Cover art for Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, designed by Nancy Brigham for Extending Horizons Books/Porter Sargent edition, c. 1976.
Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, by Peter Kropotkin, 1902 CE.
In his Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, the Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin uses examples from both non-human animals and human society to show that cooperation, not competition, is the most important factor promoting the survival of organisms and therefore the evolution of species. Kropotkin is writing in response to an essay by Thomas Huxley (“The Struggle for Existence”) rather than to Darwin’s own work. How does Kropotkin’s insistence on cooperation as an evolved trait compare with Darwin’s remarks on sympathy and ‘moral consciousness’ in Chapters 2 and 3 of The Descent of Man?
Source/Citation:
Image via justseeds.org, full text of Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) at Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341
MUTUAL AID: A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION
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By Pëtr Kropotkin
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The Montréal Review, May 2018http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mutual-Aid-A-Factor-of-Evolution.php
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MUTUAL AID: A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION
By Pëtr Kropotkin
230 pp. Forgotten Books.
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Introduction
Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find — although I was eagerly looking for it — that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.
The terrible snow-storms which sweep over the northern portion of Eurasia in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in more temperate regions in August and September — resulting in inundations on a scale which is only known in America and in Eastern Asia, and swamping, on the plateaus, areas as wide as European States; and finally, the heavy snowfalls, early in October, which eventually render a territory as large as France and Germany, absolutely impracticable for ruminants, and destroy them by the thousand — these were the conditions under which I saw animal life struggling in Northern Asia. They made me realize at an early date the overwhelming importance in Nature of what Darwin described as “the natural checks to over-multiplication,” in comparison to the struggle between individuals of the same species for the means of subsistence, which may go on here and there, to some limited extent, but never attains the importance of the former. Paucity of life, under-population — not over-population — being the distinctive feature of that immense part of the globe which we name Northern Asia, I conceived since then serious doubts — which subsequent study has only confirmed — as to the reality of that fearful competition for food and life within each species, which was an article of faith with most Darwinists, and, consequently, as to the dominant part which this sort of competition was supposed to play in the evolution of new species.
On the other hand, wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as, for instance, on the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals came together to rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in the migrations of birds which took place at that time on a truly American scale along the Usuri; and especially in a migration of fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest — in all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.
And finally, I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in Transbaikalia, among the wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and so on, that when animals have to struggle against scarcity of food, in consequence of one of the above-mentioned causes, the whole of that portion of the species which is affected by the calamity, comes out of the ordeal so much impoverished in vigour and health, that no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition.
Consequently, when my attention was drawn, later on, to the relations between Darwinism and Sociology, I could agree with none of the works and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They all endeavoured to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was “a law of Nature.” This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.
On the contrary, a lecture “On the Law of Mutual Aid,” which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler’s idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest. This suggestion — which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the ideas expressed by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man — seemed to me so correct and of so great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in 1883) I began to collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler had only cursorily sketched in his lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in 1881.
In one point only I could not entirely endorse Kessler’s views. Kessler alluded to “parental feeling” and care for progeny as to the source of mutual inclinations in animals. However, to determine how far these two feelings have really been at work in the evolution of sociable instincts, and how far other instincts have been at work in the same direction, seems to me a quite distinct and a very wide question, which we hardly can discuss yet. It will be only after we have well established the facts of mutual aid in different classes of animals, and their importance for evolution, that we shall be able to study what belongs in the evolution of sociable feelings, to parental feelings, and what to sociability proper — the latter having evidently its origin at the earliest stages of the evolution of the animal world, perhaps even at the “colony-stages.” I consequently directed my chief attention to establishing first of all, the importance of the Mutual Aid factor of evolution, leaving to ulterior research the task of discovering the origin of the Mutual Aid instinct in Nature.
The importance of the Mutual Aid factor — “if its generality could only be demonstrated” — did not escape the naturalist’s genius so manifest in Goethe. When Eckermann told once to Goethe — it was in 1827 — that two little wren-fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him next day in the nest of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the little ones, together with their own youngsters, Goethe grew quite excited about this fact. He saw in it a confirmation of his pantheistic views, and said: — “If it be true that this feeding of a stranger goes through all Nature as something having the character of a general law — then many an enigma would be solved. “He returned to this matter on the next day, and most earnestly entreated Eckermann (who was, as is known, a zoologist) to make a special study of the subject, adding that he would surely come “to quite invaluable treasuries of results” (Gespräche, edition of 1848, vol. iii. pp. 219, 221). Unfortunately, this study was never made, although it is very possible that Brehm, who has accumulated in his works such rich materials relative to mutual aid among animals, might have been inspired by Goethe’s remark.
Several works of importance were published in the years 1872–1886, dealing with the intelligence and the mental life of animals, and three of them dealt more especially with the subject under consideration; namely, Les Sociétés animales, by Espinas (Paris, 1877); La Lutte pour l’existence et l’association pout la lutte, a lecture by J.L. Lanessan (April 1881); and Louis Böchner’s book, Liebe und Liebes-Leben in der Thierwelt, of which the first edition appeared in 1882 or 1883, and a second, much enlarged, in 1885. But excellent though each of these works is, they leave ample room for a work in which Mutual Aid would be considered, not only as an argument in favour of a pre-human origin of moral instincts, but also as a law of Nature and a factor of evolution. Espinas devoted his main attention to such animal societies (ants, bees) as are established upon a physiological division of labour, and though his work is full of admirable hints in all possible directions, it was written at a time when the evolution of human societies could not yet be treated with the knowledge we now possess. Lanessan’s lecture has more the character of a brilliantly laid-out general plan of a work, in which mutual support would be dealt with, beginning with rocks in the sea, and then passing in review the world of plants, of animals and men. As to Büchner’s work, suggestive though it is and rich in facts, I could not agree with its leading idea. The book begins with a hymn to Love, and nearly all its illustrations are intended to prove the existence of love and sympathy among animals. However, to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.
The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by the student of animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human ethics. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But this subject lies outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only indicate here a lecture, “Justice and Morality” which I delivered in reply to Huxley’s Ethics, and in which the subject has been treated at some length.
Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a Law of Nature and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When Huxley issued, in 1888, his “Struggle-for-life” manifesto (Struggle for Existence and its Bearing upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very incorrect representation of the facts of Nature, as one sees them in the bush and in the forest, I communicated with the editor of the Nineteenth Century, asking him whether he would give the hospitality of his review to an elaborate reply to the views of one of the most prominent Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the proposal with fullest sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. “Yes, certainly; that is true Darwinism,” was his reply. “It is horrible what ‘they’ have made of Darwin. Write these articles, and when they are printed, I will write to you a letter which you may publish. “Unfortunately, it took me nearly seven years to write these articles, and when the last was published, Bates was no longer living.
After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various classes of animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the same factor in the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as there are a number of evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of mutual aid among animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to admit it for Man. For primitive Man — they maintain — war of each against all was the law of life. In how far this assertion, which has been too willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the times of Hobbes, is supported by what we know about the early phases of human development, is discussed in the chapters given to the Savages and the Barbarians.
The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which were developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses, during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the next village-community period, and the immense influence which these early institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of mankind, down to the present times, induced me to extend my researches to the later, historical periods as well; especially, to study that most interesting period — the free medieval city republics, of which the universality and influence upon our modern civilization have not yet been duly appreciated. And finally, I have tried to indicate in brief the immense importance which the mutual-support instincts, inherited by mankind from its extremely long evolution, play even now in our modern society, which is supposed to rest upon the principle: “every one for himself, and the State for all,” but which it never has succeeded, nor will succeed in realizing.
It may be objected to this book that both animals and men are represented in it under too favourable an aspect; that their sociable qualities are insisted upon, while their anti-social and self-asserting instincts are hardly touched upon. This was, however, unavoidable. We have heard so much lately of the “harsh, pitiless struggle for life,” which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other animals, every “savage” against all other “savages,” and every civilized man against all his co-citizens — and these assertions have so much become an article of faith — that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different aspect. It was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter provisions, migrations, etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual Aid, viewed at as one of the chief factors of evolution — not on all factors of evolution and their respective values; and this first book had to be written, before the latter could become possible.
I should certainly be the last to underrate the part which the self-assertion of the individual has played in the evolution of mankind. However, this subject requires, I believe, a much deeper treatment than the one it has hitherto received. In the history of mankind, individual self-assertion has often been, and continually is, something quite different from, and far larger and deeper than, the petty, unintelligent narrow-mindedness, which, with a large class of writers, goes for “individualism” and “self-assertion.” Nor have history-making individuals been limited to those whom historians have represented as heroes. My intention, consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to discuss separately the part taken by the self-assertion of the individual in the progressive evolution of mankind. I can only make in this place the following general remark: — When the Mutual Aid institutions — the tribe, the village community, the guilds, the medieval city — began, in the course of history, to lose their primitive character, to be invaded by parasitic growths, and thus to become hindrances to progress, the revolt of individuals against these institutions took always two different aspects. Part of those who rose up strove to purify the old institutions, or to work out a higher form of commonwealth, based upon the same Mutual Aid principles; they tried, for instance, to introduce the principle of “compensation,” instead of the lex talionis, and later on, the pardon of offences, or a still higher ideal of equality before the human conscience, in lieu of “compensation,” according to class-value. But at the very same time, another portion of the same individual rebels endeavoured to break down the protective institutions of mutual support, with no other intention but to increase their own wealth and their own powers. In this three-cornered contest, between the two classes of revolted individuals and the supporters of what existed, lies the real tragedy of history. But to delineate that contest, and honestly to study the part played in the evolution of mankind by each one of these three forces, would require at least as many years as it took me to write this book.
Of works dealing with nearly the same subject, which have been published since the publication of my articles on Mutual Aid among Animals, I must mention The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, by Henry Drummond (London, 1894), and The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, by A. Sutherland (London, 1898). Both are constructed chiefly on the lines taken in Büchner’s Love, and in the second work the parental and familial feeling as the sole influence at work in the development of the moral feelings has been dealt with at some length. A third work dealing with man and written on similar lines is The Principles of Sociology, by Prof. F.A. Giddings, the first edition of which was published in 1896 at New York and London, and the leading ideas of which were sketched by the author in a pamphlet in 1894. I must leave, however, to literary critics the task of discussing the points of contact, resemblance, or divergence between these works and mine. [...]
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Chapter 9: Conclusion
If we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the analysis of modern society, in connection with the body of evidence relative to the importance of mutual aid in the evolution of the animal world and of mankind, we may sum up our inquiry as follows.
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and tribes at the very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions developed already in the lower savage stage, in the clan and the tribe; and we found that the earliest tribal customs and habits gave to mankind the embryo of all the institutions which made later on the leading aspects of further progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial units (village communities), connected with guilds these latter arising out ofthe common prosecution of a given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.
And finally, in the last two chapters facts were produced to show that although the growth of the State on the pattern of Imperial Rome had put a violent end to all medieval institutions for mutual support, this new aspect of civilization could not last. The State, based upon loose aggregations of individuals and undertaking to be their only bond of union, did not answer its purpose. The mutual-aid tendency finally broke down its iron rules; it reappeared and reasserted itself in an infinity of associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to take possession of all that is required by man for life and for reproducing the waste occasioned by life.
It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current, powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other current — the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.
It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete, unless these two dominant currents are analyzed. However, the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later on, the richer classes’ rule have been promoted, established, and maintained. The struggles between these forces make, in fact, the substance of history. We may thus take the knowledge of the individual factor in human history as granted — even though there is full room for a new study of the subject on the lines just alluded to; while, on the other side, the mutual-aid factor has been hitherto totally lost sight of; it was simply denied, or even scoffed at, by the writers of the present and past generation. It was therefore necessary to show, first of all, the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of both the animal world and human societies. Only after this has been fully recognized will it be possible to proceed to a comparison between the two factors.
To make even a rough estimate of their relative importance by any method more or less statistical, is evidently impossible. One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good. But when we see that in the animal world, progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive development; when we notice that with man, even success in struggle and war is proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two conflicting nations, cities, parties, or tribes, and that in the process of evolution war itself (so far as it can go this way) has been made subservient to the ends of progress in mutual aid within the nation, the city or the clan — we already obtain a perception of the dominating influence of the mutual-aid factor as an element of progress. But we see also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science. In fact, the study of the inner life of the medieval city and of the ancient Greek cities reveals the fact that the combination of mutual aid, as it was practised within the guild and the Greek clan, with a large initiative which was left to the individual and the group by means of the federative principle, gave to mankind the two greatest periods of its history — the ancient Greek city and the medieval city periods; while the ruin of the above institutions during the State periods of history, which followed, corresponded in both cases to a rapid decay.
As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy — and they were made under the medieval city organization, — once these discoveries were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. If the medieval cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the ethical consequences of the revolution effected by steam might have been different; but the same revolution in technics and science would have inevitably taken place. It remains, indeed, an open question whether the general decay of industries which followed the ruin of the free cities, and was especially noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth century, did not considerably retard the appearance of the steam-engine as well as the consequent revolution in arts. When we consider the astounding rapidity of industrial progress from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries — in weaving, working of metals, architecture and navigation, and ponder over the scientific discoveries which that industrial progress led to at the end of the fifteenth century — we must ask ourselves whether mankind was not delayed in its taking full advantage of these conquests when a general depression of arts and industries took place in Europe after the decay of medieval civilization. Surely it was not the disappearance of the artist-artisan, nor the ruin of large cities and the extinction of intercourse between them, which could favour the industrial revolution; and we know indeed that James Watt spent twenty or more years of his life in order to render his invention serviceable, because he could not find in the last century what he would have readily found n medieval Florence or Brügge, that is, the artisans capable of realizing his devices in metal, and of giving them the artistic finish and precision which the steam-engine requires.
To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle.
However, it is especially in the domain of ethics that. the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it —we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life.
Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind. It was also refined at the same time. In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of “due reward” — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of “no revenge for wrongs,” and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race. 
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Pyotr Alexeevich Kropotkin (December 9, 1842 – February 8, 1921) was a Russian activist, revolutionary, scientist and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism.
Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, he attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France (where he was imprisoned for almost four years) and in England. He returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but was disappointed by the Bolshevik form of state socialism.
Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops; and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition[11] and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy.
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Ecovillages: Why They Rise Above Just Being “Eco”
by Gabriela Andreevska,
GEN Europe Secretariat
Introduction
“Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very late product of human
evolution. As far as we can go back in the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in
societies - in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals; and an extremely slow and long
evolution was required to bring these societies to the gentile, or clan organization, which, in its
turn, had to undergo another, also very long evolution, before the first germs of family,
polygamous or monogamous, could appear. Societies, bands, or tribes -- not families -- were thus
the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors…none of the higher
mammals, save a few carnivores and a few undoubtedly-decaying species of apes (orangutans
and gorillas), live in small families, isolately struggling in the woods. All others live in societies.
And Darwin so well understood that isolately-living apes never could have developed into manlike beings, that he was inclined to consider man as descended from some comparatively weak
but social species, like the chimpanzee, rather than from some stronger but unsociable species,
like the gorilla.” (Kropotkin, 1972).
Science, text and space: thoughts on the
geography of reading
David N Livingstone
The very principle that made Darwinian theory
attractive to Wellington audiences, namely struggle, was precisely what most perturbed the circle which
gathered at the St Petersburg Society of Naturalists
in late nineteenth-century Russia. Of central importance here were the interventions of Karl Kessler,
who was appointed professor of zoology at St
Petersburg University in 1861. In 1879 he declared
on Darwin’s theory in an essay tellingly entitled
‘On the Law of Mutual Aid’. Here he condemned
‘the cruel, so-called law of the struggle for existence’.
To be sure, he allowed that overpopulation could
generate intraspecific competition for resources; but
he was sure that Darwin had given way too much
weight to it. The sciences of zoology and sociology,
he believed, had ignored ‘the law of mutual aid,
which . . . is if anything more important than the
law of the struggle for existence’ (quoted in Todes
1989, 110–11). He reported that he himself had
witnessed the survival value of reciprocated care
and cooperation among bees, beetles, spiders,
reptiles and a host of other creatures. In the human
species, mutual aid undergirded society’s material
and moral progress.
Kessler’s reading of Darwin did not remain an
isolated textual event. It inaugurated a reading history that steered later Russian engagements with
the text. In fact a number of Kessler’s associates –
such as Alexander Brandt, Mikhail Filippov,
Vladimir Bekhterev and Modest Bogdanov – constituted what Daniel Todes (1989, chapter 6)
describes as the ‘Russian Mutual Aid Tradition’.
And perhaps most visibly of all, Kessler’s cooperative gloss was vigorously promulgated in the writings of the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin, who
achieved prominence through radical publications
and political activism (Woodcock and Avakumovic
1950; Miller 1976). A member of the St Petersburg
fraternity, he read the published version of Kessler’s ‘mutual aid’ speech and later published the
book on which his scientific reputation very largely
rests, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Here, in
grand cosmic style, he traced the principle of correlative sociability from its application in the animal
world, through primitive human society and medieval urban life, up to his own day. Like the evolutionism of his St Petersburg associates, this was
Darwinism with its Malthusian teeth extracted. As
he put it in a letter to Marie Goldsmith:
Kessler, Severtsov, Menzbir, Brandt . . . and finally
myself . . . stand against the Darwinist exaggeration of
struggle within a species. We see a great deal of mutual
aid, where Darwin and Wallace see only struggle.
(quoted in Todes 1989, 104)
In Mutual Aid itself he insisted:
The animal species, in which individual struggle has
been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of
mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are
invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous,
and the most open to further progress . . . The
unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to
decay. (Kropotkin 1939, 293; see also discussion in
Livingstone 1992, 254–8)
These St Petersburg readings of Darwin, of course,
were not conjured out of thin air. To the contrary,
as Daniel Todes (1989) makes clear, the St Petersburg engagement with Darwinian evolution was
moulded by earlier textual encounters, notably
with Thomas Malthus’s theory of population. Both
on the political left and right in Russia, Malthus’s
atomistic conception of society had already been
castigated, mostly since the 1840s, as a cold, soulless
and mechanistic product of English political
economy. Malthus may have rationalized poverty
and inequity in England, but his commentators
were certain that his theory would not apply in a
harmonious Russia. It ‘violated Russians’ vision of
a cohesive society in which all of its members were
valued parts of the whole’ and its ethos was seen
as inimical to ‘the cherished peasant commune’
(Todes 1989, 29). In an environment where the laws
of nature and society ran in tandem, Darwin’s
theory of organic change was interpreted in the
shadow of the Russian rendezvous with Malthus.
But reading lineage was not the only force shaping
the encounter. Physical space also had a role to
play. Kropotkin had spent lengthy periods of time
in Siberia during the 1860s just prior to encountering
Kessler’s theory. There he found an environment,
as did other scientific travellers, where scarcity and
severity predominated. Nature displayed no plenitude here; no tightly-packed, wedged-in, ecological
niches; no super-abundance and swarming life forms.
The vocabulary of fecundity, overpopulation and
intraspecific competition that Darwin and Wallace
employed in the tropics just didn’t seem right in
this sparse northern world (see Livingstone 2002b).
Just as the teeming tropics never left Darwin’s
mind, the wastelands of Russia’s high latitudes
remained with Kropotkin.
The St Petersburg engagement with Darwin, then,
was a compound product of textual pre-history
and environmental reality. Here Darwin was read
through the twin spectacles of Russian geopolitics
– social structure and territorial configuration. Just
Science, text and space 399
as the colonial politics of New Zealand predisposed
Wellington readers of Darwin to embrace its robust
selectionism and the cut-throat ethics of struggle;
just as the Charleston naturalists read Darwin
through the lens of a racialized Agassiz-type creationism that lent support to southern social
structure; so in St Petersburg, Darwin’s theory of
evolution, construed in the light of a customary
disquiet over Malthusian social theory, was translated into the language of cooperation and reciprocal sociability. Malthus might have been a credible
intellectual source of inspiration for Darwin and
his disciples in England; his philosophy was profoundly troubling to a Russian society whose class
structure and political traditions made it suspicious
of competitive individualism. In all three venues,
political factors were crucial to the local constitution of Darwinian meaning.
Dependent Co-evolution:
Kropotkin’s Theory of Mutual Aid and Its Appropriation by Chinese Buddhists
Justin R. Ritzinger
University of Miami
http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-BJ001/bj001390679.pdf
Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal (2013, 26: 89-112)
New Taipei: Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
ᷕ厗ἃ⬠⬠⟙䫔Ḵ⋩ℕ㛇ġ 枩 89-112炷㮹⚳ᶨ䘦暞Ḵ⸜炸炻㕘⊿烉ᷕ厗ἃ⬠䞼䨞
ISSN: 1017-7132
Abstract
The encounter between Buddhism and science has long been recognized as
one of the key events in the formulation of Buddhist modernisms. Yet only
recently has this begun to be explored in its historic specificity. This paper
examines Republican-era Chinese Buddhists’ engagement with the theory of
evolution at the peak of its cultural influence in the 1920s and 30s. It argues
that while Buddhists largely accepted biological evolution, Darwinist theories
of survival of the fittest were rejected. Instead, they embraced the alternative
theory of Peter Kropotkin, who saw mutual aid as the driving force of
evolution. This theory was not only less offensive to Buddhist sensibilities,
but also amenable to a rhetorical strategy of subsumption in which Kropotkin
was presented as anticipated and fulfilled by Buddhist doctrine. This tactic
allowed Buddhists to portray the religion as modern, scientific, and
progressive while avoiding what were seen as the pernicious corollaries of
Darwinism. Effectively, Buddhists who employed this tactic attempted to
annex Kroptokin’s discursive space, taking advantage of the internal
variegation of modernity in order to constitute it as part of a modern discourse
and superscribe that discourse with their own concerns.
Anarchism and the Myth of the Primitive: Godwin and Kropotkin
Samuel Clark
Draft: for final version, see Studies in Social and Political Thought 15(2008): 6-25
Anarchists are commonly supposed to hold deeply optimistic views about human
nature, and to be nostalgic for ‘primitive’ (as opposed to ‘civilised’) societies. I shall
argue here that these claims are false. It is worth doing so, both as a recovery of some
interesting thought from misrepresentation, and because a precise account of
primitivism will be useful in other contexts.
‘Traditionally, anarchists are seen to possess an optimistic conception of
human nature, an optimism essential to the success of their vision of a stateless
society.’2
According to James Joll, ‘The fundamental idea that man is by nature good
and that it is institutions that corrupt him remains the basis of all anarchist thought.’3
For him, anarchists share the mental pathology of heretical Christians who demand
and expect ‘a return to the Golden Age of the Garden of Eden before the Fall’4
. Roger
Scruton claims that ‘typical anarchist beliefs’ include that ‘men are benign by nature
and corrupted by government’5
. Irving Horowitz, that ‘Anarchism has as its
theoretical underpinning an idealization of natural man in contrast and in oppostion to
civilized man … What is offered is a belief in “natural man” as more fundamental and
historically prior to “political man”.’6
Norman Barry, that ‘Communitarian [as
opposed to libertarian] anarchism depends upon an optimistic view of human nature
as essentially benign and cooperative.’7
These examples could easily be continued.
They impute one or both of two claims to anarchists: that they believe, first, in a pure
and good human nature which is distorted or masked by current circumstances;
second, in a long-lost golden age. In sections 1 and 2 below I set out these claims in
2
more detail, and then show in each case that they do not apply to two representative
anarchists, William Godwin and Peter Kropotkin.
Claims that anarchists are primitivists have often been used to ground
criticism. Robert Dahl, for instance, offers as ‘a critique of anarchism’ the thought
that ‘While some romantic anarchists may imagine our returning to the tiny
autonomous groups of some preliterate societies, short of a cataclysm that no sane
person wants, a return to the infancy of the species looks to be impossible or, if not
impossible, highly undesirable.’8
Benjamin Barber attacks anarchists because ‘their
view of actual men is wildly romanticized. Hunger, greed, ambition, avarice, the will
to power, to glory, to honour, and to security which have played some role in all
traditional ethnologies find no place in the anarchist portrait of man’9
. Barber directs
this attack specifically against twentieth-century American anarchists like Abbie
Hoffman, but is explicit that he believes the tradition from Godwin onwards to be
implicated in this wild romanticism. His evidence in fact consists of unsupported
claims about the elitist psychology of individual anarchists and a few, out-of-context
quotations. Similarly, the only support Horowitz can give for his characterisation
(quoted above) comes from Denis Diderot, who, in Horowitz’s own words,
‘advocated a parliamentary monarchism in which representation would be elected by
the propertied classes’10, and was therefore clearly not an anarchist. In the face of
evidence this weak, it is tempting to dismiss the whole line of attack as a selfsustaining polemic.
However, there are two forms of this criticism which require a more detailed
response. I call them accusations of ‘primitivism’, for convenience and because each
can be related to one of the various meanings of ‘primitive’. This article will display,
3
analyse and refute two important forms of the assertion that anarchists are
primitivists.
‘Primitive’ is a complex term. It can mean unsophisticated, savage, stupid or
childish; pure; original or primary; low or simple; an early stage of evolution or
progress; a relic or survival in a world that has moved on. It can refer to people or
societies without our technology or without institutions like our states. ‘Primitive’
stands in some complex relation to a cluster of terms including ‘savage’, ‘native’,
‘aboriginal’, ‘undeveloped’, ‘unevolved’ and ‘prehistoric’, and also to opposing terms
like ‘civilised’, ‘developed’, ‘complex’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘modern’. We should note
the term’s ideological weight: calling societies or people ‘primitive’ has often been
involved in, and even stood in for, justifications of marginalisation, oppression and
extermination. It can also be used in a less extreme but still polemical way, to indicate
a comfortable value judgement: ‘we are civilised, they are primitive.’
The two meanings of the term which relate to the criticisms of anarchism
under discussion here are primitive as pure, and primitive as original or primary. The
criticisms which involve these meanings are, respectively: the claim that anarchism
depends on an unrealistic notion of uncorrupted human nature (‘human nature
primitivism’); and the claim that anarchists are nostalgic for a mythical golden age
(‘golden age primitivism’). I define and respond to each in turn.
Prince Kropotkin meets the Hutchinson niche
ISRAEL JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION,
Vol. 55, 2009, pp. 1–10
DOI: 10.1560/IJEE.55.1.1
E-mail: rdholt@zoo.ufl.edu
The IJEE Soapbox provides an informal forum for leading ecologists and evolutionary biologists to expound
on issues that they find particularly exciting, thought provoking, and novel.
Robert D. Holt is our first invited IJEE Soapbox essayist. Bob is Professor of Biology and Arthur R.
Marshall, Jr., Chair in Ecology at the University of Florida, and is one of the foremost theoreticians in ecology
and evolutionary biology. His research focuses on theoretical and conceptual issues at the population and
community levels of ecological organization and on linking ecology with evolutionary biology. Bob is best
known for his pioneering work on apparent competition, multispecies interactions in food webs (community
modules) in time and space, and the evolution of niche conservatism.
IJEE Soapbox:
Prince Kropotkin meets
the Hutchinson niche
Robert D. Holt
Department of Biology
University of Florida,
Gainesville, Florida 32611-8525, USA
Siberia in the winter is among the harshest ecosystems on earth, or so it must have
seemed to the Russian nobleman Prince Petr Kropotkin back in the 19th century as he
wandered in his scientific expeditions, winding through that seemingly endless wilderness of dark brooding forest and treacherous bog. In the course of his personal evolution
from a privileged member of the elite, to an advocate for the oppressed peasantry and
industrial workers and Russia’s foremost anarchist-communist, he published a provocative work, Mutual Aid (1902, reprinted 2005), reflecting on natural and human systems,
and the drivers of evolution in both. He drew upon his observations of animal and human life in Siberia to counter the grim world view of the social Darwinists, who asserted
that the raw competitive struggle of individual against individual was the prime driver
of evolution. Kropotkin believed his observations in Siberia showed that individual
struggle against the forces of the environment was inadequate to explain persistence
in that brutal realm, and that cooperation, rather than competition, must be an essential
force in evolution (Gould, 1977, provides a fine essay on Kropotkin).
RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND KROPOTKIN:
THE HERITAGE OF ANARCHISM IN BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Richard J. Perry
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
St. Lawrence University
Canton, New York
INTRODUCTION
"The Anarchist, Prince Kropotkin" seems an unlikely epithet for a man whose concept of society strongly influenced British social anthropology.
Yet Kropotkin's ideas were among the most salient influences on social anthropology during its formative years and defined an approach to enquiry that persists to the present. Apparently this influence has never been discerned or acknowledged.
Kropotkin has been relegated to a minor position among social philosophers. In his History of Western Philosophy, Lord Russell neglects to mention Kropotkin's name even once (Russell 1945), nor does Kropotkin receive any attention fromHarris in his Rise of Anthropological Theory (Harris 1968). Yet despite his personal obscurity in this regard, Kropotkin's ideas through their influence on Radcliffe-Brown helped set the tone of
British social anthropology during the first half of this (20TH) century. (Kropotkin has been doomed to share with his anarchist colleagues the onus of having traveleddown a "dead end" (cf. Jolls: 1965). Anarchistsfailed to achieve the far-reaching changes in societyto which they dedicated themselves, and as apacific anarchist, even the notoriety of a Bakunin
passed Kropotkin by. Only recently, as contemporary moods have shifted toward deep social dissatisfaction, have the writings of Kropotkin been given much serious attention (cf. Goodman 1968:519).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kropotkin's influence as a social thinker had much
more significance. During his years in England after his arrival in 1886, Kropotkin personified anarchist thought at a time when anarchism was in vogue. Aprominent and beloved social figure, Prince Kropotkin drank tea with Herbert Spencer, lectured on
geography and was called by Oscar Wilde one of the two happy men he had ever met (Pipes 1968:465).
In this era anthropology in Britain remained strongly evolutionary in its approach, and for a
time, the notion of "social Darwinism" enjoyed a comfortable acceptance. Radcliffe-Brown entered Trinity College at Cambridge in 1901. As we shall see below, the influence of Kropotkin's ideas did much to shape Radcliffe-Brown's approach to the study of societies.READ ON
MUTUAL AID AND MUTUAL TRUST
In the Introduction to his timeless classic, Mutual Aid: A Factor of
Evolution, Peter Kropotkin wrote, "[A] lecture 'On the Law of Mutual
Aid,' which was delivered at a Russian Congress of Naturalists, in
January 1880, by the well-known zoologist, Professor Kessler, the
then Dean of the St. Petersburg University, struck me as throwing a
new light on the whole subject [of 'survival of the fittest']. Kessler's
idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle [nature red in
tooth and claw] there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for
the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive
evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of
mutual contest."
In Mutual Aid, if I remember correctly, Kropotkin does not speak
explicitly of mutual trust. But certainly in a human society where
mutual aid is practiced there must also prevail a high degree of
mutual trust. Those of us committed to building a humane and truly
compassionate world, where all people will be able to live with
dignity, must work to achieve mutual trust. We need to recognize it
as an essential characteristic of our emerging global grassroots
infrastructure. We should also recognize how difficult it will be to
attain. Why is that?
ON THE ORIGIN OF SOCIOBIOLOGICAL THINKING 1. HISTORICAL REMARKS
Uroboros, or biology between mythology and philosophy
ed. by W. Ługowski & K. Matsuno
Wrocław
1998 Arboretum
Krzysztof Łastowski
Institute of Philosophy,
Adam Mickiewicz University
Szamarzewskiego 89c,
60-569 Poznań, Poland
Theoretical premises of modern sociobiological thinking can be found in the
concept form ulated by Russian biologist and sociologist Peter Kropotkin
(1904) w ho lived and worked at the turn o f the 19th and 20th centuries. The
peculiar position o f the then-contemporary biology also had its contribution to
the beginnings o f the form ative period of sociobiological thought. From the
point o f view of philosophy o f science the evolutionary (Darwinian) paradigm
was widespread in the last two decades o f the 19th century: the controversies
around the concept of natural selection, presented by Darwin's opponents,
confirm this domination even more markedly. It w as then that the idea of
"mutual aid" w as form ed - the idea which, according to Kropotkin, was as essential a factor/mechanism o f evolution as the "struggle for survival". Kropotkin's concept w as immediately rejected. Consequently, the Darwinian paradigm remained unchanged form any years in its basic element, i.e. natural
selection. This imperfection has been improved only by modern sociobiological ideas.
The problem presented in the paper is essential for one m ore reason,
namely that it indicates the existence - in the eyes o f a philosopher o f science
- o f the myth o f self-sufficiency which is expressed in the belief that biological
ideas are "impervious" to ideas belonging to other fields o f knowledge. If it is
true that science is "governed" by paradigm s, then Kropotkin's idea could
have been cognitively noticed only by W .D. Hamilton in the developmental
process o f the 20th century evolutionary biology.
From the point o f view o f the philosophy o f science it is worth noting that in
m id-19th century Darwin (1859) and Spencer (1862) proclaim ed their concepts which caused the ideas of a "struggle for survival" and "natural selection" to become the main points of discussion on the evolution of living organ
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http://rcin.org.pl/ifisisms. Even opponents o f evolutionary thinking became so entangled in the
discussion o f Darwinian ideas that any issue not pertaining to the fundamentals of Darwinian evolution w as marginal to evolutionary biology in the making.
On the other hand, evolutionary biology w as dominated by proponents and
opponents of the ideas mentioned above: the struggle for survival and natural
selection.
The Darwinian paradigm - to use the Kuhn's concept - dominated
contemporary biology. The paradigm assumed that biological phenomena
(and, in Spencer’s view, also social ones) w ere subject without exception to
unrestrained mechanism s o f the "struggle for survival". This view w as supported by Hegel's philosophy which founded some appropriate concepts, such
as "society of citizens" and "spiritualized animal kingdom ".
EXCERPT READ ON
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