Summary of the book:

Written in 1887, core idea is that there has been too much focus by society on the role "competition" plays in the natural process of evolution. The story that "Mutual Aid" hopes to counterbalance is the following:

Man is instinctually greedy and evolution has endowed man with an "everyone versus all" mentality. Individualist thinking is the main instinct of animals and man as a result of evolution. It's the creation of the State that contains man's desires and capitalism that harnesses the individualist competitive desire as a productive force.

Kropotkin's theory is counter to this narrative. By looking at animals as well as various periods of the human species, he shows that mutual aid is much more prevalent and natural than competition between individuals of the same species. If anything, humans and animals will do mostly anything to avoid conflict. It is rare to find an example in the animal kingdom or human history where the dominating relationship is "one against all".

Review:

Kropotkin proves his theory well and I finished the book in agreement. I was surprised how much it had in common with prison abolition. In the beginnings of human societies, crime was extremely rare because everyone was accountable to the community. When the community was broken apart and the State gained control over all processes that the accountability was lost.

The reason I gave three stars is that to prove Kropotkin's point about mutual aid, it is mostly just him listing examples for ~300 pages. It would be nice to have more discussion of how to apply this knowledge since I agreed with him by page 150.

kropotkin is such a cool guy. like come for the ecology and history, stay for the genuinely uplifting rhetoric. this book is an affirmation that people are fundamentally good, that it is in our nature (and our best interest) to live cooperatively. it spits on the myth of rugged individualism and invites its readers to be a part of a larger whole.

“There is the gist of human psychology. Unless men are maddened in the battlefield, they ‘cannot stand it’ to hear appeals for help, and not respond to them. The hero goes;… the sophisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual-aid feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of pre-human life in societies.”
(page 160 in my edition)

Considering I first read this book in college, I'd be curious to revisit it and see how I feel. Essentially Kropotkin's argument is that societies function better when they cooperate than when they compete. He uses some scientific and historical evidence to back up his claims which had rarely been done by anarchist writers before.