Editor's Note: The following excerpted from The Prince of Evolution: Peter Kropotkin's Adventures in Science and Politics by Lee Alan Dugatkin. Copyright (c) 2011 by Lee Alan Dugatkin. 

"…{He is} that beautiful white Christ which seems to be coming out of Russia… {one} of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience."
-Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was not the sort of man prone to effusive compliments. Who could possibly have merited such glowing praise from Wilde's typically satirical, razor-edged pen? That perfect life, the White Christ, belonged to a quite remarkable Russian scientist, explorer, historian, political scientist, and former prince by the name of Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin was one of the world's first international celebrities. In England he was known primarily as a brilliant scientist, but Kropotkin's fame in continental Europe centered more on his role as a founder and vocal proponent of anarchism. In the United States, he pursued both passions. Tens of thousands of people followed "ex-Prince Peter"—and that is how he was often billed—during two speaking tours in America.

Kropotkin's path to fame was unexpected and labyrinthine, with asides in prison, breathtaking 50,000-mile journeys through the wastelands of Siberia, and banishment, for one reason or another, from most respectable Western countries of the day. In his homeland of Russia, Peter went from being Czar Alexander II's favored teenage page, to a young man enamored with the theory of evolution, to a convicted felon, jail-breaker and general agitator, eventually being chased halfway around the world by the Russian Secret police for his radical—some might (and did) say enlightened—political views.

Both while in jail, and while on the run when he was entertaining and enlightening huge crowds, Kropotkin found the energy and concentration to write books on a dazzling array of topics: evolution and behavior, ethics, the geography of Asia, anarchism, socialism and communism, penal systems, the coming industrial revolution in the East, the French Revolution, and the state of Russian literature. Though seemingly disparate topics, a common thread—the scientific law of mutual aid, which guided the evolution of all life on earth—tied these works together. This law boils down to Kropotkin's deep-seated conviction that what we today would call altruism and cooperation—but what the Prince called mutual aid—was the driving evolutionary force behind all social life, be it in microbes, animals or humans. Traveling around the world, and trying to elude the Secret Police, simply gave Kropotkin the time, material and experience to develop his ideas.

Peter's theory of mutual aid came to him in the most unlikely of places. To follow in the footsteps of his hero, Alexander von Humboldt, when he was twenty years old, Kropotkin began a series of expeditions in Siberia. At that point, he was already an avowed evolutionary biologist—one of the few in Russia—and a great admirer of Darwin and his theory of natural selection.  Fifty thousand miles later, and five years the wiser, Kropotkin left Siberia a Darwinian. But he was a very different kind of evolutionary biologist: a new species of sort. For in Siberia, Kropotkin had not found what he had expected to find. Though still in its early gestation period when Kropotkin began his journey through Siberia, evolutionary theory of the day advanced that the natural world was a brutal place: competition was the driving force. And so, in the icy wilderness, Peter expected to witness nature red in tooth and claw. He searched for it. He studied flocks of migrating birds and mammals, fish schools, and insect societies.

4 Comments

1. 1. tomcloyd 03:33 PM 9/13/11

   I'm so very pleased to encounter this article, not having known of Kropotkin as anything by someone associated with promotion of the politics of anarchy. There's so much more to the story. This book excerpt outlines a truly heroic life, lived on a scale that is hard to imagine, much less comprehend. This is what a life CAN be, if one is up to it. I want to know more; I will now seek out this book. My gratitude to Lee Alan Dugatkin for telling the tale!

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2. 2. arete10 05:14 PM 9/13/11

   Thank you for this wonderful and insightful look at the ideas of Peter Kropotkin. His ideas have been unjustly ignored for two primary reasons:
   1) His understanding of the importance of mutual aid and cooperation in human society stood in sharp contradiction to the dog-eat-dog mentality of the dominant ideology - capitalism.
   2) His philosophy of Anarchism as the highest expression of a compassionate humanity was distorted by those who either didn't understand it or didn't want others to understand it. Like today's most prominent Anarchist, Noam Chomsky, Kropotkin understood the need to create a society in which both freedom and equality were achieved, and in the knowledge that one's own happiness must not depend upon the exploitation of others.

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3. 3. Cognosium 02:12 AM 9/14/11

   While there are, of course, many examples of interspecies and intraspecies competition, it is the gene, rather than the organism which is the competitive entity in Darwinian evolution so there is no real inconsistency.
   Cooperation between species is a hugely widespread phenomenon, as evidenced by the innumerable symbiotic associations observed in nature. Not to mention the tightly altruistic characteristic of swarms.
   Even the extreme belligerence of our own species (which, in my writings I propose as a prime generator of our unusual "intelligence") is generally directed towards those outside a group (tribe, nation, gang), while within the group cooperation is strong and indeed is reinforced by warfare. This is the source of patriotism.
   
   Such considerations are the wider evolutionary model advanced in "The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?" (a free download in e-book formats from the "Unusual Perspectives" website)

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4. 4. jgrosay 05:34 AM 9/20/11

   Besides Piotr Kropotkin, two famous anarchists come into my mind: first the Italian Errico Malatesta, that said when in his last illnes to the person that tryed opening a window to allow more sunlight coming in: "Shut it, I can't stand a Sun that doesn't glow the same for all people". A film by Peter Lilienthal,almost impossible to find, that was brought in 1970 to the Cannes Movie Festival summarizes his life. Another fellow in the same line of beliefs was the Colombian Vicente Rojas-Lizcano, aka "Biofilo panclasta" -lover of living things, destroyer of everything -, known among other things for his intense womanizer activity during the russian communist revolution, where he pretended being a member of the party to approach women. Mikhail Bakunin was considered also as founder of anarchism, but it seems he was also a free-mason, people that have a more hierarchical organization, finally not so anarchistic. Does all this connect to the "Anarchistic cookbook", offered in bookstores in the 80's ?

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