KROPOTKIN, Pytor (1842-1921). Autograph Letter, Signed 1897. A holograph letter from the principle architect and exponent of anarchist-communism, expressing his desire to make "personal acquaintance" with Franklin Henry Giddings, one of the founders of American sociology, during a brief tour of the Northeastern U.S. at the invitation of the Lowell Institute, where he lectured on "Mutual Aid," his antidote to the prevalent social Darwinism of the day. Though sharing an evolutionary perspective on social history, Kropotkin and Giddings had decidedly different interpretations of the basic engine and end of social evolution. A stay in England prior to his trip to America had convinced Kropotkin of the need to counteract what appeared to him as a near-religious devotion to the notion of "mutual struggle," which he considered a crude misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Himself a scientist, Kropotkin drew upon the work of the Russian zoologists Kessler and Syévertsoff to assert the pre-eminence of mutual aid over mutual struggle in both animal and human social evolution. Bolstered by his studies of animal, primitive, and medieval free societies, Kropotkin concluded that an anarchist social organization followed inevitably from the laws of social evolution and from the predominance of social over competitive instincts. By contrast, Giddings’s own take on social evolution led him to argue in Democracy and Empire (1900) for the inevitability of either a Russian or Anglo-American "Democratic Empire" incorporating "all the semi-civilized, barbarous, and savage communities of the world" -- that is, the very societies Kropotkin idealized as exemplary forerunners of an anarchist utopia. One side of a folded quarto sheet.

Kropotkin to Giddings

• Category: History - Culture - Art - Philosophy - Literature
• Keywords: Modern Thought · Russian
• Language: Englisch
• Inventory number: 5430LB

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