The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
It was 90 years ago this month, on February 8, 1921, that Peter Kropotkin died in Dimitrov,
then a small town in Russia about 40 miles north of Moscow.
He had been born in Moscow itself almost exactly 78 years before, on December 9th, 1842, but
he had spent at least half of the 78 intervening years living abroad, a few years in Switzerland,
a few more in France, though most of his time in France was spent behind bars, and for more
than 30 years, in England.
Kropotkin was of noble birth, Prince Kropotkin was the title he was born into, and like his
His father and his father before him, he was expected to become an officer in the Tsar's
army and pursue a military career.
The young Peter Kropotkin dutifully went to military school, and on graduation at the
age of 19, accepted a commission in the Tsar's army.
But to his father's disgust, he requested an assignment in Siberia, where he knew there
was little or nothing military for the army to do, so that he stood a pretty fair chance
of being attached to one of the various geographical expeditions that were busily mapping the region
and documenting its flora and fauna.
Geography and zoology, you see, were his true passions.
Military service was just something he was doing to please his father.
And Kropotkin succeeded with his underhanded and self-serving plans.
He became a military attaché on several geographical expeditions over the next few years, working
Working alongside the geographers and zoologists and winning their respect for his conscientiousness
and accuracy.
In 1867, at the age of 24, he resigned his commission in the army, whereupon his father
disinherited him, leaving him a prince with no visible means of support.
Nothing daunted, Kropotkin began putting himself through the University of St. Petersburg by
working as a salaried employee of the Russian Geographical Society.
In 1871 he led exploratory expeditions for the society in Finland and Sweden.
But by then his enthusiasm for geography and zoology, though still very strong, had begun
to play second fiddle to a more recently acquired enthusiasm for radical politics.
By some time late in 1872, near the time of his 30th birthday it would appear, he decided
he was an anarchist.
After the influence of these new ideas he joined an illegal society, the Tchaikovsky Circle,
which had been named for one of its members, a younger brother of the celebrated composer.
Though the Circle's principal activity seems to have been the publication of foreign books
in editions for Russian readers, Marx, Darwin and John Stuart Mill were among the authors
they made available, the members began gradually to be picked off, arrested by the Tsar's
In 1874, Kropotkin, now 31, was imprisoned for this crime.
After two years behind bars, he escaped and fled to Switzerland.
There he remained for the next five years, until in 1881, after the assassination of
the Tsar, the Swiss caved into pressure from the Russian government and agreed to expel
Well, all Russian nationals living on Swiss soil who were known radicals or revolutionaries.
Again Kropotkin fled, this time to France, but within a couple of years, thanks to the
continuing machinations of his enemies in St. Petersburg, he was arrested again, this
time by French authorities, who charged him with sedition and locked him up anew after
his conviction on these charges.
By this time, however, he was able to rely on his growing international reputation to
protect him from the worst of the mistreatment various political authorities had in mind
for him.
Since his escape to Switzerland from Russia almost a decade before, in 1876, when he was
33 years old, he had earned his living as a scientific journalist, contributing articles
to magazines and newspapers.
During these same years, the scholarly papers he had published during his time in Russia,
based on his explorations, had gradually percolated through the scientific community.
It proved very easy for his friends and supporters on the outside to organize petitions and letter-writing
campaigns in which some rather eminent persons participated.
After three years, the French gave in to the pressure and released Kropotkin.
Having tried Switzerland and France without much success, he decided to try England.
And England worked out for him just fine.
He lived there from 1886 to 1917, writing principally for Nature magazine, The Times
of London and an influential intellectual magazine of the day, The Nineteenth Century.
Yet when the Tsar's government fell in the February 1917 revolution and the way was cleared
for him to return home, he seized the opportunity.
He was 74 years old when he came back to a Russia he hadn't seen since he was in his
mid-30s.
Shortly after he arrived, the October Revolution installed the Bolsheviks in power, an event
Kropotkin publicly deplored.
Paul Average reports that he told one friend, this buries the revolution, and commented
further that the Bolsheviks were demonstrating how the revolution was not to be made, that
is by authoritarian rather than libertarian methods.
Kropotkin didn't live to see the worst consequences of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Revolution,
however, as we have seen by the time conditions in the larger cities had become as bad as
Ayn Rand portrays them in her novel We the Living, he was dead, and of course conditions
became far worse after his death than they had ever been before it.
Ropotkin himself played no small part in bringing this catastrophe about.
In the later years of the 19th century, his was one of the most influential of the voices
raised in support of the economic absurdity of abolition of private property, and the
rule of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Early in his career, he had lent his support to what was often called back then propaganda
of the Deed, terrorist violence we would call it today, intended to arouse the sleeping
masses to political awareness and political action.
He abandoned these positions early on, but not before he had committed his early ideas
to paper and thereby made certain of their influence over at least two generations of
young European anarchists and communists.
Nonetheless, Peter Kropotkin is one of the half-dozen cases of famous anarcho-communists
that I would say is worth a second look if you're seeking candidates for places in the
libertarian tradition.
In previous episodes of this podcast, I've said as much about Rudolf Rocker and Emma
Goldman.
I say it now about Peter Kropotkin.
Not only did Kropotkin awaken pretty quickly to the folly of his early admiration for violence
In order to understand this, it is necessary to understand first the intellectual world in which Peter Kropotkin came of age in the early 1860s.
Like all good students of that era and later eras as well, Kropotkin knew his Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes had written, 200 years before, in the middle of the 17th century, about the conditions
that had existed when human beings lived in what he called the state of nature, before
coercive governments were established.
Hobbes described the principal feature of this period as a war of all against all, and
the life of the average human during this time as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short.
Its conception of things seemed to be echoed in the language of Charles Darwin's On the
Origin of Species, published in 1859 when Kropotkin was 16 years old, with its talk
of how, as George Woodcock summarizes it,
In nature there is never enough for all, and that it is not desirable that it should be,
since the most potent force in the evolution of the animal world and of human societies
is the struggle for existence within the species, which procures the survival of the fittest
and thus ensures the progress of the race.
The problem Kropotkin confronted with respect to all this not long after his appointment
to a post in Siberia is described simply and succinctly in the opening pages of his most
famous work, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, first published in 1902 when he was nearly
of Money.
I failed to find, he wrote, although I was eagerly looking for it, that bitter struggle
for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered
by most Darwinists, though not always by Darwin himself, as the dominant characteristic of
struggle for life and the main factor of evolution.
What he saw instead was mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which made
me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the
preservation of each species, and its further evolution.
He concluded that life in societies enables the feeblest animals, the feeblest birds,
and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible
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Are so many qualities making the individual or the species the fittest under certain circumstances?
We maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle
for life.
Those species which willingly abandon it are doomed to decay, while those animals which
know best how to combine have the greatest chance of survival and of further evolution,
Although they may be inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin
and Wallace, except the intellectual faculty.
As George Woodcock notes, this argument is potentially important to anyone who wants
to allege that human society, with all its manifest advantages, can be carried on without
the protection offered by the state.
The argument was designed, Woodcock writes, to show that anarchist proposals could work,
because they were based on the constants of social relations among beings of all kinds,
human and animal.
It was also designed, of course, to put the quits to Thomas Hobbes' assertion that life
in the state of nature was a war of all against all.
Perhaps if life in the state of nature included mutual aid, then there could indeed be a free
Society, one in which force and the threat of force played no part.
In the 1960s, Barbara Brandon famously responded when asked what would happen to the poor and
disabled in a libertarian society that, if you want to help those people, no one will
stop you.
Kropotkin envisioned a human society in which more than a few would want to help those who
were poor and disabled.
When Peter Kropotkin died in February of 1921, these ideas did not die with him.
About three weeks before his death in Brooklyn, New York, a Russian immigrant couple gave
birth to an infant they named Murray, Murray Bookchin, who would do a good deal to advance
Kropotkin's main idea about human society.
Bookchin was what used to be known as a red diaper baby.
He grew up a Marxist.
He joined the Young Pioneers, the communist youth organization, at the age of nine.
But he devoted as much of his time as he could to reading and studying.
And it wasn't long before he began to discern problems in the faith he had been fed with
his mother's milk.
By the end of the 1930s, while still a teenager, he announced that he could no longer support
Stalin.
And after another few years, as a progressively more disillusioned and skeptical Trotskyite,
Years in which Bookchin, now in his twenties, did factory work and organizing for the CIO,
he began to feel that he had to reject categorically the coercion he had come to see as inherent
in conventional Marxism-Leninism.
By the time of his 29th birthday at the beginning of 1950, he had decided he was an anarchist.
And what earlier anarchist had impressed him and influenced him the most?
Why Peter Kropotkin, of course.
As William O. Reichert put it in his 1976 book, Partisans of Freedom, a Study in American
Anarchism, Bookchin shared Kropotkin's view that the evolutionary process we find in physical
nature has its counterpart in social development, and that we ignore this truth at our own peril.
To Bookchin it had begun to seem obvious that if Kropotkin had been right that mutual aid
was a principal factor of the evolutionary process for humans and other animals, then
it would be wise to treat mutual aid as the spontaneous natural process it is.
Reichard notes that for both the ecologist and the anarchist, the most striking characteristic
of nature is the spontaneity that lies at the bottom of every natural growth pattern.
Mutual aid as a natural growth pattern for our species is also, in a sense, what Friedrich
Hayek famously spoke of as a spontaneous order.
And when we see this, we see also that mutual aid needs our protection.
This is how Reichert summarizes Bookchin's argument.
Natural living processes atrophy and die to the extent that they are artificially restricted
and caged within imposed regimens of force and restraint, whereas they flourish and progress
whenever left to their own internal resources.
Here's how Bookchin himself puts it in his 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism.
The ecologist, insofar as he is more than a technician, tends to reject the notion of
power over nature.
He speaks instead of steering his way through an ecological situation, of managing rather
than recreating an ecosystem.
The anarchist in turn speaks in terms of social spontaneity, of releasing the potentialities
of people.
Both in their own way regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the creative
potential of a natural and social situation.
Their object is not to rule a domain, but to release it.
Reichert comments on this quotation from Bookchin in a way that would probably be surprising
to the man behind this idea, Peter Kropotkin.
As the above makes clear, Reichert writes, anarchism draws its inspiration not from the
modern world of science, but from the idea of nature as it has always been interpreted
during the previous periods of enlightened thought.
Nature on this view is not a defective system that needs to be discarded, but a highly ordered
living process that merely needs to be relieved of its artificial restraints to become the
magnificent thing it is.
Just as ecology seeks to right the balance of physical nature by allowing it to revert
back to its natural patterns of growth, so anarchism seeks to right the balance of human
society by allowing people to express their inner social inclinations.
There is a vital truth contained in ecology according to Bookchin, and this is that if
we wish to advance the unity and stability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize
it, we must conserve and promote variety.
If Bookchin's theory appears strikingly similar to the theory of laissez-faire formulated
by the enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century, we should not be surprised, for the
philosophical foundations of all anarchists stem from the same source.
Perhaps it was this common debt to the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
that led Bookchin to seek grounds for friendly relations with libertarians of our sort during
in the 1960s and 70s.
In the 60s, apparently in response to Murray Rothbard's friendly overtures to the new left,
Bookchin arranged to meet Rothbard, and for a brief time became an occasional visitor
in Rothbard's famous living room at 215 West 88th Street in Manhattan.
But the two men did not get along, and the time came soon enough when Rothbard threw
Bookchin out of his apartment, though the nature of the enormity committed by Bookchin
to make him deserving of such an eviction seems never to have been recorded.
In any case, Bookchin continued his friendly overtures to libertarians of our sort into
the late 1970s, when he spoke at at least one national libertarian gathering, the National
Convention of the Libertarian Party, held in Boston over Labor Day weekend of 1978.
In later years, Bookchin changed his mind about libertarians of our sort and about various
and its other things as well.
He even stopped calling himself an anarchist.
But however he characterized his political views at the time of his death nearly five
years ago in late July of 2006, his work in the middle years of the 20th century stands
on its own.
And the essence of that work was the updating and further popularization of an idea traceable
to Peter Kropotkin.
The idea that if human beings are freed from the burden of the state, they will naturally
find a way to live peaceably together.
They will create a spontaneous order and live in it harmoniously.
The idea remains an enticing one.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
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