Prince Kropotkin is one of the great political thinkers whose ideas on the nature of cooperation and its motive effect on evolution are very timely.

1. Prince Peter Kropotkin
Advocate of Cooperation

2. Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин
9 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.

3. Writer
He 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.

4. 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.

5. End of Innocence
With 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.

6. 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

7. Hard Life Experience
• Cooperation or
competition as defining
motor of evolution?

8. An Alternative View

9. 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."

10. 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