Daily Inspiration Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Freedom, for Bakunin, isn’t the absence of limits; it’s the refusal of someone else’s limits. He pulls off a typically anarchist inversion: the only laws worth “obeying” are the ones that aren’t really laws at all, but facts of the world you come to accept through your own reason and experience. Gravity doesn’t need a police force. Hunger doesn’t demand a cathedral. Nature constrains you without claiming moral authority over you, and that distinction is the whole point.

The sentence is built like a battering ram. “Solely in this” slams the door on softer liberal ideas of liberty-as-rights granted by constitutions. Then comes the key rhetorical move: obedience becomes compatible with freedom, but only after Bakunin strips obedience of humiliation. You’re not submitting; you’re recognizing. Agency lives in the act of understanding, not in the fantasy of total independence.

The subtext is an attack on every institution that dresses coercion up as destiny. By naming “human or divine, collective or individual,” he targets the full spectrum: monarchs and priests, but also majorities and revolutionary committees. This is Bakunin arguing with both the church and the state, and also pre-emptively arguing with authoritarian socialists who would replace the czar with “the people” as an abstract idol.

Context matters: mid-19th-century Europe is a laboratory of uprisings, crackdowns, and ideological factions. Bakunin is trying to rescue emancipation from becoming another form of rule. His liberty is not permission; it’s self-government measured against reality, not decrees.