Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕
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Peter Kropotkin initially published the chapters of Mutual Aid as individual essays in the intellectual periodical The Nineteenth Century over the course of six years. In 1902 the essays were published as a book.
In it, Kropotkin explores the role of mutually-beneficial cooperation across both animal and human societies. He begins by outlining how animals, both within and across species, thrive not through individual fitness, but rather through mutual cooperation. He then extends the breadth of his study to ancient human societies across generations and nations, until arriving at modern society, which he suggests has largely dispensed with the ancient benefits of mutual aid in favor of private property, capitalism, and social Darwinism.
Though more of a philosophical work than a scientific work, many of Kropotkin’s observations of the animal kingdom are considered to be scientifically accurate today, with Douglas H. Boucher calling Mutual Aid a precursor to the theory of biological altruism.
As a philosophical work Mutual Aid, along with his other work The Conquest of Bread, is recognized as a foundational text of the anarcho-communist political philosophy.
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- Author: Peter Kropotkin
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Romanes’s Animal Intelligence, p. 472. ↩
Brehm, i, 82; Darwin’s Descent of Man, ch. iii. The Kozloff expedition of 1899–1901 have also had to sustain in Northern Tibet a similar fight. ↩
The more strange was it to read in the previously-mentioned article by Huxley the following paraphrase of a well-known sentence of Rousseau: “The first men who substituted mutual peace for that of mutual war—whatever the motive which impelled them to take that step—created society” (Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1888, p. 165). Society has not been created by man; it is anterior to man. ↩
Such monographs as the chapter on “Music and Dancing in Nature” which we have in Hudson’s Naturalist on the La Plata, and Carl Gross’ Play of Animals, have already thrown a considerable light upon an instinct which is absolutely universal in Nature. ↩
Not only numerous species of birds possess the habit of assembling together—in many cases always at the same spot—to indulge in antics and dancing performances, but W. H. Hudson’s experience is that nearly all mammals and birds (“probably there are really no exceptions”) indulge frequently in more or less regular or set performances with or without sound, or composed of sound exclusively (p. 264). ↩
For the choruses of monkeys, see Brehm. ↩
Haygarth, Bush Life in Australia, p. 58. ↩
To quote but a few instances, a wounded badger was carried away by another badger suddenly appearing on the scene; rats have been seen feeding a blind couple (Seelenleben der Thiere, p. 64 seq.). Brehm himself saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which was wounded; its wound was several weeks old (Hausfreund, 1874, 715; Büchner’s Liebe, 203). Mr. Blyth saw Indian crows feeding two or three blind comrades; and so on. ↩
Man and Beast, p. 344. ↩
L. H. Morgan, The American Beaver, 1868, p. 272; Descent of Man, ch. iv. ↩
One species of swallow is said to have caused the decrease of another swallow species in North America; the recent increase of the missel-thrush in Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush; the brown rat has taken the place of the black rat in Europe; in Russia the small cockroach has everywhere driven before it its greater congener; and in Australia the imported hive-bee is rapidly exterminating the small stingless bee. Two other cases, but relative to domesticated animals, are mentioned in the preceding paragraph. While recalling these same facts, A. R. Wallace remarks in a footnote relative to the Scottish thrushes: “Prof. A. Newton, however, informs me that these species do not interfere in the way here stated” (Darwinism, p. 34). As to the brown rat, it is known that, owing to its amphibian habits, it usually stays in the lower parts of human dwellings (low cellars, sewers, etc.), as also on the banks of canals and rivers; it also undertakes distant migrations in numberless bands. The black rat, on the contrary, prefers staying in our dwellings themselves, under the floor, as well as in our stables and barns. It thus is much more exposed to be exterminated by man; and we cannot maintain, with any approach to certainty, that the black rat is being either exterminated or starved out by the brown rat and not by man. ↩
“But it may be urged that when several closely-allied species inhabit the same territory, we surely ought to find at the present time many transitional forms. … By my theory these allied species are descended from a common parent; and during the process of modification, each has become adapted to the conditions of life of its own region, and has supplanted and exterminated its original parent-form and all the transitional varieties between its past and present states” (Origin of Species, 6th ed. p. 134); also p. 137, 296 (all paragraph “On Extinction”). ↩
According to Madame Marie Pavloff, who has made a special study of this subject, they migrated from Asia to Africa, stayed there some time, and returned next to Asia. Whether this double migration be confirmed or not, the fact of a former extension of the ancestor of our horse over Asia, Africa, and America is settled beyond doubt. ↩
The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii, 85, 95. ↩
Dr. B. Altum, Waldbeschadigungen durch Thiere und Gegenmittel (Berlin, 1889), pp. 207 seq. ↩
Dr. B. Altum, ut supra, pp. 13 and 187. ↩
A. Becker in the Bulletin de la Societe des Naturalistes de Moscou, 1889, p. 625. ↩
See Appendix V. ↩
Russkaya Mysl, Sept. 1888: “The Theory of Beneficency of Struggle for Life, being a Preface to various Treatises on Botanics, Zoology, and Human Life,” by an Old Transformist. ↩
“One of the most frequent modes in which Natural Selection acts is, by adapting some individuals of a species to a somewhat different mode of life, whereby they are able to seize unappropriated places in Nature” (Origin of Species, p. 145)—in other words, to avoid competition. ↩
See Appendix VI. ↩
Nineteenth Century, February 1888, p. 165. ↩
The Descent of Man, end of ch. ii, pp. 63 and 64 of the 2nd edition. ↩
Anthropologists who fully endorse the above views as regards man nevertheless intimate, sometimes, that the apes live in polygamous
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