The life and thought of Bakunin has contemporary relevance, particularly
for his definitions of freedom. This book confirms Bakunin as an
important and influential political theorist whose anarchism was
dominated by a desire to achieve a unity of theory and practice.
Everything about him is colossal...he is full of a primitive exuberance
and strength. Richard Wagner He was not a conventional intellectual if
anything, he was anti-intellectual and so never produced a systematic
corpus of his ideas in the manner of Marx or Herbert Spencer. But his
philosophy is by no means incoherent, and he fully deserves to be
recognized as an important and influential political theorist. That his
anarchism was dominated by a desire to achieve a unity of theory and
practice, of fact and value, of thought and action, within the reality
of a given historical social order and that he opposed all the dualism
which Western culture had bequeathed from mechanistic philosophy and
bourgeois political theory particularly the opposition between
individual and society, philosophy and empirical knowledge, nature and
humans.