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selenicseasThis book can be read in its entirety on the Anarchist Library.
I went into this book not knowing what it was going to be about. It gripped me from the beginning; the descriptions of animal behavior in the Mutual Aid Among Animals sections made me want to look more into nonfiction biology texts to see if I could possibly learn more. I highly doubt that was Kropotkin's intention.
The mutual aid chapters relating to humans are divided into different types of societies – savages, barbarians, the medieval city, and "ourselves" (then-present-day Europeans). Yes, those are the actual words Kropotkin uses; he was a European writing in the late 19th/early 20th century. Kropotkin doesn't focus entirely on European cultures – there are descriptions of mutual aid and cooperation in cultures from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia. He references plenty of other scientists and their work (the book comes with an appendix). Some of them, I assume, would be familiar to the reader in 1902, but the only one I was able to recognize was Charles Darwin.
Speaking of Darwin, it's obvious through Kropotkin's writing that social "Darwinism" was a problem back then as it is now.
The state's role as an antagonist to mutual aid is discussed in later chapters. What's also discussed is now communities continually turn to mutual aid and cooperation despite that antagonism, as mutual aid, rather than competition, is (what Kropotkin believes to be) the natural state of humanity.
I went into this book not knowing what it was going to be about. It gripped me from the beginning; the descriptions of animal behavior in the Mutual Aid Among Animals sections made me want to look more into nonfiction biology texts to see if I could possibly learn more. I highly doubt that was Kropotkin's intention.
The mutual aid chapters relating to humans are divided into different types of societies – savages, barbarians, the medieval city, and "ourselves" (then-present-day Europeans). Yes, those are the actual words Kropotkin uses; he was a European writing in the late 19th/early 20th century. Kropotkin doesn't focus entirely on European cultures – there are descriptions of mutual aid and cooperation in cultures from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia. He references plenty of other scientists and their work (the book comes with an appendix). Some of them, I assume, would be familiar to the reader in 1902, but the only one I was able to recognize was Charles Darwin.
Speaking of Darwin, it's obvious through Kropotkin's writing that social "Darwinism" was a problem back then as it is now.
The state's role as an antagonist to mutual aid is discussed in later chapters. What's also discussed is now communities continually turn to mutual aid and cooperation despite that antagonism, as mutual aid, rather than competition, is (what Kropotkin believes to be) the natural state of humanity.
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