Secrecy’s use: Using Bakunin to theorize authority and free action

Abstract

This article pursues the unsettling logic that secrecy may be a tool for enlightenment, empowerment and free political action. It explores nineteenth-century anarchist Bakunin’s ideas about enlightenment, knowledge, authority and political action, and in the process offers a way to understand his seemingly contradictory positions on secret societies and revolutionary organizations. For Bakunin, humans could only act freely if exercising their own judgment; authorities such as revolutionary parties could hinder people from doing so. Therefore, true revolution could only be coordinated by those who kept their organizational affiliation secret. Explaining Bakunin’s ideas about freedom, education, authority and propaganda provokes a number of conclusions that articulate with contemporary political theorizing about transparency and its converse, secrecy or anonymity, and the relationship of each to political life. As troubling as it is to consider, secrecy may have a hand in producing free political action, and it may even be sometimes necessary.