R 
BAKUNIN THE APOSTLE OF NIHILISM. 241 
bourgeoisie. The return to the régime of a bygone age would, 
on the contrary, perpetuate the divisions of the bourgeoisie and 
their intestine struggles, thus reopening to our profit the era of 
revolutions.” * Nothing could be more true. Socialism, when 
isolated, is not to be dreaded ; but in the event of a political 
revolution or a great reverse in a foreign war, the anarchists will 
be ready once more to profit by the collapse of power. 
If the sovereigns of Europe wish to disarm Socialism, they 
"'ill not succeed in doing so by exceptional laws, as in Germany, 
nor by casemates and Siberia, as in Russia. Let them put an 
pnd to this detestable antagonism of State against State, which 
is the curse of our times ; let them reduce their armies and 
diminish their taxes, and then they may fearlessly give complete 
liberty to a happier people. The vision of Utopia will not dis- 
iippear, for it is older than Plato, and Society will continue to 
be transformed as has been the case since prehistoric times ; 
but the Utopia will no longer be a dream of universal destruc- 
bon, and the transformations will take place peacefully. 
If, now, we endeavour to reach the sources of Nihilistic 
Socialism, we shall meet, on the one hand, the levelling philo 
sophers of the last century—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Morelli, 
^ably, Rrissot, Helvetius j and the Socialists of the present 
century—Owen, St. Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Louis Blanc; 
on the other hand, the German philosophers, Hegel, 
Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer. Marx and Lassalle, Herzen 
^ud Bakunin, were at the outset enthusiastic Hegelians. In a 
'"cry strange book, which dates from 1845, Der Einzige und sein 
^Jsentlmm (“The Individual and his Property”), written by Max 
^tirner, one may see Hegelianism ending in the deification of 
^-goisni, and absolutely denying everything else. Stirner takes 
^or his epigraph the following verse of one of Goethe’s songs : 
babe meine Sache auf nichts gestellt (“I rest my hopes 
nothing ”). His doctrine is summed up in the following 
lourds of the preface : “ My affair is neither the divine nor the 
human, neither the true, nor the good, nor liberty, etc., but my 
; myself and my interest, nothing more.” In the case of 
I État à Versailles et dans P Association des Travailleurs, by Brousse, 
noon, 1873, without the name of the publisher.