Abstract
Abstract When the Great War began, there were attempts to explain away the atrocities in terms of “the struggle for existence.” A protest against such an “abuse” of Darwin’s terminology appeared in a letter published in the London Times. It was said that such an explanation was “little more than an application to philosophy and politics of ideas taken from crude popular misconceptions of the Darwinian theory (of ‘struggle for existence’, and ‘will to power’, ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘superman,’ etc.)”; and that there was, however, a work in English “which interprets biological and social progress not in terms of overbearing brute force and cunning, but in terms of mutual cooperation.” A reprint of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid was quickly published to emphasize that the war was not the result of an inherent aggression among the masses. It was their rulers who prepared the war, and their intellectual leaders who worked out its barbarous methods.
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