Prince Peter Kropotkin

Advocate of Cooperation

Пётр Алекс евич Кроп ткине́ о́9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921 was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geographer, writer, and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists.

WriterHe wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.

Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition

• This edition of the encyclopedia is one of the most renowned and romanticized

• It represents one of the last great repositories of knowledge before humanity lost its innocence in the First World War.

End of InnocenceWith the publication of the final volumes of the 11th, in the spring of 1911, came the last stand of the Enlightenment. One year later the Titanic would strike an iceberg. Three years later, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Five years later, a staggering 1.25m people would die in the Battle of the Somme. And the world would never be the same.

Written by the best-known scholars of the time

• Edmund Gosse, J. B. Bury, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, Peter Kropotkin, T. H. Huxley and William Michael Rossetti.

• Houdini

Hard Life Experience

• Cooperation or competition as defining motor of evolution?

An Alternative View

The Success of Species

• He argued "that it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human."

A Kinder, Gentler Conception• He used many real life examples in an attempt to

show that the main factor in facilitating evolution is cooperation between individuals in free-associated societies and groups, without central control, authority or compulsion. This was in order to counteract the conception of fierce competition as the core of evolution, that provided a rationalization for the dominant political, economic and social theories of the time; and the prevalent interpretations of Darwinism