BAKUNIN AND THE ITALIANS.  By T. R. Ravindranathan.  Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's 
University Press, 1988.  x, 332 pp.  *C?$35.95, cloth; $...., paper.*

Italy figured prominently in Bakunin's life after his escape from Siberia in 1861.  He lived 
in Florence and Naples for four years in the mid-1860s and maintained relations with Italy 
until his death in 1876.  This monograph is the first in any language to focus exclusively on 
Bakunin's activity in Italy for this entire period.  On this subject it supersedes Rosselli's 
<EM>Mazzini e Bakunin</EM> and Romano's <EM>Storia del movimento socialista in Italia</EM>, 
showing 
the latter 
wrong on a good number of important points.

The book is chronological.  Early chapters deal with Bakunin's evolution through the early 
1860s and his life in Florence and Naples.  The author then discusses Bakunin's Naples period 
in greater detail and demonstrates his crucial role in launching the First International in 
Italy.  Ravindranathan examines the Paris Commune's influence in Italy, recounts the rise of 
"Bakuninism" there, traces the Italian attitude toward the split in the International, 
describes the "insurrectionary fever" of 1873-74, and analyzes the decline of Bakunin's 
influence in Italy after his death.  This study validates Miklós Molnár's conclusion (in Le 
déclin de la Premičre internationale) that the International's disintegration was due to its 
very success.  The variety of social conditions in all the countries where the organization 
had taken root made it impossible to come up with any coherent and universally applicable 
general program.

Bakunin arrived in Naples at "a very critical point in the political evolution of the local 
Left republicans," who were disenchanted with Garibaldi and Mazzini but could not replace 
them.  Bakunin, by contrast, "articulated with great clarity the distinction between social 
and political revolution" (p. 232).  The author proves Bakunin's influence on the first 
fifteen years of Italian socialism ("largely the history of the Bakuninist movement," p. 237) 
by a skillful integration of intellectual and social history.  The key link is his sensitive 
use of newspapers and periodicals from these years.  (It would be instructive to compare his 
method with E.L. Rudnitskaia's in her recent and related Russkaia revoliutsionnaia mysl/: 
Demokraticheskaia pechat/, 1864-1873.)  Despite long paraphrases of rare primary sources, and 
long quotations from them, this book is very readable.  One hopes that the author's work in 
collecting these sources will facilitate the Archives Bakounine project.

The author appears unaware of Miklós Kún's work on Bakunin's contacts with Freemasonry in the 
1860s.  Ravindranathan could have helped clarify whether or not these contacts explain 
Bakunin's ideas on revolutionary organizations, a thesis Kún argues but does not prove.  The 
author invites a real quibble only when he describes Bakunin as a "libertarian" socialist 
(e.g., pp. 158, 232).  This error, which is not central to the argument, may result from 
seeing Bakunin as more connected with the Russian terrorists who emerged from the failure of 
populism, than with such figures as Proudhon and Lelewel who strongly influenced him in the 
1840s.  Bakunin's doctrine was one of revolutionary federalist collectivism.  However, the 
author is correct to conclude that Bakunin's reliance on spontaneity made it difficult to 
transmit his ideas to future generations.

Treating Bakunin as neither saint nor fool, holy or otherwise, Ravindranathan humanizes him.  
The rarity of precedent for this in the historiography makes the feat all the more remarkable 
and welcome.