"Statism and Anarchy" is Bakunin's most important work. Its influence on the revolutionary movement of its time was very significant. It serves as a mirror of 19th-century European history, within its socio-political context, and as the unique historical representation of the corresponding period from the perspective of the working masses (free from the distorting lens of political theology - bourgeois or Marxist).

Contrary to "classical" historiography, which views history only as a complex interaction of leading personalities or as a chain of political decisions made from above, Bakunin penetrates the confusion of the surface of events and, delving deeply, follows the traces of the anti-state tendency, the Social Revolution, which gives the dominant note to the historical course. 

At the same time, he identifies and traces the course of the parallel and opposing historical tendency, whose conflict shapes history, of the centralization and strengthening of state power, of statism, while also prophetically demystifying its pseudo-popular expressions - the "People's State" of the Marxists and the statist notions of authoritarian socialism in general.