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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
PETER ALEKSEYEVICH KROPOTKIN WAS BORN IN MOSCOW IN 1842, the youngest son of a noble Russian family whose origins could be traced back to the Middle Ages. He died in 1921 in a small village some forty miles to the north of that city, a radical critic of the Bolshevik regime and a symbol for all those who believed that the Bolsheviks had perverted the original aims of the Russian Revolution. In the course of his life he had spent a long period of exile in Western Europe, had been imprisoned both in Russia and in France and had achieved international celebrity in two separate fields. The first was geography, where in particular his research on the structure of the mountain ranges of Northern Asia radically changed the received views of the scientific community. The second was the European anarchist movement, in which Kropotkin played a prominent role both as a revolutionary activist and a theoretician. Indeed these two careers were not as mutually irrelevant as they might at first appear, since the most distinctive feature of Qopotkin's anarchism was the attempt he made to place anarchist ideas on a scientific foundation, borrowing especially from the then-fashionable theory of organic evolution. In the assessment that follows I shall look first at his exposition and defence of anarchist principles, then at his efforts to place those principles in a framework borrowed from the natural sciences and finally offer a critical verdict both on the principles themselves and on the attempt to use evolutionary theory to back them up.
1 His funeral was the last occasion on which the anarchists and others hostile to the regime were allowed to congregate en masse. According to Woodcock and Avakumović, 100,000 people took part in the procession to the cemetery. See Woodcock, G. and Avakumović, I., The Anarchist Prince: a biographical study of Peter Kropotkin, New York, Schocken Books, 1971 Google Scholar; Miller, M. A., Kropotkin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976 Google Scholar; and Kropotkin’s own Memoirs of a Revolutionist, London, Swann Sonnenschein, 1908, for further biographical details.
2 See Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 199.
3 See Ibid. pp. 221–4.
4 Syndicalism immediately presented the anarchists with a new form of organization and set of methods for overthrowing capitalism, and there was no formal inconsistency between embracing these and adhering to anarcho‐communism as a view about the final destination of the revolution. But while most anarcho‐syndicalists continued to think that the future society would indeed be organized in this way, they disagreed with the more traditional anarcho‐communists about some important intervening matters, particularly about the role of trade unions in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. For a fuller discussion see ch. 9 of my forthcoming book Anarchism.
5 For a recent defence, very much in the spirit of Kropotkin, see Bookchin, M., Post‐Scarcity Anarchism, London, Wildwood House, 1974.Google Scholar
6 Kropotkin, , ‘The Spirit of Revolt’ in Baldwin, R. N. (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, New York, Dover, 1970.Google Scholar
7 ‘La Propagande par le fait’, published in the Bulletin of the Jura Federation and reprinted in slightly abbreviated form in Guillaume, J., L’Internationale: Documents et Souvenirs, vol. IV, Paris, Stock, 1910, pp. 224–7Google Scholar. Kropotkin’s participation in the writing of this article is probable but not certain.
8 Kropotkin, , ‘Les Minorités Revolutionnaires’ in his Paroles d’un Révolté, Paris, Flammarinon, 1885.Google Scholar
9 Kropotkin, ‘Revolutionary Government’ in Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 248–9.
10 Kropotkin, , The Conquest of Bread, New York, Vanguard Press, 1926, ch. 11.Google Scholar
11 These ideas were sketched in The Conquest of Bread, chs 16–17 and later developed more fully in Fields, Factories and Workshops, London, Nelson, 1912.
12 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. 65–8.
13 Ibid., ch. 13.
14 Kropotkin, ‘Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles’ in Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets; The Conquest of Bread, ch. 1.
15 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. 163–4.
16 Ibid., p. 156.
17 Ibid., ch. 12; ‘Anarchist Communism’, pp. 69–71.
18 Kropotkin, ‘Anarchism: its Philosophy and Ideal’ in Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 126–30; The Conquest of Bread, ch. 2.
19 Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, pp. 58–9.
20 Ibid., ch. 9.
21 See Kropotkin, ‘Prisons and Their Moral Influence on Prisoners’ in Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets.
22 See Himmelfarb, G., ‘Varieties of Social Darwinism’ in her Victorian Minds, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.Google Scholar
23 Kropotkin, , Modern Science and Anarchism, London, Freedom Press, 1912, chs. 2–8.Google Scholar
24 Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, Dorchester, Prism Press, n. d.
25 Kropotkin, ‘Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal’, pp. 115–24.
26 Kropotkin, , Mutual Aid, London, Heinemann, 1910.Google Scholar
27 Ibid., p. 57.
28 Kropotkin refers to Huxley at the beginning of Mutual Aid, and it appears from the Preface that Huxley’s essay was the direct spur to the writing of the book. It was only in his Ethics, however, that Kropotkin acknowledged Huxley’s real intention, which was to divorce moral standards from natural processes ‐ see ch. 11.
29 This point is vigorously pursued in Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976 Google Scholar. A salutary note of caution (about not turning a difficulty into an impossibility) is sounded in Midgley, M., Beast and Man, Methuen, London, 1980, ch. 6.Google Scholar
30 Kropotkin did believe that Darwin had exaggerated the extent to which animal populations were held in check by competition for limited supplies of food rather than by other factors, but this was recognized to be no more than a difference in emphasis. See Mutual Aid, pp. 60–75. For his general agreement with Darwin, see the opening pages of that book and Ethics, ch. 3.
31 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 176.
32 See my discussion in Social Justice, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976, pp. 232–4.
33 Kropotkin, , The State: Its Historic Role, London, Freedom Press, 1911.Google Scholar
34 See Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, Conclusion.
35 Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 111.
36 Ibid., p. 304.
37 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 271. See also Kropotkin, , ‘Co‐operation: a reply to Herbert Spencer’, Freedom, 12 1896‐01 1897 Google Scholar.
38 See those cited in Miller, M., Kropotkin, pp 176–7.Google Scholar
39 Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, chs. 6–8.
40 This point is well made in Carter, A., The Political Theory of Anarchism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, pp. 85–6.Google Scholar
41 Two influential expositions of sociobiology are Wilson, E. O., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1975 Google Scholar, and Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Two balanced assessments are M. Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense?, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1979, and Midgley, Beast and Man. These latter books have persuaded me to abandon the dismissive attitude I adopted in Social Justice towards Kropotkin’s use of animal evidence.
42 Richards, V. (ed.), Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, London, Freedom Press, 1965, p. 44 Google Scholar. Malatesta’s criticism is elaborated somewhat on pp. 257–68.