An American evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Stephen J. Gould, wrote the following in his essay titled “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot”: “More generally, I like to apply a somewhat cynical rule of thumb in judging arguments about nature that also have overt social implications: When such claims imbue nature with just those properties that make us feel good or[Read More…]

  “The function of ethics is not even so much to insist upon the defects of man, and to reproach him with his ‘sins,’ as to act in the positive direction, by appealing to man’s best instincts.”[1] Those best instincts are the very ones that urge us to engage in acts of mutual-aid, justice, and self-sacrifice. Peter Kropotkin writes that nature is[Read More…]

According to N. Lebedev, Kropotkin’s editor with whom he frequently corresponded both in person and through letters, two central reasons prompted the celebrated anarchist to devote the last years of his life to writing about the fundamental questions of ethics. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw an influx of ideas about the relativity of ethical conduct and even[Read More…]

  George Woodcock, a prominent Canadian writer and anarchist thinker, writes that anarchism’s “ultimate aim is always social change; its present attitude is always one of social condemnation, even though it may proceed from an individualist view of man’s nature; its method is always that of social revolution, violent or otherwise.”[1] Peter Kropotkin was not a pacifist. More often than[Read More…]