Bakunin Mikhail (1814–76), Russian revolutionary anarchist. He lived in Western Europe in 1840–49 and again in 1861–76 after an intervening period in Western and Russian prisons and Siberian exile. Bakunin is best known for his vigorous if incoherent anarchist-socialist views. On the one hand, he claimed that the masses’ ‘instinct for freedom’ would spark the social revolution; on the other, he claimed that the revolution would be the work of a conspiratorial elite of disciplined professionals. Still, Bakunin made two significant if limited philosophic contributions. (1) In the early 1840s he spoke of the ‘incessant self-immolation of the positive in the pure flame of the negative,’ and came to see that ‘flame’ as a necessary dialectical component of revolutionary action. His sharpest criticism was directed not at conservative attempts to defend the existing order but rather at (Hegelian) attempts to reconcile positive and negative and ‘liberal’ efforts to find a ‘modest and harmless place’ for the negative within the positive. For Bakunin the negative is absolutely justified in its ‘constructive’ elimination of the positive. Writing in German (in 1842) he exploited both senses of the word Lust, namely ‘joy’ and ‘urge,’ declaring that the Lust to destroy is at the same time a creative Lust. (2) From 1861 until the end of his life Bakunin was committed to scientism, materialism, and atheism. But in the late 1860s he formulated a forceful critique of the political and social role of scientific elites and institutions. Individual life is concrete and particular; science is abstract and general and incapable of understanding or valuing living individuals. Instead, it tends to ignore or to exploit them. Bakunin, who had preached an anarchist revolt against church and state, now preached a ‘revolt of life against science, or rather against government by science.’ This was related to his anarchist critique of Marx’s statism and technicism; but it raised the more general question – one of continuing relevance and urgency – of the role of scientific experts in decisions about public policy. See also POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN NIHILIS. G.L.K.