Politics & Power Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin isn’t diagnosing a few bad apples; he’s indicting privilege as a corrupting technology. The sting is in the certainty: “whether… politically or economically” collapses two forms of power that polite society likes to keep separate. Titles and capital, he argues, produce the same moral deformation. It’s a refusal of the comforting idea that you can have “good” rulers if you just pick the right ones. For Bakunin, the position itself rewires the person.

The phrasing “depraved in intellect and heart” does double work. “Intellect” points to the way privilege distorts perception: insulated from consequences, the privileged can afford fantasies about how the world works, then mistake those fantasies for wisdom. “Heart” goes after empathy. Power trains you to see other people as instruments, problems, or abstractions. The line is moral, but it’s also practical: a society run by the sheltered will be run badly, because it’s run by people who can’t accurately read reality.

Context matters. Bakunin is writing in the long 19th-century crisis of legitimacy: collapsing monarchies, rising industrial capitalism, police states dressed up as reform. His revolutionary skepticism targets not just kings and bosses but the reformist promise that the state can be captured and purified. The subtext is a warning to comrades, too: today’s liberator can become tomorrow’s administrator, and administration is where ideals go to die.

It works because it’s ruthless about incentives. Privilege isn’t merely unfair; it’s psychologically adaptive for those who have it, and that adaptation is exactly what makes it dangerous.