by JE Ferrie - 2014 - Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution,10 finding the evidence and concepts Kropotkin describes fundamental to the pro- motion of public health.11. Mutual Aid ...
By the time he finished his doctorate, Tony McMichael had become fascinated by the ideas of the Pulitzer Prizewinning author and microbiologist Rene´ Dubos, and it was through writing to Dubos that he eventually secured his first postdoctoral position.6 In common with other thinkers on the ecology of health and disease, Dubos followed Peter Kropotkin (Figure 2) in emphasizing that the most important aspect of the natural world is not the law of the jungle or ruthless competition, but rather interdependence and co-existence, or mutual aid.8 The first ever mention of Kropotkin in the IJE was in a commentary last December on Edmund Parkes’ review of John Snow’s Mode of Transmission of Cholera: ‘History is not kind to critics. Its writers typically dismiss where they do not simply ignore those whose careful reviews argue caution in the face of works destined to become, in the future, classics. Think, here, Prince Peter Kropotkin whose naturalist studies focused upon the limits of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the direction in which research based upon it would be best directed’.9 In the Editorial for this December’s issue of the IJE, Tom Koch expands on this theme to provide an interesting and compelling exploration of the ideas presented in Kroptokin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 10 finding the evidence and concepts Kropotkin describes fundamental to the promotion of public health.11 Mutual Aid, published in 1902, is probably Kropotkin’s most famous work. Rarely out of print and often thought of as an anarchist classic, it actually comprises a series of articles Kropotkin wrote in reply to Thomas Huxley’s The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, published in the journal The Nineteenth Century. Kropotkin’s replies appeared in the same journal between 1890 and 1896 and were expanded to form Mutual Aid. 10 Although Kropotkin was and is internationally recognized for his contribution to geography, Mutual Aid has generally been either dismissed or ignored, and Kropotkin labelled a crackpot. Partly this was due to his stance against Huxley and the then dominant interpretation of Darwin, but also because acceptance would have challenged those aspects of Social Darwinism carefully constructed to defend the interests of the ruling class and capitalist exploitation. Similar political agendas had underlined the earlier argument between Thomas Malthus and William Godwin, with Malthus recognized as a significant influence on Darwin and Darwinian thinking.11,12
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