Cosmopolis and Community: Élisée Reclus and Pëtr Kropotkin on Spatial and Moral Unity, 1870s to 1900s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a reading of the anarchists and geographers Élisée Reclus and Pëtr Kropotkin as cautious cosmopolitans. It does so, on a first level, by examining their discussion of the moral philosophy underlying Stoic and Kantian variants of cosmopolitanism and by a fine-grained analysis of their (sparse) usage of the term. On a second level, the paper confronts the debates of nineteenth-century anarchists with those of the cosmopolitans of the early twenty-first century – proponents of ‘global justice’ as well as their critics – suggesting that both concerns arose at comparable historical conjectures, marked by accelerated globalisation. While globalisation could pose a threat to traditional units of belonging, it also, and more importantly in the anarchists’ view, held the promise of creating universal solidarities. Anarchists examined communities in terms of their cohesion with the territory and envisaged the possibility of transgressing such connections. It is argued that Reclus and Kropotkin’s immersion in the science of geography is essential to making sense of the specifically anarchist view of cosmopolitanism, one that sought to bring together the moral with the material, the local with the global.