MARK LEIER teaches at Simon Fraser University, where he is the director of the Center for Labour Studies. He is the author or co-author of four books on labor history.""He lives in North Vancouver, Canada.
Leier (director, Center of Labour Studies/ Simon Frasier Univ.)
traces the experiences, politics and ideas that influenced Mikhail
Bakunin, the founder of modern anarchism.
This intellectual portrait is overwhelmingly sympathetic.
Criticisms from Bakunin's contemporaries and later historians are
often debunked before they are fully explained. The argument that
Bakunin's ideology was informed by sexual dysfunction is raised,
only to be dismissed out of hand. The author describes Bakunin's
writings in breathless prose, as if his subject's pamphlets were
clearly destined for greatness. Yet the anarchist's vision of a
just, stateless communal society is not clearest in soliloquoy; it
emerges more sharply in the chapters devoted to his recurring feuds
with Karl Marx. Leier laments that anarchists are often
misinterpreted and derided, and communism provides a sharp
contrast. Bakunin detested communism as the "negation of liberty,"
and rather than granting even more power to the state, he
ca--Kirkus "Kirkus "
"The time for Bakunin--the real one, not the caricature--has come
again, and Mark Leier has given us just the history that we need.
Wonderfully written, scholarly but also packed with fascinating
tales and fresh revelations, "Bakunin: The Creative Passion" is
passion with purpose."
-- Paul Buhle, co-editor, "Encyclopedia of the American Left "and
"Wobblies! a Graphic History"
""
"Mark Leier mounts a passionate defense of Bakunin and of his creed
of anarchism. Even if you do not believe that anarchists, let alone
Marxists, have the right answers, Leier's radical tract will force
you to face the question posed by the millions of the world's poor
who deserve a say in their fate, as they wait for the promised
radiant future." - Andrew Mango, author of "ATATURK: The Biography
of the Founder of Modern Turkey"
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