Gustav Landauer (7 April 1870–2 May 1919) was one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He was an advocate of social anarchism and an avowed pacifist. In 1919, during the German Revolution, he was briefly Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. He was brutally murdered when this Republic was overthrown by right wing elements. In his work "Skepticism and Mysticism", Landauer offers insights into the continual dialectical role of mystics and skeptics in advancing human knowledge over the ages. In his search for true cognition and the meaning of the world he explores man's psyche and what it means to be a sentient being.