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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Grey’s Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in Northwest and Western Australia, London, 1841, vol. ii, pp. 237, 298. ↩
Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi, p. 652. I abridge the answers. ↩
Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie, 1888, vol. xi, p. 386. ↩
The same is the practice with the Papuas of Kaimani Bay, who have a high reputation of honesty. “It never happens that the Papua be untrue to his promise,” Finsch says in Neuguinea und seine Bewohner, Bremen, 1865, p. 829. ↩
Izvestia of the Russian Geographical Society, 1880, pp. 161 seq. Few books of travel give a better insight into the petty details of the daily life of savages than these scraps from Maklay’s notebooks. ↩
L. F. Martial, in Mission Scientifique au Cap Horn, Paris, 1883, vol. i, pp. 183–201. ↩
Captain Holm’s Expedition to East Greenland. ↩
In Australia whole clans have been seen exchanging all their wives, in order to conjure a calamity (Post, Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familienrechts, 1890, p. 342). More brotherhood is their specific against calamities. ↩
Dr. H. Rink, The Eskimo Tribes, p. 26 (Meddelelser om Grönland, vol. xi, 1887). ↩
Dr. Rink, The Eskimo Tribes, p. 24. Europeans, grown in the respect of Roman law, are seldom capable of understanding that force of tribal authority. “In fact,” Dr. Rink writes, “it is not the exception, but the rule, that white men who have stayed for ten or twenty years among the Eskimo, return without any real addition to their knowledge of the traditional ideas upon which their social state is based. The white man, whether a missionary or a trader, is firm in his dogmatic opinion that the most vulgar European is better than the most distinguished native.” —The Eskimo Tribes, p. 31. ↩
Dall, Alaska and Its Resources, Cambridge, U.S., 1870. ↩
Dall saw it in Alaska, Jacobsen at Ignitok in the vicinity of the Bering Strait. Gilbert Sproat mentions it among the Vancouver Indians; and Dr. Rink, who describes the periodical exhibitions just mentioned, adds: “The principal use of the accumulation of personal wealth is for periodically distributing it.” He also mentions (The Eskimo Tribes, p. 31) “the destruction of property for the same purpose,” (of maintaining equality). ↩
See Appendix VIII. ↩
Veniaminoff, Memoirs Relative to the District of Unalashka (Russian), 3 vols. St. Petersburg, 1840. Extracts, in English, from the above are given in Dall’s Alaska. A like description of the Australians’ morality is given in Nature, xlii. p. 639. ↩
It is most remarkable that several writers (Middendorff, Schrenk, O. Finsch) described the Ostyaks and Samoyedes in almost the same words. Even when drunken, their quarrels are insignificant. “For a hundred years one single murder has been committed in the tundra;” “their children never fight;” “anything may be left for years in the tundra, even food and gin, and nobody will touch it;” and so on. Gilbert Sproat “never witnessed a fight between two sober natives” of the Aht Indians of Vancouver Island. “Quarrelling is also rare among their children.” (Rink, The Eskimo Tribes.) And so on. ↩
Gill, quoted in Gerland and Waitz’s Anthropologie, v, 641. See also pp. 636–640, where many facts of parental and filial love are quoted. ↩
Primitive Folk, London, 1891. ↩
Gerland, Anthropologie v, 636. ↩
Erskine, quoted in Gerland and Waitz’s Anthropologie, v, 640. ↩
W. T. Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences, London, 1866, p. 363. ↩
It is remarkable, however, that in case of a sentence of death, nobody will take upon himself to be the executioner. Everyone throws his stone, or gives his blow with the hatchet, carefully avoiding to give a mortal blow. At a later epoch, the priest will stab the victim with a sacred knife. Still later, it will be the king, until civilization invents the hired hangman. See Bastian’s deep remarks upon this subject in Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. Die Blutrache, pp. 1–36. A remainder of this tribal habit, I am told by Professor E. Nys, has survived in military executions till our own times. In the middle portion of the nineteenth century it was the habit to load the rifles of the twelve soldiers called out for shooting the condemned victim, with eleven ball-cartridges and one blank cartridge. As the soldiers never knew who of them had the latter, each one could console his disturbed conscience by thinking that he was not one of the murderers. ↩
In Africa, and elsewhere too, it is a widely-spread habit, that if a theft has been committed, the next clan has to restore the equivalent of the stolen thing, and then look itself for the thief. A. H. Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Leipzig, 1887, vol. i, p. 77. ↩
See Prof. M. Kovalevsky’s Modern Customs and Ancient Law (Russian), Moscow, 1886, vol. ii, which contains many important considerations upon this subject. ↩
See Carl Bock, The Head Hunters of Borneo, London, 1881. I am told, however, by Sir Hugh Law, who was for a long time Governor of Borneo, that the “headhunting” described in this book is grossly exaggerated. Altogether, my informant speaks of the Dayaks in exactly the same sympathetic
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