Power Corrupts the Best
By Michael Bakunin, from What is Anarchism? An Introduction.
The State is nothing else but this domination and exploitation regularized and systematized.
We shall attempt to demonstrate it by examining the consequence of the government of the
masses by a minority, at first as intelligent and devoted as you like, in an Ideal State, founded
on 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 corageous 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 priveleged only by nature and for that very reason singled out for election by the people.
Their number is necessarily very limited, for 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 in, 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 a 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 eleced leaders, the other, formed of a small number of privileged natures, recognized and
accepted as such by the people, and charged by them to govern them. Dependant on popular
election, they are at first distinguished from the mass of the citizens only be 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 seperate 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 prove 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 inherant in power never fail to produce theis demoralisation;
they are: contempt for the masses and the over-estimation of one's own merits.
"The masses," a man says to himself, "recognizing 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, recognizing 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 command
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.
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