God and the State
The cover of the first print in 1882.
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| Author | Mikhail Bakunin |
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| Original title | Dieu et l'état |
| Translator | Carlo Cafiero and Élisée Reclus |
| Country | France |
| Language | English, translated from French |
| Genre | Politics |
| Publisher | Dover |
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Publication date
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1882 |
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Published in English
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1883 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 89 p. (Dover Paperback Edition) |
| ISBN | (Dover Paperback Edition) |
| OCLC | 192839 |
| 335/.83 19 | |
| LC Class | HX833 .B313 1970 |
| Preceded by | Founding of the First International |
| Followed by | The Immorality of the State |
God and the State (called by its author The Historical Sophisms of the Doctrinaire School of Communism) is an unfinished manuscript by the Russian anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, published posthumously in 1882. The work criticises Christianity and the then-burgeoning technocracy movement from a materialist, anarchist and individualist perspective. Early editions contained rewrites by Carlo Cafiero and Élisée Reclus in order to make the work more poetic in the translated French and due to misreadings, but later translations have attempted to remain more faithful to the original text. It has gone on to become Bakunin's most widely read and praised work.
God and the State was written between February and March 1871. It was originally written as Part II of a greater work that was going to be called The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution. Part I was to deal with the background of the Franco-Prussian War and a general history of European resistance to imperialism. God and the State, like most of Bakunin's work, is unfinished and disjointed. When Bakunin was criticized on this he said, "My life is a fragment." God and the State is indeed a fragment; the book has paragraphs that drop out and pick up in mid-sentence, footnotes that are four or five paragraphs long, and the book itself stops abruptly in mid-sentence.
God and the State was discovered by Carlo Cafiero and Élisée Reclus, two prominent anarchists at the time, and close friends of Bakunin around the time of his death. The two looked tirelessly for the missing parts of the book, but had no success. They translated the book into French and distributed it as a pamphlet in Geneva in 1882. Cafiero and Reclus titled the book Dieu et l'état (God and the State) although Bakunin originally titled the book The Historical Sophisms of the Doctrinaire School of Communism. The book's original title was not discovered in Bakunin's diary until after Cafiero and Reclus's deaths.
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