SOURCE: "Requiem," in Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse, Praeger, 1981, pp. 418-35.

In the following excerpt, Mendel conducts a psychoanalytic study of Bakunin, looking primarily at his conflicted relationship with authority. Ultimately, Mendel finds the authoritarian streak in Bakunin's personality definitive, dismissing his Utopian aspirations as "corrupted by narcissistic and oedipal disorders. "

Of all the voices that sound through Bakunin's words and deeds, it is that of the frightened youth that is the most genuine. Nothing rings more true than his confession of how difficult it was for him to overcome timidity and make those brilliant speeches that won him such acclaim or his talk of turning inwards, closing himself off in his "sturdy mansion with gates and locks," his "forbidden temple" with its "monastic fence" and "immense store of food, wine, and tobacco," his "Gothic castle, on top of a high, steep, inaccessible mountain." For all its bulk...