Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/576

550 member of the landowning class, he had no experience of the life of industrial towns; in Europe he paid no attention to the effects of machine methods of production or to the effects of modern trade and commerce upon education and upon the formation of character. Bakunin was a political occultist; as leader of a secret society, he was, in the political sphere, to play the part of the wonder-working Russian pope, hidden behind the altar-piece.

Bakunin had studied German philosophy, and he studied French philosophy as well, but never came to realise that the two philosophies do not mix well. He had a special fondness for Proudhon and the French socialists. Blanqui, rather than Marx, was congenial to him. Catholic education, in Russia and in France, has similar effects on men's minds, forming them both positively and negatively. Bakunin took his ideas from the Germans, but the French were his teachers in practical matters. His anarchism was Russian, but it was Orthodox anarchism, and it is comprehensible only as a revolt against Russian Orthodoxy. This Russian anarchism is closely akin to the French socialism of those days; French socialism was strongly anarchist, and down to our own time anarchism has remained especially characteristic of Catholic nations. German and Marxist socialism, on the other hand, has developed chiefly in Protestant lands. Among Protestants, anarchism as a philosophical system, and anarchism as a mood, do not exist to the same extent as among the Catholic Latin races, the Catholic Germans (in Austria and South Germany), and the Slavs. It is therefore incorrect to speak of anarchism as simply a Russian manifestation, as a peculiar outcome of the Russian national character; and we must distinguish clearly between anarchism and revolutionism. The mental stagnation of the Russian theocracy, the absence of intellectual life and activity, the inertia of absolutism, impelled the cultured aristocracy towards anarchism; Bakuninist anarchism is the anger and the irritability of the aristocrat upon whom inactivity has been imposed by circumstances and by education. Towards the close of his life Bakunin was extremely fond of reading Schopenhauer, the philosopher of bitterness, and the fact is psychologically characteristic of this aspect of Bakuninist anarchism.

Herzen might have been enlightened in this respect by his teacher Hegel. He accurately diagnosed the nature of Bakunin's