Bakunin in Naples: An Assessment

Abstract

The biographers of Mikhail Bakunin have paid insufficient attention to his crucial role in the development of early Italian socialism. E. H. Carr, for example, while acknowledging the importance of the Italian interlude in Bakunin's personal evolution, fails to examine the impact of these three and a half years on the thinking of the local radicals with whom Bakunin was in constant contact.' The seminal works of Max Nettlau and Nello Rosselli shed much light on the subject.2 However, since they wrote in the 1920s and were unaware of numerous archival and newspaper sources, many of their conclusions proved to be only tentative. Subsequently, Aldo Romano labeled their conclusions as baseless and built on fantasy.3 However, Romano's account often is distorted; he portrays Bakunin as a person of little consequence and seems compelled to take sides with Marx against him on every issue between the two great antagonists. The ideas he spread in Italy, Romano claims, were devoid of originality and were simply a rehash of those of Carlo Pisacane. Although still fashionable in certain quarters, this interpretation has come under increasing criticism from Italian historians in the past two decades. The purpose of this study is to focus on this debate and reevaluate the influence of Bakunin on the emergence of Italian socialism. Bakunin had avidly followed the last phase of the Risorgimento from his far-off exile in Irkutsk in 1860.4 Although soon after his