Wit & Attitude Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin’s “equality” arrives with a knife in it. He opens by borrowing the cool authority of “the naturalistic point of view” - the 19th-century habit of treating society like biology, as if you can deduce politics from the body. Then he punctures the sanctimony: yes, all men are equal... except the ones who obviously aren’t. It’s a provocation aimed at two targets at once: bourgeois liberals who turn equality into a pious slogan, and would-be revolutionaries tempted to replace old hierarchies with new priesthoods.

The subtext is less about insulting “idiots” than about warning what revolutions do with difference. If you admit exceptions, the state will always claim to be run by them. Governments, in Bakunin’s view, are magnets for self-declared “geniuses” - technocrats, moralizers, party intellectuals - who insist their superior insight entitles them to command. That’s why the line functions as a trap: once you accept genius as a political category, you’ve handed power its favorite alibi.

The “idiots” land differently: not as a biological caste, but as a reminder that misery, ignorance, and dependency are manufactured conditions. A society that keeps people uneducated can then treat them as naturally unfit for freedom. Bakunin’s context is the bruising mid-century argument over who should lead the masses: parliamentarians, Marxist party cadres, or the people themselves. His cynicism is strategic. Equality, he implies, isn’t a fact you discover in nature; it’s a discipline you enforce against every convenient exception.