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I’m reading this now because I just finished reading The Age of Revolution, the first installment in a four-part history of the modern work by Eric Hobsbawm and, although I enjoyed it and plan to finish the series, my brain needs a bit of respite from dense historical analysis. I’m hoping this novel will serve as its purpose as a fictional companion piece.

In Bakunin’s polemic “All-Round Education”, he argues for complete equality in education which can only be achieved with absolute political and economic freedom and equality. “The bourgeois socialists,” he insists, “wish to preserve classes… We […] desire the full and definitive abolition of classes, the unification of society, the economic and social equalization of all human beings on earth.”

“In the pettiest struggle, born of the needs of the moment, there must be mirrored the great goal of social liberation, and each struggle must help to smooth the way and strengthen the spirit which transforms the inner longing of its bearers into will and deed.”

“Democracy, with its motto of “equality of all citizens before the law,” and liberalism, with its “right of man over his own person,“ both shipwrecked on the realities of the capitalist economic form. So long as millions of human beings in every country had to sell their labor-power to a small minority of owners… the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud.”

“In our present, poor capitalistic society, the man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them… Still, …he reproaches the idealist communist societies with having the material life of each as their sole aim.

These are the objections which all communist systems have to consider… Will the anarchist Commune be impelled by the same direction? It must…strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind.”