Liberated from the past, and its moral constraints, these wandering outlaws of their own dark mind are free to dream up new forms of self-definition; their seemingly uncontrollable energy is manifested as much in intensified individualism as in political avant-gardism. Moving through the mundane places and practices of everyday life – motels, bars, gyms, internet chat rooms, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Twitter timelines, private car rentals and, in Awlaki’s case, glamorous escort services – global jihadists as well as ‘domestic’ terrorists are unmistakably a product of the modern era: its technologies of communication and advertising, its fears of the loss of will and energy, its stifling of individuality and its paradoxical imperatives to assert a singular, manly and energetic self.
It is safe to say that there will be many more such men and women in the future, made and unmade by globalization, unmoored to any specific cause or motive, but full of dreams of spectacular violence – men and women who will bring to politics, life itself, a sense of imminent apocalypse.
The Last Men
To understand their promptings, and the perils they pose, we have to examine the specific conditions – inequality, the sense of blocked horizons, the absence of mediating institutions, general political hopelessness – in which an experience of meaninglessness converted quickly into anarchist ideology; and we have to return to the man from a backward country who gave political revolt its existential and international dimension.
Mikhail Bakunin has always been less well known than Marx and Mazzini, his compatriots in theorizing, conspiracy and intrigue during some long decades of failed revolutions and uprisings in Europe. But it was the Russian who with his notion of unfettered individual freedom anticipated an era beyond street barricades, armed insurrections, the idolatry of the nation state and hedonistic self-fulfilment.
The idea of free self-development, exalted by the Romantics, had gone steadily mainstream in the ideologies of the nineteenth century, reformulated by figures as various as Marx and Stirner. Even John Stuart Mill, the theorizer of a rich empire of commerce and inheritor of the utilitarian tradition, had placed personal growth, and the necessity of diverse experiences, at the centre of his liberal philosophy. Mill warned against the spiritual entropy induced by democratic societies, and their suppression of rich and vigorous individuality.
Men everywhere in the nineteenth century longed, out of a deep fear of emasculation, for a new Napoleon, who would show, as Nietzsche wished, the businessman, the philistine and women their place. Disgust with bourgeois routines of moneymaking, and the search for distinction, also provoked in the late nineteenth century artistic manifestos of art for art’s sake, and a broad notion of culture defined against anarchy.
Baudelaire promoted the cult of the cool, fastidious, narcissistic dandy, who feels at ease only among criminals and outcasts. Flaubert, Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde elevated into the realms of philosophy an unquenchable thirst for new forms of feeling. The eclectic experience and individual singularity sought in this manner included wilful self-degradation abroad; and it was spectacularly achieved in literature by Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1898), the representative of progressive, civilizing Europe, who dies whispering ‘The horror! The horror!’, aghast at the savagery caused by his own insatiable need for novel experiences.
Bakunin went much further than the anti-conformist liberal-aristocrats, the Marxist revolutionaries, the self-martyring aesthetes, the abyss-loving coxcombs, the seekers of dereliction, and other existential heroes of his time. He not only saw through commercial society and its ideology of bourgeois liberalism; he looked beyond the antidotes of nationalism, imperialism, universal suffrage and even revolutionary socialism.
‘Ultimately,’ he lamented, ‘we come always to the same sad conclusion, the rule of the great masses of the people by a privileged minority.’ Refusing the palliative of working-class revolution or rule by a technocracy, he insisted that human dignity in nations and peoples manifests itself only in ‘the instinct of freedom, in the hatred of oppression, and by the force of revolting against everything that has the character of exploitation and domination in the world’.
An itinerant member of a rootless Russian intelligentsia, and the pioneer of secret societies and cells, Bakunin formulated a transnational, moveable mode of politics as an interconnected world came into being in the late nineteenth century. While he never himself resorted to acts of terror, he did outline its temptations for unmoored men exposed to misery and suffering, and convinced that there was not enough scope for collective action to change history.
Identifying freedom with a joyful passion of destruction, Bakunin took to a new extreme the Romantic-liberal notion of individual autonomy: beyond the hatred of the businessman, the philistine and women. He revealed that such lethal individualism is not a break from modernity. Rather, it is as much its integral part as liberal individualism and such collectivist projects as nationalism and fascism. All of these tendencies arise at particular moments from within a still ongoing experiment, which, starting in eighteenth-century Europe, is now worldwide in scope.
*
We saw Bakunin with Wagner, fleeing the failed revolution in Dresden in 1849. Wagner went on to become the icon of German nationalism in Bismarck’s Second Reich. He made it his task to rework heroic myths from Germany’s ostensible medieval Christian and primeval pagan past in order to restore spiritual wholeness to a society evidently corrupted by materialism.
Bakunin, arrested and exiled to Siberia for over a decade, spent the rest of his life organizing and indoctrinating groups of revolutionaries from Europe and Russia, who then took his ideas even further afield, to the United States and India. It was a journey that went on to define a whole new pattern of politics worldwide – one whose complexity and originality has become more apparent in our own close-knit societies.
In retrospect, it seems clear that a figure like Bakunin could only flourish in the new intellectual and spiritual climate into which the failure of the 1848 revolutions had ushered Europe. The ‘greatest event of recent times’, as Nietzsche put it, had already occurred: the ‘death of God’. With God dead or dying, man was free to create his own values in a valueless universe. Hegel claimed to see history as a rational dialectical process – the ‘algebra of revolution’ as Herzen called it – that ends with the reconciliation of individual and collective freedom in the context of the rational Prussian state (of which Hegel was conveniently an employee). Marx projected the rational end of history into the future, turning it into a political goal. His Communist Manifesto, written on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, proclaimed ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’