One of my favourite books of all time. I even did my thesis on it. I would highly suggest it to anyone. Though negated by modern sciences and psychology you will be amazed how much of social Darwinism still lurks in today's "common sense" as manufactured by ones in control. Usually the arguments that are quite famous and repeated often to support capitalism and fascism still unconsciously arise from long negated but not yet dead social Darwinism. This work is the only complete response and scientific negation of social Darwinism. Social Darwinism in the past has been a weapon of fascists, totalitarians (tankies), and capitalists alike to support their arguments. You will be amazed how many common arguments in favour of racism, colonization, patriarchy and the mindset of such poisonous nature are production of social Darwinism. Kropotkin was amazing! I love all of his writings.

Each chapter could have been 1-2 paragraphs long and made the same point. All the examples felt very repetitive and like it was just making the same point over and over and over and over and over again.

Kropotkin comes with the receipts in this one.

For a long time there was an emphasis in science on the ‘war’ that constantly took place in the natural world. After Darwin published his theory of evolution, scientists wanted to claim that struggle between individuals made up the main focus of life. Struggle over resources, mates, habitats, etc. It was a very individualist way of looking at the natural world and, honestly, it did a lot to back up capitalist economic theories. But Kropotkin called bullshit.

Over the course of ~300 pages, Kropotkin draws from an incredibly wide variety of scientific and historical manuscripts to demonstrate just how widespread and essential mutual aid is to living creatures. Birds do it, bees do it too. He shows, in great detail, just how much living beings depend on other living beings. We see it in nature by watching birds, cattle, insects. We see it in human history from early tribal life all the way to our modern, industrialized world.

Considering just how long research takes even with our modern technology, it is no surprise that this book took Kropotkin close to 10 years to finish. I’m so glad he took the time to piece this work together. Especially in 2021, it’s important to remember that the only way we will survive is together. And we have to fight against the forces that seek to separate us. Because separation makes us weak, and opens up the possibility for great inequality (looking at you, billionaires).

I had this on my Kindle as a "backup" book for a while, because it was a free download from Project Gutenberg and I like Kropotkin pretty well (see some reviews I wrote of other books of his). I had chipped away at it piecemeal over time, on flights when I finished whatever other book I was reading and the like, but I recently went ahead and finished it (because I got a bunch of great free John Muir books as my new backups!).

This is an interesting hybrid sort of book. Kropotkin is an anarchist and also a gentleman-scientist, and his goal in this book is to show how "mutual aid" plays an important role, even a pivotal role, in the natural world, in evolution, and among humanity. I think we today are a little more used to this idea, but Kropotkin was writing this book during the heyday of Social Darwinism, so I think it was a bolder statement to contemporaries.

The first few chapters are about mutual aid in the animal world. Elise and I have watched a lot of nature documentaries over the years, and it struck me while reading this that it was probably the late nineteenth-century equivalent of watching a nature documentary--Kropotkin talks in some detail about the social organization of very many different kinds of animals, enough that you start to build a little picture in your head. Another very striking aspect of this for me was how very little was known about the lives of fish and other sea creatures at this time. Kropotkin essentially passes over them by saying that we don't really know anything about them. That gave me a strong appreciation for Jacques Cousteau, and the very real way in which he opened up an entirely new world for people. A reminder of how lucky we are to be able to watch "Blue Planet" today.

The rest of the book is about as you'd expect, giving illustrations of cooperation from "savage" societies and modern societies, and talking about ways in which the modern state works against them. One part that was very interesting for me was Kropotkin's depiction of the medieval European "free city." He really paints the era of about 1100-1500 as a high point for human societal flourishing, with practices of mutual aid taking their greatest historical extent (basically, extended to the level of the city but not beyond). This interested me because I think the common depiction of this time period is as a dark and backward era preceding the flourishing of the Renaissance. Kropotkin essentially argues that the social practices of the 1100-1500 period were what allowed the Renaissance to occur, but by the time it really hit its stride, it was already starting to be crushed out by the rise of states. This is certainly a heterodox telling, but I am curious how much historical truth there is to it. Kropotkin specifically talks about how the historical narratives that are passed down tend to focus on grand events and in particular conflicts, and generally pass over the lived experience of the common man (which includes a great deal of solidarity and relatively little conflict). I am sure this is true to some extent--and also probably less controversial a statement today than in the late nineteenth century.

As a prominent anarchist thinker, Kropotkin takes on the task of showing that the idea of human nature as fundamentally individualistic and antagonistic to other people is either a myth or has been extremely exaggerated in the interest of power. He tries to show that mutual cooperation and a leaning toward collectivism is an inherent part of human nature. He engages in a kind of rewriting/ revisiting of history to show examples of this trend in both humans and non-human animals. While I was primed to be convinced by his arguments, I wish his sources (especially the ecological/ scientific ones) were better cited, as he draws wide generalizations from small examples or even anecdotal accounts. The chapters on human civilizations were also pretty Eurocentric, but not exclusively so.

Dans ce livre Kropotkine nous fait réfléchir sur un aspect de l'évolution qui n'est pas souvent approfondis, l'entr'aide.

En partant des animaux puis en passant par les société tribales jusqu'à son époque, il détermine l'importance de cet aspect naturel pour la survie de l'espèce, mais aussi pour son développement culturel. Il démontre aussi sa puissance contre d'autres mouvances autoritaires.

Un livre très intéressant et facile à lire. Il permet aussi de comprendre son grand optimisme vis à vis de l'être humain dans son livre "la morale anarchiste".