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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Hanoteau et Letourneux, La Kabylie, ii, 58. The same respect to strangers is the rule with the Mongols. The Mongol who has refused his roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has suffered therefrom (Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii, 231). ↩
N. Khoudadoff, “Notes on the Khevsoures,” in Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv, 1, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a remarkable return to the old gentile rules. ↩
Dm. Bakradze, “Notes on the Zakataly District,” in same Zapiski, xiv, 1, p. 264. The “joint team” is as common among the Lezghines as it is among the Ossetes. ↩
See Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887. Münzinger, Über das Recht und Sitten der Bogos, Winterthur, 1859; Casalis, Les Bassoutos, Paris, 1859; Maclean, Kafir Laws and Customs, Mount Coke, 1858, etc. ↩
Waitz, iii, 423 seq. ↩
Post’s Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familien-Rechts Oldenburg, 1889, pp. 270 seq. ↩
Powell, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, Washington, 1881, quoted in Post’s Studien, p. 290; Bastian’s Inselgruppen in Oceanien, 1883, p. 88. ↩
De Stuers, quoted by Waitz, v, 141. ↩
W. Arnold, in his Wanderungen und Ansiedelungen der deutschen Stämme, p. 431, even maintains that one-half of the now arable area in middle Germany must have been reclaimed from the sixth to the ninth century. Nitzsch (Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, Leipzig, 1883, vol. i) shares the same opinion. ↩
Leo and Botta, Histoire d’Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i, p. 37. ↩
The composition for the stealing of a simple knife was 15 solidi and of the iron parts of a mill, 45 solidi (See on this subject Lamprecht’s Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken in Raumer’s Historisches Taschenbuch, 1883, p. 52.) According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and the iron armour of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five cows, or two years of a freeman’s labour. A cuirass alone was valued in the Salic law (Desmichels, quoted by Michelet) at as much as thirty-six bushels of wheat. ↩
The chief wealth of the chieftains, for a long time, was in their personal domains peopled partly with prisoner slaves, but chiefly in the above way. On the origin of property see Inama Sternegg’s Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, in Schmoller’s Forschungen, Bd. I, 1878; F. Dahn’s Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, Berlin, 1881; Maurer’s Dorfverfassung; Guizot’s Essais sur l’histoire de France; Maine’s Village Community; Botta’s Histoire d’Italie; Seebohm, Vinogradov, J. R. Green, etc. ↩
See Sir Henry Maine’s International Law, London, 1888. ↩
Ancient Laws of Ireland, Introduction; E. Nys, Études de droit international, t. i, 1896, pp. 86 seq. Among the Ossetes the arbiters from three oldest villages enjoy a special reputation (M. Kovalevsky’s Modern Custom and Old Law, Moscow, 1886, ii, 217, Russian). ↩
It is permissible to think that this conception (related to the conception of tanistry) played an important part in the life of the period; but research has not yet been directed that way. ↩
It was distinctly stated in the charter of St. Quentin of the year 1002 that the ransom for houses which had to be demolished for crimes went for the city walls. The same destination was given to the Ungeld in German cities. At Pskov the cathedral was the bank for the fines, and from this fund money was taken for the walls. ↩
Sohm, Fränkische Rechts- und Gerichtsverfassung, p. 23; also Nitzsch, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i, 78. ↩
See the excellent remarks on this subject in Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’histoire de France. 7th Letter. The barbarian translations of parts of the Bible are extremely instructive on this point. ↩
Thirty-six times more than a noble, according to the Anglo-Saxon law. In the code of Rothari the slaying of a king is, however, punished by death; but (apart from Roman influence) this new disposition was introduced (in 646) in the Lombardian law—as remarked by Leo and Botta—to cover the king from blood revenge. The king being at that time the executioner of his own sentences (as the tribe formerly was of its own sentences), he had to be protected by a special disposition, the more so as several Lombardian kings before Rothari had been slain in succession (Leo and Botta, Histoire d’Italie, i, 66–90). ↩
Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. I, “Die Germanen der Urzeit,” p. 133. ↩
Dr. F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, Berlin, 1881, Bd. I, 96. ↩
If I thus follow the views long since advocated by Maurer (Geschichte der Städteverfassung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1869), it is because he has fully proved the uninterrupted evolution from the village community to the medieval city, and that his views alone can explain the universality of the communal movement. Savigny and Eichhorn and their
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