Daily Inspiration Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin opens with a trapdoor: “Do I reject all authority?” sounds like the caricature of anarchism his critics loved to attack. The punchline lands in the most stubbornly ordinary place imaginable - boots. It’s not just wit; it’s a surgical reframing. He’s separating coercive authority (the state, the church, the boss with police power behind him) from earned authority (the craftsperson who knows what they’re doing). The joke works because it drags ideology down to the level of sore feet: if your politics can’t handle footwear, it can’t handle life.

The subtext is an argument about consent and competence. Bakunin isn’t denying expertise; he’s denying the right of expertise to harden into command. You “defer” to the boot-maker the way you defer to gravity: voluntarily, pragmatically, with the option to walk away and try another shop. That word “defer” matters. It implies a temporary, situational hierarchy, not a permanent moral ranking of people.

Context sharpens the blade. Writing in the 19th-century ferment of revolutions and rising industrial capitalism, Bakunin was battling both reactionary monarchies and the emerging socialist temptation to replace one ruling class with another, “scientific” one. The boot-maker stands in for a society organized around federated skills and mutual reliance rather than top-down administration. By choosing boots, he also signals class allegiance: knowledge lives in hands as much as in books. It’s anarchism as anti-snobbery, and as a warning: the moment authority stops being useful and starts being unquestionable, it stops being expertise and starts being domination.