"Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness"
About this Quote
Bakunin’s line is a Molotov cocktail disguised as political theory: it refuses the comforting idea that virtue is a national character trait. For him, “powerful states” don’t merely commit crimes now and then; they are structurally compelled to. Empire, policing, borders, extraction, conscription, debt, espionage - the toolkit of “maintenance” is inseparable from coercion. Crime isn’t an aberration. It’s the operating system.
The second clause is the real knife twist. “Little states are virtuous only by weakness” doesn’t flatter the small; it indicts the moral vanity of the powerless. If you can’t invade your neighbors, you get to call your restraint “principle.” Bakunin is puncturing the way morality is often retrofitted onto capability: we confuse inability with ethics and then build patriotic mythologies on top of it.
Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of 1848’s failed revolutions and the consolidation of modern nation-states, Bakunin watched liberal nationalism promise emancipation while delivering new bureaucracies, armies, and prisons. His anarchism treats the state as a machine that reproduces domination regardless of flag or constitution. The sentence also anticipates a bleak realism: international politics rewards predation, so “stability” often means someone else’s subjugation.
The intent isn’t to excuse brutality as inevitable; it’s to make complacency impossible. If both greatness and goodness are suspect, the reader is pushed toward Bakunin’s implied alternative: legitimacy must be built outside state power, in voluntary association, not in the polished alibis of sovereignty.
The second clause is the real knife twist. “Little states are virtuous only by weakness” doesn’t flatter the small; it indicts the moral vanity of the powerless. If you can’t invade your neighbors, you get to call your restraint “principle.” Bakunin is puncturing the way morality is often retrofitted onto capability: we confuse inability with ethics and then build patriotic mythologies on top of it.
Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of 1848’s failed revolutions and the consolidation of modern nation-states, Bakunin watched liberal nationalism promise emancipation while delivering new bureaucracies, armies, and prisons. His anarchism treats the state as a machine that reproduces domination regardless of flag or constitution. The sentence also anticipates a bleak realism: international politics rewards predation, so “stability” often means someone else’s subjugation.
The intent isn’t to excuse brutality as inevitable; it’s to make complacency impossible. If both greatness and goodness are suspect, the reader is pushed toward Bakunin’s implied alternative: legitimacy must be built outside state power, in voluntary association, not in the polished alibis of sovereignty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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