Alvaro Giron
Illustrations by Ana Donat
https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/5117/511751285006.pdf
More than a decade ago I began to take the first in what would eventually become an extensive research into Pyotr (or Piotr) Kropotkin. At that time, newly installed in England for a postdoctoral sojourn, one tended to think that few would be interested in a theoretical anarchist decades after the final collapse of anarchism's brief revival after 1968.
It seemed that there would, at best, remain some smouldering embers,appropriately ground down in those days when the Thatcherite orthodoxy suitably modernized with convenient Blairite clothing prevailed in Britain and beyond. Well, I soon realized that on the island where he lived for over thirty years of exile, from 1886 to 1917, he was never wholly forgotten.
However, the fact that Kropotkin was not entirely forgotten did not necessarily
mean that he had been taken seriously. The related ambiguities are particularly pronounced
when it comes to his thoughts on Evolution. On the one hand, he has been praised for his strong resistance to the wrongly-called social Darwinism.
Also, he is often mentioned as one of the clearest pioneers in the study of altruism among animals. However, general opinion tends to present Kropotkinian vision of nature as something that had more to do with his personal (supposedly benevolent) inclinations or his political ideals than with the dispassionate analysis that he, as a scientist, would be expected to have. In fact, the idea had an earlier origin.
Much earlier, in the review published in Nature in 1903 on his major work, Mutual Aid (1902), the reader would find that Kropotkin attached ´to the lower animals a benevolence similar to his own. ( F.W.H., 1903. ´Mutual Aidª. Nature, 67: 196-197.)
One of the relatively recent attempts to scientifically rehabilitate Kropotkin's interpretationof the Theory of Evolution came, and perhaps not coincidentally, from the pen of the late Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay ´Kropotkin Was No Crackpotª(1997).
In it, while making generous use of the contribution of Daniel Todes (1989) on Russian Darwinism, Gould challenged the image of the idiosyncratic character who shapes the contours of natural economy in terms of his own peculiar political convictions: Kropotkin was not a rare bird, rather his ideas had their roots in a tradition peculiar to the Russian slant on evolution.It was a Darwinism without Malthus, which tended to emphasize the capital importance of sociability, if not solidarity,in the struggle that living beings sustained against environmental challenges. What Gould found reassuring was to know that, despite the political connotations that Darwinism had acquired in Russia, not a little of that anti-Malthusian tradition was based on solid field work in vast, sparsely inhabited territories of the Russian Empire.
This contrasted with the foundational experience of someone like Darwin, who was born and lived in an overcrowded island and spent part of his first steps as a scientist in tropical environments. Put another way, the substrate of Kropotkin's anti-Malthusian Darwinism is based, not only on political ideals that may seem eccentric, but rather supported by a respectable scientific tradition, firmly anchored in empirical knowledge of a particular natural environment.
2011 MÈTODE Annual Review 21
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