Peter Kropotkin

1842-1921 · Russian · Political Philosophy, Ethics, Evolutionary Theory

Well-being for all is not a dream.

Peter Kropotkin was born a Russian prince, a Rurikid whose family outranked the Romanovs in antiquity, and he spent his life trying to abolish everything that made such rank possible. Page to the Tsar, then a young army officer who chose Siberia over the guards so that he might explore, he did geography of the first rank in the mountains of Manchuria and Finland — and there, watching animals survive the brutal Asian winters, he saw something Darwin's English followers had missed. The struggle for existence was real, but the animals that flourished were not the fiercest competitors; they were…

Topics Peter Kropotkin addresses

• mutual aid
• mutual aid as a factor of evolution
• cooperation versus competition in nature
• the critique of Social Darwinism
• sociability as a natural law
• anarchist communism
• the abolition of the wage system
• distribution according to need
• the critique of collectivism
• expropriation
• the conquest of bread
• the abolition of the state
• the state as an instrument of domination
• the critique of state socialism
• anarchism versus Marxism
• the critique of revolutionary government
• spontaneous order
• free federation
• the medieval free city and the commune
• voluntary association
• integration of labour
• the union of brain work and manual work
• fields, factories, and workshops
• anarchist ethics

Converse with Peter Kropotkin on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Peter Kropotkin's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.