Love & Passion Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin doesn’t merely reject God; he treats God as a rival sovereign whose very existence would poison the conditions for human dignity. The opening pledge, “a jealous lover of human liberty,” is doing double work: it casts freedom as an erotic, possessive commitment, and it frames any competing authority as an intimate betrayal. That word “absolute” is the tell. For Bakunin, liberty isn’t one value among many; it’s the precondition that makes morality, creativity, and mutual respect possible at all. Anything that claims a higher court of appeal turns people into minors.

The Voltaire reversal is a surgical cultural flex. Voltaire’s line (“if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”) treats God as social technology: a myth that keeps order. Bakunin answers with a revolutionary’s counter-diagnosis: the invention has become the cage. Even a real God would function politically as the ultimate alibi for earthly hierarchies. Priests, monarchs, and bosses don’t need to prove they deserve obedience if they can outsource legitimacy to the heavens. “Abolish him” is deliberately scandalous because it collapses theology into governance. The target isn’t metaphysical mystery; it’s command and submission.

Context sharpens the bite. Writing in the 19th century, Bakunin watched church authority fuse with monarchy and emerging state bureaucracies, all insisting that suffering is meaningful, inequality is ordained, dissent is sinful. His provocation is not adolescent atheism; it’s an attempt to burn the last refuge of unaccountable power. If liberty is truly human, even God can’t be exempt from popular sovereignty.