He spent sixty-two years trying to set the world on fire. This is the story of why he was wrong—told with love.

Mikhail Bakunin was the most incandescent revolutionary of the nineteenth century: a Russian aristocrat who traded his estate for the barricade, a veteran of three uprisings, a prisoner of three empires, the rival who nearly broke Karl Marx, and the trusting soul whom the young fanatic Nechayev played like an instrument. He gave anarchism its most famous sentence—that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge—and he believed, with his whole enormous heart, that freedom was something you seized by tearing the old world down.

His own life is the quiet, devastating evidence that it is not.

Every barricade he mounted delivered him to a fortress cell. Every tyranny he attacked bred a fresher one. The secret brotherhood he founded to abolish all authority voted him dictatorial powers over it. Following his extraordinary journey—from the philosophy salons of Moscow to the Dresden uprising, from the Peter and Paul Fortress to Siberian exile and an escape around the entire globe—this book treats its subject with affection rather than judgment, and gradually uncovers a gentler truth he glimpsed but never grasped.

No revolution has ever made ordinary life better in the middle distance. The tyranny of the state cannot be broken by tyranny against it. And the only just order is the one built close to home—out of mutual aid, kindness, love, and the refusal to condemn. Bakunin stormed heaven and built nothing. This book asks what he might have raised had he simply stayed and tended the ground beneath his feet.

A biography, a philosophical argument, and a meditation on how good lives are actually made—for anyone who has ever wondered whether the world can be mended by force, and suspected that it cannot.