Introduction to Part 2

Nicholas Walter’s irritation with Wilde’s tribute to Kropotkin stemmed from the symbolism that attached to Kropotkin’s goodness and the purity of his vision. Yet for all its extravagance, Wilde’s phrase is richly suggestive. Woodcock and Avakumović use Wilde’s accolade as a chapter heading, reduced to ‘White Jesus’. Kropotkin’s nobility is trumpeted and the idea of his removal from Russia is subsumed by his virtues. Read differently, Wilde’s handle rightly directs attention to the character of Kropotkin’s politics when he came out of Russia in 1876....

From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism

This chapter examines contemporary anarchist critiques of Kropotkin, especially post-anarchist analysis. It argues that science has become a byword to describe Kropotkin's political theory, providing an exemplar for classical anarchism. This theory is described as teleological, based on a particular concept of human nature and linked to a form of revolutionary utopianism that promises the realisation of anarchy. Post-anarchists dissolve the distance between Kropotkin and Bakunin that advocates of his evolutionary theory invented in the 1960s in order to rescue anarchism from its reputation for violence. This repackaging of historical traditions underpins judgments about the irrelevance of anarchism to contemporary politics and political theory. In response, critics of post-anarchism have sought to defend nineteenth-century revolutionary traditions. The result of this argument is that Kropotkin emerges as a political theorist of class struggle. This defence raises significant questions about the coherence of Kropotkin's position on the war in 1914.

Introduction

Peter Kropotkin has an unenviable reputation for being one of the foremost anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century. Keeping company with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, famous for adopting the epithet ‘anarchist’ to describe his political views and Mikhail Bakunin, Marx’s fiercest foe, he is also often said to be the most accessible anarchist. There are a number of reasons for this: he left a substantial body of work that gives a good account of his conception of anarchism; he published a substantial part of this work in English; and perhaps above all, he took a leading role in the propagation of anarchist ideas and exercised a profound influence on nineteenth-and twentieth-century activist movements. Pre-eminence in a political tradition is not typically disadvantageous to an individual, except where the tradition itself is outlawed. Kropotkin’s reputation as one of anarchism’s central figures and canonical writers is unenviable nevertheless, not just because his work has attracted sustained attention from critics and protagonists within and outside the anarchist movement, but also because he has assumed a representative status as an anarchist of a particular type. Probably more than any other anarchist, Kropotkin defines classical anarchism....

Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition

This chapter returns to the major theme of the book, Kropotkin's association with classical anarchism. It argues that the label is distorting of Kropotkin's work and that it sets up a caricature of anarchism which is misleading and unhelpful. It also reflects on Kropotkin's decision to support the Entente to argue that disagreements about the meaning of concepts of militarism and antimilitarism, nationalism and internationalism highlight significant divisions within the anarchist movement which remain under-examined, if not neglected.

Conclusion to Part 3

In his critical, melancholy reminiscence of Kropotkin, Malatesta made a number of significant claims about his anarchism. First, it traced a progressive evolution, leading to emancipation understood as a singular condition. Like Malatesta, Kropotkin was an optimist, who saw ‘things rose-coloured’. They both hoped for ‘an early revolution which would realize our ideals’. But in Kropotkin’s work, this optimism fuelled a rigid theorisation of anarchy, for he was also a scientist and a ‘social reformer’, ‘pressed’ by ‘the desire to know and the desire to bring about the well-being of humanity’. Second, Kropotkin was fully immersed in the conventions of his time. He ‘professed the materialist philosophy which dominated the scientists of the second half of the nineteenth century’ and ‘wanted to reduce all to a unity’. Third, his ‘conception of the universe was rigorously mechanical’ and consequently deterministic. According to Kropotkin’s system, individual will ‘does not exist and is a mere illusion’. Malatesta continues:...

Nihilism

This chapter examines Kropotkin's understanding of nihilism and uses his sympathetic account of the Russian movement to re-consider his approach to science. It shows how Kropotkin approached nihilism in the 1890s as a critic of Nietzscheanism and as an interpreter of Russian literature and uses his warm appreciations of Turgenev and Chernyshevksy to develop the framework for his analysis of the nihilist movement. One of the striking features of Kropotkin's defence of nihilism is his analysis of the feminist currents within the Russian revolutionary movement. While nihilism shaped Kropotkin's approach to science, the example of women's movement moulded his understanding of ethics and the chapter shows how by illustrating the nihilist themes of his essay, 'An Appeal to the Young'.

Mapping the State

This chapter outlines three parallel accounts of the state that Kropotkin developed in the 1870s and 1880s as an anarchist critic of Tsarism. The first was an explanatory account for West European audiences and it described the iniquities of the Tsarist regime, and the social, economic and political problems that Russian revolutionaries were attempting to address. The second was a general anarchist critique that probed ideas of class and slavery and set out the reasons why constitutional solutions being proposed by radicals in Russia and elsewhere would fail to bring about social transformation. The third was an examination of the dynamics of change that drew directly on Kropotkin's understanding of geography. Kropotkin applied this to distinguish between nations and states and to develop ideas of colonisation, monopoly and a politics of anti-statecraft. By looking at the dynamics of the state, Kropotkin also explored the relationship between the state and capitalism and the power relationships of the international system. This analysis led him to identify Germany as the central power in Europe.

Conclusion to Part 1

The pre-eminent position that Kropotkin attained as an exponent of anarchism in anarchism’s second wave explains the exhaustion of his political thought in its post-anarchist third incarnation. Kropotkin achieved canonical status as a classical anarchist. Instead of questioning the premises of this representation of his ideas, third-wave anarchists accepted it and used it against him, rejecting Kropotkin as an exponent of classical anarchism. The most important challenge to this view reverses the judgements of dominant second-wave new anarchists, reinforcing an association with a form of revolutionary politics that the third-wave activists hold at arm’s length. In many ways, Kropotkin emerges as an old man: worthy but out-of-time....

Introduction to Part 3

As Kropotkin’s exile advanced, he developed the ideas he had set out in the 1880s to challenge the cultural prejudices that dismissed anarchist organising as unviable. Publishing some of his best known work during this period, notably Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution, The Conquest of Bread...

Conclusion to Part 2

Kropotkin described the work he completed for Le Révolté as the ‘foundation of nearly all I have written later on’.1 What did that mean? His early writings pointed up several themes: that anarchism was an ethical approach to politics; that the problems that socialists confronted were global; that science, construed poetically, offered a key to the resolution of those problems; that submissiveness and passivity were fatal barriers to social change and social solidarity was a catalyst for action; that change was a principle of life on Earth; and that fluid movements forged across diverse populations offered a model for cooperative living. Kropotkin presented these ideas in a distinctive way, using nihilism as his touchstone, but in developing his positions on nationality, slavery and the cementation of elite power, he aligned himself with Proudhonist and Bakuninist anti-authoritarianism. And his commentary on the Paris Commune formalised the ideological division that this alignment signalled. Yet there is scant evidence in Kropotkin’s early writings that his identification with anti-authoritarian politics was a launch-pad for a theory resembling classical anarchism....