Struggle or Mutual Aid: Jane Addams, Petr Kropotkin, and the Progressive Encounter with Social Darwinism

Abstract

the pluralist Volume 5, Number 1 Spring 2010 : pp. 21–43 21 the year is 1901. Two minor celebrities from opposite corners of the globe share an evening meal in Chicago. Both are politically left-leaning, both are evolutionists of a sort, both are concerned with the plight of the poor in the face of the escalation of the Industrial Revolution. The Russian man has been giving a series of lectures to the people of Chicago; he is staying at the American woman’s settlement house—Hull House. They are Jane Addams, Chicago’s activist social worker and Petr Kropotkin, Russian nobleman by birth, anarchist in politics, and naturalist by inclination. Each awaits publication of their first full-length book concerning politics and moral development: Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) on Addams’s part and Mutual Aid (1902) on Kropotkin’s. They discuss the status of moral development at the dawn of the twentieth century over dinner at Hull House. Odds are, such a meeting took place. Kropotkin, on his second tour of the United States, was indeed a week-long guest at Hull House in Chicago. Throughout the week Kropotkin gave lectures on “mutual aid” to various Chicago area organizations. The lectures Kropotkin gave were drawn from the essays he had published in The Nineteenth Century over the past seven years, essays which would shortly appear in book form, as Mutual Aid. I initially had hoped that an archival search would reveal telling discussions of evolutionary matters between Addams and Kropotkin. What I found in written documents were travel arrangements and complimentary thank-you notes—documents that did not further the analysis and provided no delicious details of those discussions. So it remains a task for thoughtful conjecture as to how those discussions illuminated the influence and the fine controversies of nineteenth-century evolutionary social thought. This article proposes to draw from their known writings to speculate on the substance of those conversations—what were their grounds of agreement; on what points