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One of the most distinctive features of ethical socialism was the place it gave to personal transformation and communal utopianism. This chapter explores the intersections between this type of socialism and a new anarchism. For most of the nineteenth century, anarchists were individualists, favoring clandestine organization and violent revolution. Yet, at the turn of the century, there arose a new communal anarchism associated with sexual liberation and moral experiments. The prophets of the new anarchism were Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy, not Mikhail Bakunin. Its organizational homes included the Freedom Group and the Brotherhood Church. It inspired agricultural and urban utopias in places such as the Cotswolds, Essex, Leeds, and London. And it appeared in discussion groups aimed at transforming personal and private relationships, including the Men and Women's Club.

This chapter discusses public and popular views of Russian life, literature, and culture. Although there was generally a public revulsion against anarchists and nihilists, this was tempered by a belief that many of their activities were justified by the behaviour of the repressive regimes that had spawned the movements. The favourable reception in Britain of Peter Kropotkin underlined the fact that personal qualities could lift an anarchist above the general condemnation of the breed in the public's mind. However they interpreted Russia, it is clear that the British public had definite views of that country and for the most part, these views were unfavourable.

This chapter begins to develop a critical perspective by paying attention to views quite contrary to Mackinder's, expressed by his contemporary — the geographer and political philosopher Peter Kropótkin, who interpreted rather differently the social translation of biology. He shared with Mackinder an evolutionary reading of space, time, and organism but he meant something rather different by each of these. The crucial differences between Mackinder and Kropótkin involve their interpretations of history and community. Mackinder saw history as a struggle between races, or racialized-nations. The injunction was to compete or face extinction, or at the very least insignificance. Kropótkin saw history as a struggle between two principles: the social power of association versus the antisocial forces of capitalism and the State. Unlike Kropótkin, then, race was central to Mackinder's view of Empire; indeed the British Empire was needed precisely to preserve the British people, or the Anglo-Saxon race, in the global struggle for space and power. Kropótkin's alternative version of the social, rather than racial, bonds of communities promoted international federation and cooperation instead of civilizational conflict.

This chapter provides readers with background information for the volume, Moving Beyond Self-Interest (S. Brown, R. Brown, & Penner, 2011), which describes new developments in theory and research on human caregiving from evolutionary, neuroscience, and social science perspectives. Scientific interest in caregiving and its motivation is rooted in philosophical thought, especially those ideas that address the phenomenon of altruism. The chapter traces historical roots of scientific attempts to understand altruism, considering the views of important visionaries like Charles Darwin and Peter Kropotkin, as well as contributions from more contemporary thinkers, including biologists William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and David Sloan Wilson, and psychologists John Bowlby, Martin Hoffman, and Daniel Batson. The chapter’s conclusion underscores Berscheid and Collins’ (2000) clarion call for scientists to mount a serious effort to explore the ”caregiving construct”, and ends by noting that their call for action has not fallen on deaf ears. The cross-discipline efforts described in the Brown, et al. volume hold great potential for advancing our understanding of the caregiving system, extending the frontiers of behavioral science and public policy beyond self-interest, and addressing some of the most vexing problems ever to confront our species.

This chapter demonstrates how anarchism anticipates the thought of active equality and how the concept of equality as it is elaborated clarifies difficulties in anarchist thought. It also argues that it is equality rather than liberty that should be the founding principle of a collectivist anarchism. The concept of exploitation secures Karl Marx's economic analysis. Peter Kropotkin's definition of anarchism is then addressed. The resources of Rancière's become relevant for a re-reading and renewing of the anarchist tradition. Liberty is conceived in terms of equality. Anarchism has been the most dogged proponent of a democratic politics that the West has witnessed. Democratic politics of Rancière keeps a certain distance from anarchism. Anarchism establishes a historical trajectory out of which the thought and practice of a democratic politics should be read.

In the early 19th-century France, anarchists as political prisoners were granted with certain privileges. Because of this, Peter Kropotkin, one of the most feared anarchists, was not imprisoned for his crimes along with the common criminals. This chapter points out that a comparative history of Anglo-American punishment is similar to that of common law. Looking into the history of the English monarchy reveals certain features that are similar to that of the French monarchy. This chapter, aside from providing a detailed account of the standards and practices of England, also includes a discussion about status and punishment in the colonial era and how these two aspects served a great purpose as these dictated the mode of punishment an offender had to take.

This chapter announces Peter Kropotkin as the original convict criminologist through a discussion of his seminal, but little known work, ‘In Russian and French Prisons‘, published in 1887. The combination of conventional empirical research with personal experience of imprisonment in Russia and France equip Kropotkin with unique resources for a critical discussion of various aspects of prison life, the role of prison in society and the futility of political reform. The chapter proceeds with a wide-ranging discussion of the role that experience of imprisonment has played in the working lives of various European intellectuals, with varying degrees of connection to criminology. It concludes with an account of the way campaign groups in the UK and Scandinavia have worked with prisoners and ex-prisoners to generate pressure for change in penal politics.

In ‘The Struggle for Existence’ (1888) Huxley portrayed nature as a Malthusian gladiators arena in which only the strong survived. While this was the context from which humans had evolved, mankind had formed society to oppose these forces. However, anticipating his 1893 essay ‘Evolution and Ethics’, Huxley concluded that although an ethical society would preserve the lives of those that nature would otherwise have destroyed; they would breed and pass on their traits, becoming an ever-greater burden upon the rest. Society would ultimately succumb to struggle once more. The Russian émigré anarchist Peter Kropotkin communicated his vehement disagreement in a series of publications. Mutual aid and cooperation were just as much a factor in evolution as competition, especially among social species. While Huxley based his account of evolution on the competitive ethic that ran throughout Origin, Kropotkin's account was much closer to what Darwin had written in Descent of Man.

In early twentieth century Japan, socialists and anarchists appropriated evolutionary theory and reoriented evolutionary theory to the Left. They promoted ideas of materialism with a critique of the ideology of the kokutai and State Shintō, thus triggering clashes between evolutionary theory and the ideology of the state. This development was balanced by the emergence of new visions of evolutionary utopianism, with Buddhist and Christian variants. New theories of evolution were introduced, such as those of Kropotkin and Bergson, and theories of vitalism emerged as a new form of resisting materialism. Utopianists, such as Kita Ikki, Kagawa Toyohiko, and Nichiren Buddhists, used evolutionary theory to predict extreme optimistic visions of the future. Both the left and utopianists deployed evolutionary theory to produce visions of modernization and progress that were very different from the vision of modernization produced by the state or by the religious ideology of the kokutai.

This chapter provides a historical and historiographical overview for the book within the literature on Los Angeles and the United States/Mexico border. It also advances a theoretical program drawn from the anarchist notion of affinity based in a critique of Marxism and Gramsci being overly statist in orientation. Affinity is used as a way to understand organizing, social interaction, and ephemeral solidarities in formal organizations and away from them. It draws from Peter Kropotkin, William C. Owen, Errico Malatesta, Sébastien Faure, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, Michael Löwy, Rebecca Solnit, and James C. Scott. It closes by connecting the concept of affinity to the history of labor and radical organizing in and near Los Angeles.

This chapter explores Edith Wharton’s enactment of the removal of her childhood repressions in The Children—a novel of expatriate children banding together in anarchist solidarity against their ineffectual parents—by implementing a unique theory of transatlantic anarchism that allows the coexistence of the two irreconcilable veins of anarchism, the collectivist Darwinian-Kropotkinian and the individualist Nietzschean-Stirneresque, and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia based on his notion of Not-Yet-Conscious, derived from Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious and dreams.

This chapter outlines the idea of 'classical anarchism'. It presents a historiography of anarchism to illustrate the ways that assessments of Kropotkin's work have helped shape and articulate the classical idea. The argument is that the representational position that Kropotkin has assumed as a classical anarchist rests on a set of interrelated ideas about science. Kropotkin is a particularly good vehicle for these arguments because his work contains a wealth of scientific tropes. The chapter looks closely at the idea of evolution and at the role that the theory of mutual aid played in the 1960s in establishing Kropotkin's theoretical respectability and his reputation as an advocate gradualist non-violent change.

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.

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'.

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.

This chapter examines the impact of the outbreak of World Word I on the anarchist movement in London. In particular, it looks at how the war divided the anarchists between interventionists and anti-interventionists, and the eventual disintegration of the network of international solidarity that used to be the core of the experience of political exile. It also considers the debate between Petr Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta about the war and the issue of militarism. In addition, the chapter discusses Italy’s eventual participation in the war and the anarchists’ propaganda campaign against the conflict. Finally, it explores how the departures of Russian militants affected the colony of anarchist refugees during the war.

This chapter shows how “the Hobbesian hypothesis” (the claim that everyone is better off in a state society with a private property system than they could reasonably expect to be in any society without either of those institutions) appeared in Nineteen-Century Political Theory. As in the Eighteen Century, disagreement about the truth of the hypothesis produced virtually no debate. G. W. F. Hegel, Frédéric Bastiat, and others asserted it with very little supporting evidence. Henry David Thoreau, Herbert Spencer, Henry George, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John Robert Seeley, Henry Sidgwick, Henry Sumner Maine, and Peter Kropotkin all voiced various levels of scepticism, and some, especially Kropotkin, produced considerable evidence. Yet supporters went on asserting the hypothesis as if it were an unchallengeable and obvious truth.