Kropotkin Was No Crackpot: Mutual Aid as an Alternative to Darwin's Vision of Nature

4/7/2016 Stephen Jay Gould. Kropotkin Was No Crackpot, 1997
https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm
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Stephen Jay Gould 1997
Kropotkin Was No Crackpot
Source:1997. Kropotkin was no crackpot. Natural History 106
(June): 12-21;
Transcribed: for marxists.org in May, 2002.
IN LATE 1909, two great men corresponded across oceans,
religions, generations,
and races. Leo Tolstoy, sage of Christian nonviolence in his
later years, wrote to the
young Mohandas Gandhi, struggling for the rights of Indian
settlers in South Africa:
God helps our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal.
The same
struggle of the tender against the harsh, of meekness and love
against
pride and violence, is every year making itself more and more
felt here
among us also.
A year later, wearied by domestic strife, and unable to endure
the contradiction of
life in Christian poverty on a prosperous estate run with
unwelcome income from his

great novels (written before his religious conversion and
published by his wife),
Tolstoy fled by train for parts unknown and a simpler end to his
waning days. He
wrote to his wife:
My departure will distress you. I’m sorry about this, but do
understand
and believe that I couldn’t do otherwise. My position in the
house is
becoming, or has become, unbearable. Apart from anything else,
I can’t
live any longer in these conditions of luxury in which I have
been living,
and I’m doing what old men of my age commonly do: leaving
this worldly
life in order to live the last days of my life in peace and
solitude.
But Tolstoy’s final journey was both brief and unhappy. Less
than a month later,
cold and weary from numerous long rides on Russian trains in
approaching winter,
he contracted pneumonia and died at age eighty-two in the
stationmaster’s home at
the railroad stop of Astapovo. Too weak to write, he dictated his
last letter on
November 1, 1910. Addressed to a son and daughter who did
not share his views on
Christian nonviolence, Tolstoy offered a last word of advice:
The views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution, and
the

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struggle for existence won’t explain to you the meaning of your
life and
won’t give you guidance in your actions, and a life without an
explanation of its meaning and importance, and without the
unfailing
guidance that stems from it is a pitiful existence. Think about it.
I say it,
probably on the eve of my death, because I love you.
Tolstoy’s complaint has been the most common of all
indictments against Darwin,
from the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 to now.
Darwinism, the charge
contends, undermines morality by claiming that success in
nature can only be
measured by victory in bloody battle – the “struggle for
existence” or “survival of the
fittest” to cite Darwin’s own choice of mottoes. If we wish
“meekness and love” to
triumph over “pride and violence” (as Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi),
then we must
repudiate Darwin’s vision of nature’s way – as Tolstoy stated in
a final plea to his
errant children.
This charge against Darwin is unfair for two reasons. First,
nature (no matter how
cruel in human terms) provides no basis for our moral values.
(Evolution might, at
most, help to explain why we have moral feelings, but nature
can never decide for us

whether any particular action is right or wrong.) Second,
Darwin’s “struggle for
existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement
about bloody battle.
Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works
in many modes:
Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation,
symbiosis, and mutual aid
may also secure success in other times and contexts. In a
famous passage, Darwin
explained his concept of evolutionary struggle (Origin of
Species, 1859, pp. 62-63):
I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including
dependence
of one being on another, and including (which is more
important) not
only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.
Two canine
animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with
each other
which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a
desert is said to
struggle for life against the drought.... As the mistletoe is
disseminated
by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may
metaphorically be
said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt
birds to
devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of other
plants.
In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for
convenience
sake the general term of struggle for existence.
Yet, in another sense, Tolstoy’s complaint is not entirely

unfounded. Darwin did
present an encompassing, metaphorical definition of struggle,
but his actual
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examples certainly favored bloody battle – “Nature, red in tooth
and claw,” in a line
from Tennyson so overquoted that it soon became a knee-jerk
cliche for this view of
life. Darwin based his theory of natural selection on the dismal
view of Malthus that
growth in population must outstrip food supply and lead to
overt battle for
dwindling resources. Moreover, Darwin maintained a limited
but controlling view of
ecology as a world stuffed full of competing species – so
balanced and so crowded
that a new form could only gain entry by literally pushing a
former inhabitant out.
Darwin expressed this view in a metaphor even more central to
his general vision
than the concept of struggle – the metaphor of the wedge.
Nature, Darwin writes, is
like a surface with 10,000 wedges hammered tightly in and
filling all available space.
A new species (represented as a wedge) can only gain entry into
a community by
driving itself into a tiny chink and forcing another wedge out.
Success, in this vision,
can only be achieved by direct takeover in overt competition.

Furthermore, Darwin’s own chief disciple, Thomas Henry
Huxley, advanced this
“gladiatorial” view of natural selection (his word) in a series of
famous essays about
ethics. Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody
battle defined nature’s
way as nonmoral (not explicitly immoral, but surely unsuited as
offering any guide
to moral behavior).
From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about
on a
level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated,
and set to
fight – whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest
live to
fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs
down, as
no quarter is given.
But Huxley then goes further. Any human society set up along
these lines of
nature will devolve into anarchy and misery – Hobbes’s brutal
world of bellum
omnium contra omnes (where bellum means “war,” not
beauty): the war of all
against all. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must lie in
mitigation of the
struggle that defines nature’s pathway. Study natural selection
and do the opposite
in human society:
But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience
[to the
law of bloody battle] is the re-establishment, in all its intensity,

of that
struggle for existence – the war of each against all – the
mitigation or
abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.
This apparent discordance between nature’s way and any hope
for human social
decency has defined the major subject for debate about ethics
and evolution ever
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since Darwin. Huxley’s solution has won many supporters –
nature is nasty and no
guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of what to
avoid in human society.
My own preference lies with a different solution based on
taking Darwin’s
metaphorical view of struggle seriously (admittedly in the face
of Darwin’s own
preference for gladiatorial examples) – nature is sometimes
nasty, sometimes nice
(really neither, since the human terms are so inappropriate). By
presenting examples
of all behaviors (under the metaphorical rubric of struggle),
nature favors none and
offers no guidelines. The facts of nature cannot provide moral
guidance in any case.
But a third solution has been advocated by some thinkers who
do wish to find a

basis for morality in nature and evolution. Since few can detect
much moral comfort
in the gladiatorial interpretation, this third position must
reformulate the way of
nature. Darwin’s words about the metaphorical character of
struggle offer a
promising starting point. One might argue that the gladiatorial
examples have been
over-sold and misrepresented as predominant. Perhaps
cooperation and mutual aid
are the more common results of struggle for existence. Perhaps
communion rather
than combat leads to greater reproductive success in most
circumstances.
The most famous expression of this third solution may be found
in Mutual Aid,
published in 1902 by the Russian revolutionary anarchist Petr
Kropotkin. (We must
shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers
furtively stalking
about city streets at night. Kropotkin was a genial man, almost
saintly according to
some, who promoted a vision of small communities setting their
own standards by
consensus for the benefit of all, thereby eliminating the need for
most functions of a
central government.) Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, lived in
English exile for
political reasons. He wrote Mutual Aid (in English) as a direct
response to the essay
of Huxley quoted above, “The Struggle for Existence in Human
Society,” published
in The Nineteenth Century, in February 1888. Kropotkin
responded to Huxley with
a series of articles, also printed in The Nineteenth Century and

eventually collected
together as the book Mutual Aid.
As the title suggests, Kropotkin argues, in his cardinal premise,
that the struggle
for existence usually leads to mutual aid rather than combat as
the chief criterion of
evolutionary success. Human society must therefore build upon
our natural
inclinations (not reverse them, as Huxley held) in formulating a
moral order that
will bring both peace and prosperity to our species. in a series
of chapters, Kropotkin
tries to illustrate continuity between natural selection for
mutual aid among animals
and the basis for success in increasingly progressive human
social organization. His
five sequential chapters address mutual aid among animals,
among savages, among
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barbarians, in the medieval city, and amongst ourselves.
I confess that I have always viewed Kropotkin as daftly
idiosyncratic, if undeniably
well meaning. He is always so presented in standard courses on
evolutionary biology
– as one of those soft and woolly thinkers who let hope and
sentimentality get in the
way of analytic toughness and a willingness to accept nature as

she is, warts and all.
After all, he was a man of strange politics and unworkable
ideals, wrenched from the
context of his youth, a stranger in a strange land. Moreover, his
portrayal of Darwin
so matched his social ideals (mutual aid naturally given as a
product of evolution
without need for central authority) that one could only see
personal hope rather than
scientific accuracy in his accounts. Kropotkin has long been on
my list of potential
topics for an essay (if only because I wanted to read his book,
and not merely mouth
the textbook interpretation), but I never proceeded because I
could find no larger
context than the man himself. Kooky intellects are interesting as
gossip, perhaps as
psychology, but true idiosyncrasy provides the worst possible
basis for generality.
But this situation changed for me in a flash when I read a very
fine article in the
latest issue of Isis (our leading professional journal in the
history of science) by
Daniel P. Todes: “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian
Evolutionary
Thought, 1859-1917.” I learned that the parochiality had been
mine in my ignorance
of Russian evolutionary thought, not Kropotkin’s in his
isolation in England. (I can
read Russian, but only painfully, and with a dictionary – which
means, for all
practical purposes, that I can’t read the language.) I knew that
Darwin had become a
hero of the Russian intelligentsia and had influenced academic
life in Russia perhaps

more than in any other country. But virtually none of this
Russian work has ever
been translated or even discussed in English literature. The
ideas of this school are
unknown to us; we do not even recognize the names of the
major protagonists. I
knew Kropotkin because he had published in English and lived
in England, but I
never understood that he represented a standard, well-developed
Russian critique of
Darwin, based on interesting reasons and coherent national
traditions. Todes’s
article does not make Kropotkin more correct, but it does place
his writing into a
general context that demands our respect and produces
substantial enlightenment.
Kropotkin was part of a mainstream flowing in an unfamiliar
direction, not an
isolated little arroyo.
This Russian school of Darwinian critics, Todes argues, based
its major premise
upon a firm rejection of Malthus’s claim that competition, in the
gladiatorial mode,
must dominate in an ever more crowded world, where
population, growing
geometrically, inevitably outstrips a food supply that can only
increase
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arithmetically. Tolstoy, speaking for a consensus of his
compatriots, branded
Malthus as a “malicious mediocrity.”
Todes finds a diverse set of reasons behind Russian hostility to
Malthus. Political
objections to the dog-eat-dog character of Western industrial
competition arose
from both ends of the Russian spectrum. Todes writes:
Radicals, who hoped to build a socialist society, saw
Malthusianism as a
reactionary current in bourgeois political economy.
Conservatives, who
hoped to preserve the communal virtues of tsarist Russia, saw it
as an
expression of the “British national type.”
But Todes identifies a far more interesting reason in the
immediate experience of
Russia’s land and natural history. We all have a tendency to
spin universal theories
from a limited domain of surrounding circumstance. Many
geneticists read the
entire world of evolution in the confines of a laboratory bottle
filled with fruit flies.
My own increasing dubiousness about universal adaptation
arises in large part, no
doubt, because I study a peculiar snail that varies so widely and
capriciously across
an apparently unvarying environment, rather than a bird in
flight or some other
marvel of natural design.
Russia is an immense country, under-populated by any
nineteenth-century

measure of its agricultural potential. Russia is also, over most
of its area, a harsh
land, where competition is more likely to pit organism against
environment (as in
Darwin’s metaphorical struggle of a plant at the desert’s edge)
than organism against
organism in direct and bloody battle. How could any Russian,
with a strong feel for
his own countryside, see Malthus’s principle of overpopulation
as a foundation for
evolutionary theory? Todes writes:
It was foreign to their experience because, quite simply,
Russia’s huge
land mass dwarfed its sparse population. For a Russian to see an
inexorably increasing population inevitably straining potential
supplies
of food and space required quite a leap of imagination.
If these Russian critics could honestly tie their personal
skepticism to the view
from their own backyard, they could also recognize that
Darwin’s contrary
enthusiasms might record the parochiality of his different
surroundings, rather than
a set of necessarily universal truths. Malthus makes a far better
prophet in a
crowded, industrial country professing an ideal of open
competition in free markets.
Moreover, the point has often been made that both Darwin and
Alfred Russel

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Wallace independently developed the theory of natural selection
after primary
experience with natural history in the tropics. Both claimed
inspiration from
Malthus, again independently; but if fortune favors the prepared
mind, then their
tropical experience probably predisposed both men to read
Malthus with resonance
and approval. No other area on earth is so packed with species,
and therefore so
replete with competition of body against body. An Englishman
who had learned the
ways of nature in the tropics was almost bound to view
evolution differently from a
Russian nurtured on tales of the Siberian wasteland.
For example, N. I. Danilevsky, an expert on fisheries and
population dynamics,
published a large, two-volume critique of Darwinism in 1885.
He identified struggle
for personal gain as the credo of a distinctly British “national
type,” as contrasted
with old Slavic values of collectivism. An English child, he
writes, “boxes one on one,
not in a group as we Russians like to spar.” Danilevsky viewed
Darwinian
competition as “a purely English doctrine” founded upon a line
of British thought
stretching from Hobbes through Adam Smith to Malthus.
Natural selection, he
wrote, is rooted in “the war of all against all, now termed the
struggle for existence –
Hobbes’ theory of politics; on competition – the economic

theory of Adam Smith. ...
Malthus applied the very same principle to the problem of
population. ... Darwin
extended both Malthus’ partial theory and the general theory of
the political
economists to the organic world.” (Quotes are from Todes’s
article.)
When we turn to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in the light of
Todes’s discoveries about
Russian evolutionary thought, we must reverse the traditional
view and interpret
this work as mainstream Russian criticism, not personal
crankiness. The central
logic of Kropotkin’s argument is simple, straightforward, and
largely cogent.
Kropotkin begins by acknowledging that struggle plays a central
role in the lives of
organisms and also provides the chief impetus for their
evolution. But Kropotkin
holds that struggle must not be viewed as a unitary
phenomenon. It must be divided
into two fundamentally different forms with contrary
evolutionary meanings. We
must recognize, first of all, the struggle of organism against
organism for limited
resources – the theme that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that
Huxley described
as gladiatorial. This form of direct struggle does lead to
competition for personal
benefit.
But a second form of struggle – the style that Darwin called
metaphorical – pits
organism against the harshness of surrounding physical

environments, not against
other members of the same species. Organisms must struggle to
keep warm, to
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survive the sudden and unpredictable dangers of fire and storm,
to persevere
through harsh periods of drought, snow, or pestilence. These
forms of struggle
between organism and environment are best waged by
cooperation among members
of the same species-by mutual aid. If the struggle for existence
pits two lions against
one zebra, then we shall witness a feline battle and an equine
carnage. But if lions
are struggling jointly against the harshness of an inanimate
environment, then
lighting will not remove the common enemy – while
cooperation may overcome a
peril beyond the power of any single individual to surmount.
Kropotkin therefore created a dichotomy within the general
notion of struggle –
two forms with opposite import: (1) organism against organism
of the same species
for limited resources, leading to competition; and (2) organism
against environment,
leading to cooperation.
No naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life

carried on
through organic nature is the greatest generalization of our
century. Life
is struggle; and in that struggle the fittest survive. But the
answers to the
questions “by which arms is the struggle chiefly carried on!”
and “who
are the fittest in the struggle!” will widely differ according to
the
importance given to the two different aspects of the struggle:
the direct
one, for food and safety among separate individuals, and the
struggle
which Darwin described as “metaphorical” – the struggle, very
often
collective, against adverse circumstances.
Darwin acknowledged that both forms existed, but his loyalty to
Malthus and his
vision of nature chock-full of species led him to emphasize the
competitive aspect.
Darwin’s less sophisticated votaries then exalted the
competitive view to near
exclusivity, and heaped a social and moral meaning upon it as
well.
They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of
perpetual
struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one
another’s
blood. They made modern literature resound with the war-cry of
woe to
the vanquished, as if it were the last word of modern biology.
They raised
the “pitiless” struggle for personal advantages to the height of a
biological principle which man must submit to as well, under

the menace
of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual
extermination.
Kropotkin did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but he
argued that the
cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance
or even predominate
over competition in considering nature as a whole.
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There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going
on
amidst various species; there is, at the same time, as much, or
perhaps
even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual
defense....
Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.
As Kropotkin cranked through his selected examples, and built
up steam for his
own preferences, he became more and more convinced that the
cooperative style,
leading to mutual aid, not only predominated in general but also
characterized the
most advanced creatures in any group-ants among insects,
mammals among
vertebrates. Mutual aid therefore becomes a more important
principle than
competition and slaughter:

If we ... ask Nature: “who are the fittest: those who are
continually at war
with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once
see that
those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are
undoubtedly the
fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in
their
respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and
bodily
organization.
If we ask why Kropotkin favored cooperation while most
nineteenth-century
Darwinians advocated competition as the predominant result of
struggle in nature,
two major reasons stand out. The first seems less interesting, as
obvious under the
slightly cynical but utterly realistic principle that true believers
tend to read their
social preferences into nature. Kropotkin, the anarchist who
yearned to replace laws
of central government with consensus of local communities,
certainly hoped to
locate a deep preference for mutual aid in the innermost
evolutionary marrow of our
being. Let mutual aid pervade nature and human cooperation
becomes a simple
instance of the law of life.
Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the
teachings of mutual
hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the
attributes of science, from
obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the

feeling of human
solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart,
because it has been
nurtured by all our preceding evolution.
But the second reason is more enlightening, as a welcome
empirical input from
Kropotkin’s own experience as a naturalist and an affirmation
of Todes’s intriguing
thesis that the usual flow from ideology to interpretation of
nature may sometimes
be reversed, and that landscape can color social preference. As
a young man, long
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before his conversion to political radicalism, Kropotkin spent
five years in Siberia
(1862-1866) just after Darwin published the Origin of Species.
He went as a
military officer, but his commission served as a convenient
cover for his yearning to
study the geology, geography, and zoology of Russia’s vast
interior. There, in the
polar opposite to Darwin’s tropical experiences, he dwelled in
the environment least
conducive to Malthus’s vision. He observed a sparsely
populated world, swept with
frequent catastrophes that threatened the few species able to
find a place in such
bleakness. As a potential disciple of Darwin, he looked for

competition, but rarely
found any. Instead, he continually observed the benefits of
mutual aid in coping with
an exterior harshness that threatened all alike and could not be
overcome by the
analogues of warfare and boxing.
Kropotkin, in short, had a personal and empirical reason to look
with favor upon
cooperation as a natural force. He chose this theme as the
opening paragraph for
Mutual Aid:
Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the
journeys which
I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria.
One of
them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence
which most
species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature;
the
enormous destruction of life which periodically results from
natural
agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast
territory which
fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those
few
spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find –
although
I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means
of
existence among animals belonging to the same species, which
was
considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin
himself) as
the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main

factor of
evolution.
What can we make of Kropotkin’s argument today, and that of
the entire Russian
school represented by him? Were they just victims of cultural
hope and intellectual
conservatism? I don’t think so. In fact, I would hold that
Kropotkin’s basic argument
is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to
cooperation among
members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for
individuals. If Kropotkin
overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe
had exaggerated
competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate
hope for social reform
from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as
firmly (and for
motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial
conquest, racism,
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and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of
natural selection in the
competitive mode.
I would fault Kropotkin only in two ways – one technical, the
other general. He
did commit a common conceptual error in failing to recognize

that natural selection
is an argument about advantages to individual organisms,
however they may
struggle. The result of struggle for existence may be
cooperation rather than
competition, but mutual aid must benefit individual organisms
in Darwin’s world of
explanation. Kropotkin sometimes speaks of mutual aid as
selected for the benefit of
entire populations or species – a concept foreign to classic
Darwinian logic (where
organisms work, albeit unconsciously, for their own benefit in
terms of genes passed
to future generations). But Kropotkin also (and often)
recognized that selection for
mutual aid directly benefits each individual in its own struggle
for personal success.
Thus, if Kropotkin did not grasp the full implication of
Darwin’s basic argument, he
did include the orthodox solution as his primary justification for
mutual aid.
More generally, I like to apply a somewhat cynical rule of
thumb in judging
arguments about nature that also have overt social implications:
When such claims
imbue nature with just those properties that make us feel good
or fuel our
prejudices, be doubly suspicious. I am especially wary of
arguments that find
kindness, mutuality, synergism, harmony – the very elements
that we strive
mightily, and so often unsuccessfully, to put into our own lives
– intrinsically in
nature. I see no evidence for Teilhard’s noosphere, for Capra’s
California style of

holism, for Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. Gaia strikes me as a
metaphor, not a
mechanism. (Metaphors can be liberating and enlightening, but
new scientific
theories must supply new statements about causality. Gaia, to
me, only seems to
reformulate, in different terms, the basic conclusions long
achieved by classically
reductionist arguments of biogeochemical cycling theory.)
There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not
intrinsically anything that
can offer comfort or solace in human terms – if only because
our species is such an
insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So
much the better. The
answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be
discovered. They
reside, like the kingdom of God, within us – the most difficult
and inaccessible spot
for any discovery or consensus.
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Assignment 1: A Growing Small Business
Due Week 3 and worth 200 points
You made it! You received your master’s degree in Human
Resource Management, and now it’s time for you to start
seeking career opportunities. At this point, you may be a little
confused as to what areas you should focus on in HR since your
experience may be limited. Imagine that a friend shares with
you that he/she has a small but rapidly growing business which

is in need of an HR department. He has asked you to be the HR
Manager.
Your friend mentioned that he / she previously worked with an
HR consultant, but now has close to 100 employees with no
definite, dedicated HR department, and really needs your
assistance. Although you are nervous, you realize that it’s now
time for you to show your skills and put all your years of
studying into action.
Select an existing small company in an industry you are familiar
with to be the basis of the small business in this case. Review
the company’s structure, culture, business strategy, mission, and
vision.
Write a five to six (5-6) page paper in which you:
Provide a brief summary, in your own words, of your selected
company’s overall business strategy. Next, determine the
direction you visualize the company growing within the next
five (5) to ten (10) years. Hint: Review the common business
strategies of Cost Leadership, Differentiation and Focus or
Niche on p. 50 of your text.
Design a human resource management strategy to support your
selected company's business strategy.
Explain the competitive advantage of your HRM strategy. Hint:
Review the following common human resource management
strategies of Loyal Soldier, Bargain Laborer, Committed Expert
and Free Agent from previous courses.
Develop an HR Scorecard table for your selected company.
Include the four (4) dimensions (i.e., financial, customer
service, internal process, and learning / growth / sustainability).
Next, assess the value of your proposal to the small business in
each of these dimensions. Hint: Review the video titled

“Building the Human Resources Performance Measurement
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Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
By Peter Kropotkin
Converted to PDF by Stephen DeMeulenaere
Kropotkin, P. (1972a), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, New
York, New York University
Press.
Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS
Chapter 2: MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS (con't)
Chapter 3: MUTUAL AID AMONG SAVAGES
Chapter 4: MUTUAL AID AMONG THE BARBARIANS
Chapter 5: MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY
Chapter 6: MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY
(continued)
Chapter 7: MUTUAL AID AMONGST OURSELVES
Chapter 8: MUTUAL AID AMONGST OURSELVES (Con't)
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
INTRODUCTION
Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the
journeys which I made
in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of
them was the
extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most
species of animals
have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous
destruction of life
which periodically results from natural agencies; and the
consequent paucity of
life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And
the other was,
that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in
abundance, I failed to
find -- although I was eagerly looking for it -- that bitter
struggle for the means of
existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which
was considered
by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as
the dominant
characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of
evolution.

The terrible snow-storms which sweep over the northern portion
of Eurasia in the
later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often follows
them; the frosts and
the snow-storms which return every year in the second half of
May, when the
trees are already in full blossom and insect life swarms
everywhere; the early
frosts and, occasionally, the heavy snowfalls in July and
August, which suddenly
destroy myriads of insects, as well as the second broods of the
birds in the
prairies; the torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in
more temperate
regions in August and September -- resulting in inundations on
a scale which is
only known in America and in Eastern Asia, and swamping, on
the plateaus,
areas as wide as European States; and finally, the heavy
snowfalls, early in
October, which eventually render a territory as large as France
and Germany,
absolutely impracticable for ruminants, and destroy them by the
thousand --
these were the conditions under which I saw animal life
struggling in Northern
Asia. They made me realize at an early date the overwhelming
importance in
Nature of what Darwin described as "the natural checks to over-
multiplication," in
comparison to the struggle between individuals of the same
species for the
means of subsistence, which may go on here and there, to some
limited extent,
but never attains the importance of the former. Paucity of life,
under-population --

not over-population -- being the distinctive feature of that
immense part of the
globe which we name Northern Asia, I conceived since then
serious doubts --
which subsequent study has only confirmed -- as to the reality
of that fearful
competition for food and life within each species, which was an
article of faith
with most Darwinists, and, consequently, as to the dominant
part which this sort
of competition was supposed to play in the evolution of new
species.
On the other hand, wherever I saw animal life in abundance, as,
for instance, on
the lakes where scores of species and millions of individuals
came together to
rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in the migrations
of birds which
took place at that time on a truly American scale along the
Usuri; and especially
in a migration of fallow-deer which I witnessed on the Amur,
and during which
scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together
from an immense
territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross
the Amur where it
is narrowest -- in all these scenes of animal life which passed
before my eyes, I
saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent
which made me
suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the
maintenance of life, the

preservation of each species, and its further evolution.
And finally, I saw among the semi-wild cattle and horses in
Transbaikalia, among
the wild ruminants everywhere, the squirrels, and so on, that
when animals have
to struggle against scarcity of food, in consequence of one of
the above-
mentioned causes, the whole of that portion of the species
which is affected by
the calamity, comes out of the ordeal so muc h impoverished in
vigour and health,
that no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon
such periods of
keen competition.
Consequently, when my attention was drawn, later on, to the
relations between
Darwinism and Sociology, I could agree with none of the works
and pamphlets
that had been written upon this important subject. They all
endeavoured to prove
that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may
mitigate the
harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all
recogni zed at the
same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every
animal against
all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was "a
law of Nature."
This view, however, I could not accept, because I was
persuaded that to admit a
pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that
war a condition of
progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet
been proved, but

also lacked confirmation from direct observation.
On the contrary, a lecture "On the Law of Mutual Aid," which
was delivered at a
Russian Congress of Naturalists, in January 1880, by the well-
known zoologist,
Professor Kessler, the then Dean of the St. Petersburg
University, struck me as
throwing a new light on the whole subject. Kessler's idea was,
that besides the
law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual
Aid, which, for the
success of the struggle for life, and especially for the
progressive evolution of the
species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest.
This suggestion --
which was, in reality, nothing but a further development of the
ideas expressed
by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man -- seemed to me so
correct and of so
great an importance, that since I became acquainted with it (in
1883) I began to
collect materials for further developing the idea, which Kessler
had only cursorily
sketched in his lecture, but had not lived to develop. He died in
1881.
In one point only I could not entirely endorse Kessler's views.
Kessler alluded to
"parental feeling" and care for progeny (see below, Chapter I)
as to the source of
mutual inclinations in animals. However, to determine how far
these two feelings
have really been at work in the evolution of sociable instincts,
and how far other
instincts have been at work in the same direction, seems to me a

quite distinct
and a very wide question, which we hardly can discuss yet. It
will be only after we
have well established the facts of mutual aid in different classes
of animals, and
their importance for evolution, that we sha ll be able to study
what belongs in the
evolution of sociable feelings, to parental feelings, and what to
sociability proper -
- the latter having evidently its origin at the earliest stages of
the evolution of the
animal world, perhaps even at the "colony-stages." I
consequently directed my
chief attention to establishing first of all, the importance of the
Mutual Aid factor
of evolution, leaving to ulterior research the task of discovering
the origin of the
Mutual Aid instinct in Nature.
The importance of the Mutual Aid factor -- "if its generality
could only be
demonstrated" -- did not escape the naturalist's genius so
manifest in Goethe.
When Eckermann told once to Goethe -- it was in 1827 -- that
two little wren-
fledglings, which had run away from him, were found by him
next day in the nest
of robin redbreasts (Rothkehlchen), which fed the little ones,
together with their
own youngsters, Goethe grew quite excited about this fact. He
saw in it a
confirmation of his pantheistic views, and said: -- "If it be true
that this feeding of

a stranger goes through all Nature as something having the
character of a
general law -- then many an enigma would be solved. "He
returned to this matter
on the next day, and most earnestly entreated Eckermann (who
was, as is
known, a zoologist) to make a special study of the subject,
adding that he would
surely come "to quite invaluable treasuries of results"
(Gespräche, edition of
1848, vol. iii. pp. 219, 221). Unfortunately, this study was
never made, although it
is very possible that Brehm, who has accumulated in his works
such rich
materials relative to mutual aid among animals, might have been
inspired by
Goethe's remark.
Several works of importance were published in the years 1872-
1886, dealing with
the intelligence and the mental life of animals (they are
mentioned in a footnote in
Chapter I of this book), and three of them dealt more especially
with the subject
under consideration; namely, Les Sociétés A nimales, by
Espinas (Paris, 1877);
La Lutte pour l'existence et l'association pour la lutte, a lecture
by J.L. Lanessan
(April 1881); and Louis Büchner's book, Liebe und Liebes-
Leben in der Thierwelt,
of which the first edition appeared in 1882 or 1883, and a
second, much
enlarged, in 1885. But excellent though each of these works is,
they leave ample
room for a work in which Mutual Aid would be considered, not
only as an

argument in favour of a pre-human origin of moral instincts, but
also as a law of
Nature and a factor of evolution. Espinas devoted his main
attention to suc h
animal societies (ants, bees) as are established upon a
physiological division of
labour, and though his work is full of admirable hints in all
possible directions, it
was written at a time when the evolution of human societies
could not yet be
treated with the knowledge we now possess. Lanessan's lecture
has more the
character of a brilliantly laid-out general plan of a work, in
which mutual support
would be dealt with, beginning with rocks in the sea, and then
passing in review
the world of plants, of animals and men. As to Büchner's work,
suggestive though
it is and rich in facts, I could not agree with its leading idea.
The book begins with
a hymn to Love, and nearly all its illustrations are intended to
prove the existence
of love and sympathy among a nimals. However, to reduce
animal sociability to
love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its
importance, just as
human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have
contributed to
narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is
not love to my
neighbour -- whom I often do not know at all -- which induces
me to seize a pail
of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it

is a far wider, even
though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and
sociability which
moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not
even sympathy
(understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of
ruminants or of horses
to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love
which induces
wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces
kittens or lambs to
play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days
together in the
autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which
induces many
thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as
France to form into a
score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in
order to cross
there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or
personal sympathy -- an
instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men
in the course of
an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and
men alike the
force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and
support, and the joys
they can find in social life.
The importance of this distinction will be easily appreciated by
the student of
animal psychology, and the more so by the student of human
ethics. Love,
sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in
the progressive
development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not

even sympathy upon
which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience -- be it
only at the stage
of an instinct -- of human solidarity. It is the unconscious
recognition of the force
that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid;
of the close
dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all;
and of the
sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to
consider the rights of
every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and
necessary
foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. But
this subject lies
outside the scope of the present work, and I shall only indicate
here a lecture,
"Justice and Morality" which I delivered in reply to Huxley's
Ethics, and in which
the subject has been treated at some length.
Consequently I thought that a book, written on Mutual Aid as a
Law of Nature
and a factor of evolution, might fill an important gap. When
Huxley issued, in
1888, his "Struggle-for-life" manifesto (Struggle for Existence
and its Bearing
upon Man), which to my appreciation was a very incorrect
representation of the
facts of Nature, as one sees them in the bush and in the forest, I
communicated
with the editor of the Nineteenth Century, asking him whether
he would give the
hospitality of his review to an elaborate reply to the views of
one of the most
prominent Darwinists; and Mr. James Knowles received the

proposal with fullest
sympathy. I also spoke of it to W. Bates. "Yes, certainly; that is
true Darwinism,"
was his reply. "It is horrible what 'they' have made of Darwin.
Write these articles,
and when they are printed, I will write to you a letter which you
may publish.
"Unfortunately, it took me nearly seven years to write these
articles, and when
the last was published, Bates was no longer living.
After having discussed the importance of mutual aid in various
classes of
animals, I was evidently bound to discuss the importance of the
same factor in
the evolution of Man. This was the more necessary as there are
a number of
evolutionists who may not refuse to admit the importance of
mutual aid among
animals, but who, like Herbert Spencer, will refuse to admit it
for Man. For
primitive Man -- they maintain -- war of each against all was
the law of life. In how
far this assertion, which has been too willingly repeated,
without sufficient
criticism, since the times of Hobbes, is supported by what we
know about the
early phases of human development, is discussed in the chapters
given to the
Savages and the Barbarians.
The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which
were developed by

the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses, during
the earliest
clan-period of mankind and still more during the next village-
community period,
and the immense influence which these early institutions have
exercised upon
the subsequent development of mankind, down to the present
times, induced me
to extend my researches to the later, historical periods as well;
especially, to
study that most interesting period -- the free medieval city
republics, of which the
universality and influence upon our modern civilization have
not yet been duly
appreciated. And finally, I have tried to indicate in brief the
immense importance
which the mutual-support instincts, inherited by mankind from
its extremely long
evolution, play even now in our modern society, which is
supposed to rest upon
the principle: "every one for himself, and the State for all," but
which it never has
succeeded, nor will succeed in realizing.
It may be objected to this book that both animals a nd men are
represented in it
under too favourable an aspect; that their sociable qualities are
insisted upon,
while their anti-social and self-asserting instincts are hardly
touched upon. This
was, however, unavoidable. We have heard so much lately of
the "harsh, pitiless
struggle for life," which was said to be carried on by every
animal against all
other animals, every "savage" against all other "savages," and
every civilized

man against all his co-citizens -- and these assertions have so
much become an
article of faith -- that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to
them a wide series
of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different
aspect. It was
necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which
sociable habits play in
Nature and in the progressive evolution of both the animal
species and human
beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better protection
from their
enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter
provisions, migrations,
etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the development
of intellectual
faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the
same advantages,
the possibility of working out those institutions which have
enabled mankind to
survive in its hard struggle against Nature, and to progress,
notwithstanding all
the vicissitudes of its history. It is a book on the law of Mutual
Aid, viewed at as
one of the chief factors of evolution -- not on all factors of
evolution and their
respective values; and this first book had to be written, before
the latter could
become possible.
I should certainly be the last to underrate the part which the
self-assertion of the
individual has played in the evolution of mankind. However,

this subject requires,
I believe, a much deeper treatment than the one it has hitherto
received. In the
history of mankind, individual self-assertion has often been, and
continually is,
something quite different from, and far larger and deeper than,
the petty,
unintelligent narrow-mindedness, which, with a large class of
writers, goes for
"individualism" and "self-assertion." Nor have history-making
individuals been
limited to those whom historians have represented as heroes.
My intention,
consequently, is, if circumstances permit it, to discuss
separately the part taken
by the self-assertion of the individual in the progressive
evolution of mankind. I
can only make in this place the following general remark: --
When the Mutual Aid
institutions -- the tribe, the village community, the guilds, the
medieval city --
began, in the course of history, to lose their primitive character,
to be invaded by
parasitic growths, and thus to become hindrances to progress,
the revolt of
individuals against these institutions took always two different
aspects. Part of
those who rose up strove to purify the old institutions, or to
work out a higher
form of commonwealth, based upon the same Mutual Aid
principles; they tried,
for instance, to introduce the principle of "compensation,"
instead of the lex
talionis, and later on, the pardon of offences, or a still higher
ideal of equality
before the human conscience, in lieu of "compensation,"

according to class-
value. But at the very same time, another portion of the same
individual rebels
endeavoured to break down the protective institutions of mutual
support, with no
other intention but to increase their own wealth and their own
powers. In this
three-cornered contest, between the two classes of revolted
individuals and the
supporters of what existed, lies the real tragedy of history. But
to delineate that
contest, and honestly to study the part played in the evolution of
mankind by
each one of these three forces, would require at least as many
years as it took
me to write this book.
Of works dealing with nearly the same subject, which have been
published since
the publication of my articles on Mutual Aid among Animals, I
must mention The
Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man, by Henry Drummond
(London, 1894), and
The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, by A. Sutherland
(London, 1898).
Both are constructed chiefly on the lines taken in Büchner's
Love, and in the
second work the parental and familial feeling as the sole
influence at work in the
development of the moral feelings has been dealt with at some
length. A third
work dealing with man and written on similar lines is The
Principles of Sociology,
by Prof. F.A. Giddings, the first edition of which was published
in 1896 at New
York and London, and the leading ideas of which were sketched

by the author in
a pamphlet in 1894. I must leave, however, to literary critics the
task of
discussing the points of contact, resemblance, or divergence
between these
works and mine.
The different chapters of this book were published first in the
Nineteenth Century
("Mutual Aid among Animals," in September and November
1890; "Mutual Aid
among Savages," in April 1891; "Mutual Aid among the
Barbarians," in January
1892; "Mutual Aid in the Medieval City," in August and
September 1894; and
"Mutual Aid amongst Modern Men," in January and June 1896).
In bringing them
out in a book form my first intention was to embody in an
Appendix the mass of
materials, as well as the discussion of several secondary points,
which had to be
omitted in the review articles. It appeared, however, that the
Appendix would
double the size of the book, and I was compelled to abandon, or,
at least, to
postpone its publication. The present Appendix includes the
discussion of only a
few points which have been the matter of scientific controversy
during the last
few years; and into the text I have introduced only such matter
as could be
introduced without altering the structure of the work.

I am glad of this opportunity for expressing to the editor of the
Nineteenth
Century, Mr. James Knowles, my very best thanks, both for the
kind hospitality
which he offered to these papers in his review, as soon as he
knew their general
idea, and the permission he kindly gave me to reprint them.
Bromley, Kent, 1902.
Chapter 1
MUTUAL AID AMONG ANIMALS
Struggle for existence. -- Mutual Aid -- a law of Nature and
chief factor of
progressive evolution. -- Invertebrates. -- Ants and Bees --
Birds: Hunting and
fishing associations. -- Sociability. -- Mutual protection among
small birds. --
Cranes; parrots.
The conception of struggle for existence as a factor of
evolution, introduced into
science by Darwin and Wallace, has permitted us to embrace an
immensely wide
range of phenomena in one single generalization, which soon
became the very
basis of our philosophical, biological, and sociological
speculations. An immense
variety of facts: -- adaptations of function and structure of
organic beings to their
surroundings; physiological and anatomical evolution;
intellectual progress, and
moral development itself, which we formerly used to explain by
so many different

causes, were embodied by Darwin in one general conception.
We understood
them as continued endeavours -- as a struggle against adverse
circumstances --
for such a development of individuals, races, species and
societies, as would
result in the greatest possible fullness, variety, and intensity of
life. It may be that
at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the
generality of the factor
which he first invoked for explaining one series only of facts
relative to the

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