Peter Kropoktin
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Location | Moscow, Russia |
| Introduction | 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. —Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion. |
| Interests | Prince Peter (Pyotr) Alexeyevich Kropotkin (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин) (December 9, 1842–February 8, 1921) was one of Russia's foremost anarchists and one of the first advocates of "anarchist communism": the model of society advocated for most of my life was that of a communalist society free from central government. Because of my title of prince and my prominence as an anarchist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I was known by some as "the Anarchist Prince". Some contemporaries saw me as leading a near perfect life. Oscar Wilde called me "the new Christ coming out of Russia." I left behind many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being my works The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. I was also a contributor to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. |
| Favorite Books | Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is book written by Peter Kropotkin on the subject of mutual aid while he was living in exile in England. The book was first published by William Heinemann in London in October 1902. Prior to that, the individual chapters were originally published as a series of essays in the Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896. Written partly as a response to Social Darwinism and in particular to Thomas H. Huxley's own Nineteenth Century essay The Struggle for Existence, Kropotkin drew on his experiences in scientific expeditions during his time in Siberia to illustrate the phenomenon of cooperation in animal and human communities. After examining the evidence of cooperation among the animals, the "savages", the "barbarians", in the medieval city, and in modern times, he concludes that cooperation and mutual aid are as important in the evolution of the species as competition and mutual strife, if not more important. |