Rh Starting from his materialistic determinism, Bakunin denied freedom of the will that he might be enabled to repudiate law, and above all criminal law. The individual, he said, was the "involuntary" product of the natural environment and the social milieu, by which criminals and kings are alike produced. Neither the criminal nor the king is responsible or blameworthy, since both are the natural products of one and the same society. To enable itself to punish criminals, society insists that it is necessary to hold the individual responsible for his actions, but this theory of responsibility derives from theology, which is compounded of absurdity and hypocrisy. The individual is neither punishable nor responsible.

Bakunin failed to note the objection that by this theory the judge and the executioner, just as much as the criminal, are "natural" products of society, so that it is plain that he had forgotten Bělinskii. Nor did he trouble himself to explain why the kings, as the topmost points, were to be overthrown, if they were no more than the blameless victims of the society to which they belonged.

Bakunin deduced all immorality (had he been consistent he would have said "so-called" immorality!) from political, social, and economic inequality. But this inequality, he said, is dominant only in the period of transition, and will disappear after the universal revolution, after a revolution which is simultaneously social, philosophical, economic, and political. During this period of transition, the sole right of society vis-à-vis the criminal is, in self-protection, to kill the criminal whom it has itself produced; but society has no right to judge or to condemn. In connection with this right to kill, Bakunin is of course thinking of the individual assassinations and the mass killings of the revolution; and the right to kill, to assassinate, is not by him properly conceived as a right but as a "natural fact," tragical but inevitable.

Bakunin, indeed, tells us in express terms that this "natural" fact is not ethical at all, but simply natural. The idea of justice is valid only during the period of transition; it is a negative idea, in whose terms the social problem and social ideal may indeed be formulated, but the positive solution of that problem, the positive attainment of that ideal, can be effected solely by fraternity, by the actual realisation of equality. Bakunin further concedes that "natural" murders will even be useless if the oppressors thus removed are merely to be replaced by