Books: February 2024

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution — Pyotr Kropotkin

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid was a surprising read. I was vaguely aware of him, knew he was an anarchist writing in the late 1800s, and expected dense, militant writing. But you open it and a dozen pages in are reading about the burrowing habits of squirrels. Fun read.

Kropotkin stakes out a middle position between social Darwinists who see life as fundamentally structured by conflict, a war of all against all, and Rousseau’s more Romantic view that people are fundamentally good in the pre-society state of nature. He says both are basically wrong. Species have evolved in ways that reflect “survival of the fittest,” but what makes animals fit, especially the most intelligent animals, is their capacity to cooperate. Animals (and people) mostly go out of their way to avoid conflict.

The first few chapters are full of clean, convincing examples from the animal world. Where things get hairier is when he enters the human world – “primitive” cultures, medieval cities, industrial societies. He seems fixated on the medieval city as the climax of human cooperation, with guilds, communal ownership, etc. In his telling, States emerge, dominate cities, and deliberately try to extinguish mutual aid behaviors. Why the State is able to do this, why they “want” to, is not super clear. But I did leave tentatively convinced that medieval cities had some good stuff going for them.

Something interesting about Mutual Aid is that the central premise – that humans evolutionarily prefer and benefit from mutual aid – doesn’t necessarily point to a particular political ideology. A free market libertarian who sees market exchange everywhere could look at this and say “yeah, he’s just describing markets.” Kropotkin clearly hates the State, which is why he’s an anarchist. But I’m not exactly sure why his evidence leads there.