Power Corrupts the Best

by Michael Bakunin (1867)

The State is nothing else but this domination and exploitation regularised
and systemised.  We shall attempt to demonstrate ut by examining the
consequence of the government of the masses of the people by a minority,
at first as intelligent and as devoted as you like, in an ideal State,
founded on a free contract.

Suppose the government to be confined only to the best citizens.  At
first these citizens are privileged not by right, but by fact.  They
have been elected by the people because they are the most intelligent,
clever, wise, and courageous and devoted.  Taken from the mass of the
citizens, who are regarded as all equal, they do not yet form a class
apart, but a group of men privileged only by nature and for that reason
singled ouit for election by the people.  Their number is necessarily
very limited, for in all times and countries the number of men endowed
with qualities so remarkable that they automatically command the 
unanimous respect of a nation is, as experience teaches us, very small.
Therefore, under pain of making a bad choice, the people will always
be forced to choose its rulers from amongst them.

Here, then, is society divided into two categories, if not yet to say
two classes, of which one, composed of the immense majority of the
citizens, submits freely to the government of its elected leaders, the
other, formed of a small number of privileged natures, recognised and
accepted as such by the people, and charged by them to govern them.
Dependent on popular election, they are at first distinguished from the
mass of the citizens only by the very qualities which recommended them
to their choice and are naturally, the most devoted and useful of all.
They do not yet assume to themselves any privilege, any particular right,
except that of exercising, insofar as the people wish it, the special
functions with which they have been charged.  For the rest, by their
manner of life, by the conditions and means of their existence, they do
not separate themselves in any way from all the others, so that a perfect
equality continues to reign among all.  Can this equality be long maintained?
We claim that it cannot and nothing is easier to prive it.

Nothing is more dangerous for man's private morality than the habit of
command.  The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous,
pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade.  Two sentiments
inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are:
contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one's own merits.

"The masses" a man says to himself, " recognising their incapacity to
govern on their own account, have elected me their chief.  By that act
they have publicly proclaimed their inferiority and my superiority.  Among
this crowd of men, recognising hardly any equals of myself, I am alone
capable of directing public affairs.  The people have need of me; they
cannot do without my services, while I, on the contrary, can get along
all right by myself; they, therefore, must obey me for their own security,
and in condescending to obey them, I am doing them a good turn.

Is there not something in all that to make a man lose his head and his
heart as well, and become mad with pride?  It is thus that power and
the habit of command become for even the most intelligent and virtuous
men, a source of aberration, both intellectual and moral.





(TBD)

