What Bakunin Actually Argues
Mikhail Bakunin wrote God and the State in 1871 during a period when he was bouncing between Swiss and Italian exile communities, largely broke, and already deeply suspected that every authority structure—religious or secular—depended on the same mechanism of submission. The text is short, roughly forty pages in most editions, and it does not read like a carefully constructed academic treatise. It reads like someone who has thought through a problem and is now explaining it to another person over bad coffee. The core argument is straightforward enough: religion and political authority are two expressions of the same impulse. You hand over your autonomy to something bigger, whether that thing is called God, the Church, the Party, or the State. Bakunin's claim is not that these institutions happen to overlap. He argues they are structurally identical. Authority demands obedience. Obedience kills the individual's capacity for self-direction. Therefore any system built on authority is a system built on the suppression of human freedom.
Downloading God And The State Bakunin
The text is in the public domain everywhere I have checked. You can grab it from Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, or Archive.org without running into any licensing questions. The French translation that Bakunin wrote himself is available as well, and some readers find it clearer than the English versions, which were mostly produced by Emma Goldman and others working from Russian manuscripts. If you want the authoritative edition, look for the Duncan Macfadysz translation, though even that one has known gaps. I ran into a specific problem last year when I was trying to compare the Macfadysz edition against the original French. The English version splits the text into sections that do not correspond cleanly to Bakunin's own pagination. I spent about twenty minutes frustrated before I realized the French edition uses paragraph numbering that the English translator simply dropped. The workaround was to open both files side by side and use the French paragraph numbers as anchors. It takes effort the first time but becomes automatic after that. There is a practical reason to do this comparison if you are serious about the text. Bakunin changes his wording between versions in ways that matter. The French uses terms like autorité and subjuguement with a precision that the English translations sometimes flatten. If you are reading this for a paper or a debate, the French gives you leverage the English does not.
How the Argument Actually Unfolds
Bakunin opens by establishing what he means by freedom, and this is where most readers miss the structure of his case. He does not define freedom as the ability to do whatever you want. That would make freedom a license, which is useless as a political principle. Instead he defines it as the absence of externally imposed constraint on the individual's rational capacity. Freedom exists when a person can think and act according to their own judgment, within the constraint of physical reality and the equal freedom of others. From there he moves to religion. His argument against God is not primarily theological. He does not spend time proving that God does not exist. That would be a category error from his perspective. The real target is the structure of belief itself. Belief in God requires submission. Submission trains the mind to accept authority without question. This conditioning carries over directly into political life. A person who kneels before God will kneel before a king, a priest, a general, or a party secretary. The posture is the same. The object changes. Then he turns to the State. Bakunin's analysis of state power anticipates later developments in institutional critique by decades. He argues that the State, regardless of its form—monarchy, democracy, constitutional monarchy—operates through the same logic of hierarchical control. The State claims a monopoly on legitimate force. It demands obedience. It suppresses dissent. It creates institutions that reproduce this dynamic across generations through education, law, and ideology.
Get the Full Details
Here is a detail beginners usually overlook. Bakunin distinguishes between right and authority. Right is what emerges from the collective will of free individuals acting in concert. Authority is imposed from above and demands obedience regardless of consent. Most political theory conflates these two. Bakunin insists they are opposites. This distinction matters because it explains why he rejects revolutionary dictatorship. A dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship. It imposes authority. It reproduces the same structure of submission even if the content changes.
Where the Argument Gets Tense
Bakunin acknowledges the obvious objection to his position. If there is no authority, how does society function? Who organizes production? Who handles coordination? His answer is not comfortable for anyone who wants a neat political blueprint. He argues that human beings are capable of self-organization through voluntary association. No central authority is needed. People cooperate because cooperation serves their interests, not because they are commanded to cooperate. This is the section where the text feels most vulnerable, and I think it is honest to say so. Bakunin does not provide a detailed mechanism for how voluntary association scales from a small commune to a complex industrial society. He gestures toward federations of free workers and communes but offers no engineering for the transition. When I have tried to work out these details in discussion groups, the conversations tend to stall around questions of coordination failure and collective action problems. Bakunin assumes a level of social trust and organizational literacy that may not exist in the conditions he is describing. There is also a tension between his anti-authoritarianism and his revolutionary zeal. He calls for insurrection. He celebrates violent overthrow. But violence is itself an imposition of will, which seems to contradict his commitment to freedom. Bakunin addresses this briefly by distinguishing between defensive violence and oppressive authority. The distinction is real but thin. In practice, revolutionary violence tends to create new authority structures even when the intention is to abolish them. History has demonstrated this repeatedly since 1871.
What This Text Actually Does Well
For all its gaps, God and the State remains one of the most precise analyses of the relationship between religious and political authority ever written. Bakunin identifies a pattern that later thinkers—Freud on religion, Foucault on power, even secular critics like Marx to some extent—would return to. The pattern is simple: authority reproduces itself through the psychology of submission. Once you accept that you are subordinate to something, the specific content of that submission becomes secondary. The habit of obedience is what matters. This insight is still useful today. Look at any modern authoritarian movement and you will see the same mechanism. The ideology changes. The leader changes. The ritual changes. But the structure remains: submission to authority, training through repetition, suppression of independent judgment. Bakunin mapped this in 1871 with resources that were far more limited than what contemporary analysts have available. The text also handles the relationship between individual freedom and social organization more honestly than most anarchist literature. Bakunin does not pretend that individuals are self-sufficient atoms. He acknowledges that human beings are social creatures who depend on community. His point is not that community is bad. It is that community based on authority is destructive to freedom. Voluntary association is possible. Coerced association is not.
Limitations You Should Not Ignore
Bakunin's text has real limitations that serious readers need to account for. The first is its anti-intellectual strain. He distrusts specialized knowledge and technical expertise. This makes sense when the alternative is a bureaucracy of unelected engineers, but it also means he offers no credible answer to problems that require specialized coordination—public health, infrastructure, environmental management. Anarchist theory has been working on these problems since 1871. Some progress has been made. Most of it builds on work Bakunin himself would have resisted. The second limitation is historical. Bakunin wrote before the emergence of mass political parties, modern surveillance technology, and the welfare state. His analysis of authority was shaped by the institutions he knew: the Church, the monarchy, the early industrial state. The forms authority takes today are different. Digital platforms enforce submission through algorithms rather than decrees. Social media creates voluntary obedience through reputation systems. These are mechanisms Bakunin could not have anticipated, and his framework needs adjustment to address them. The third limitation is perhaps the most important. Bakunin's text is primarily destructive. It tears down authority structures. It does not build alternatives with the same rigor it applies to critique. If you are looking for a positive political program, you will be disappointed. Read his earlier works like God and the State alongside Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread for a more complete picture. Even then, the constructive side remains thin.
Who Should Read This and Who Should Skip It
If you are interested in political philosophy, specifically the tradition of anarchist thought, this text is essential. It is short enough to read in a single sitting and dense enough to reward careful attention. Read it alongside Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and you will see the fundamental split between authoritarian and libertarian socialism clearly laid out. If you are looking for a practical guide to organizing a community or running a cooperative, this is not the book. Bakunin does not provide operational advice. His contributions are theoretical and critical. There are better sources for the practical side of autonomous organization. If you are approaching the text from a religious perspective, expect confrontation. Bakunin does not argue in good faith with theological positions. He treats religion as a social phenomenon and analyzes it accordingly. This is fair as social analysis but unfair as theological engagement. Readers who want that engagement should look elsewhere.
The text remains relevant because the dynamics it describes have not gone away. Authority still demands submission. Submission still suppresses independent judgment. The objects of submission change—God, King, Party, Corporation, Algorithm—but the structure persists. That is why God and the State continues to generate discussion nearly fifteen decades after it was written.
