Education Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin manages a neat rhetorical judo move here: he performs deference while sharpening the knife. The opening posture is almost courtly - he will listen "freely" and with "all the respect" due to intelligence, character, knowledge. In a political culture where authority justifies itself as expertise, that concession matters. It signals he isn't anti-thought or anti-competence; he's anti-command. He grants people their merits as people, not as rulers.

Then comes the hinge: "reserving always my incontestable right". The word "incontestable" is the tell. Bakunin isn't asking permission to dissent; he's treating dissent as a natural right that cannot be signed away, even in the presence of brilliance. The subtext is a warning to every would-be vanguard: if your project requires silencing criticism, your project is already authoritarian, regardless of its rhetoric or intentions.

The line also stages Bakunin's broader clash with 19th-century revolutionary politics, especially the idea that liberation must be administered by a scientifically enlightened minority (think Marxist centralism, or any technocratic socialism). He anticipates a modern problem: expertise can become a new priesthood. By pairing respect with "criticism and censure", he sketches an ethic of anti-idolatry. Listen hard, take knowledge seriously, then refuse the slide from "they know more" to "they get to decide". In Bakunin's world, the revolution isn't just against the old state; it's against the habit of surrendering your judgment to anyone who claims to embody History.