The Neglected (II) Kropotkin

Abstract

PETER ALEKSEYEVICH KROPOTKIN WAS BORN IN MOSCOW IN 1842, the youngest son of a noble Russian family whose origins could be traced back to the Middle Ages. He died in 1921 in a small village some forty miles to the north of that city, a radical critic of the Bolshevik regime and a symbol for all those who believed that the Bolsheviks had perverted the original aims of the Russian Revolution. In the course of his life he had spent a long period of exile in Western Europe, had been imprisoned both in Russia and in France and had achieved international celebrity in two separate fields. The first was geography, where in particular his research on the structure of the mountain ranges of Northern Asia radically changed the received views of the scientific community. The second was the European anarchist movement, in which Kropotkin played a prominent role both as a revolutionary activist and a theoretician. Indeed these two careers were not as mutually irrelevant as they might at first appear, since the most distinctive feature of Qopotkin's anarchism was the attempt he made to place anarchist ideas on a scientific foundation, borrowing especially from the then-fashionable theory of organic evolution. In the assessment that follows I shall look first at his exposition and defence of anarchist principles, then at his efforts to place those principles in a framework borrowed from the natural sciences and finally offer a critical verdict both on the principles themselves and on the attempt to use evolutionary theory to back them up.