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God and the State

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God and the State

Written by: Mikhail Bakunin
Narrated by: Glen Reed
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Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and is considered one of the most influential figures of anarchism. Bakunin’s God and the State, an unfinished manuscript published posthumously in 1882, is a classic and influential atheist text which sets out the anarchist critique of religion as bound up in legitimising the state. The work criticises Christianity and the technocracy movement from a materialist, anarchist, and individualist perspective. God and the State is one of Bakunin's best known works, which has been translated into, inter alia, Czech, German, Georgian, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Greek, Romanian, Turkish, and Yiddish.

Public Domain (P)2019 Woodkeep Audio Atheism Classics Ideologies & Doctrines Politics & Government Russia
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At times, Bakunin sounds a little outdated, especially when talking about his ideas of the general characteristics of certain races. (To be clear, nothing overtly negative. Just things like saying all Germans are very calculating, for example.) I also find him to be a little harsh on some philosophers and thinkers, especially those of the Enlightenment. That's no surprise, of course, and though I wouldn't go so far as to deride them so harshly myself, the point made about their work are valid.

Overall, though, this is a fascinating work of antitheism and anarchism (a term used only once in the book, I believe) with convincing arguments for those positions, which are easy to understand and follow, for the most part.

Bakunin does not concern himself with the question of whether there is a god. Rather, he argues that there should not be one. "If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him." He essentially makes an argument we've all heard before, that religion is just a means to oppress the masses--a necessary tool of the state--but with far more rigour and thoroughness, exploring anthropology, sociology, science, and philosophy, and comparing it all the while to the relationship between the state and the people, or the master and the slave.

A fascinating book with excellent narration

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