'Anarchism', in the Encyclopaedia Britannica

Name: 'Anarchism', in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Author: Peter Kropotkin

by Peter Kropotkin

I’m not sure who invited him but, by 1911, Kropotkin was certainly quite established within literary circles. He was exiled from Russia, and spent the first part of his exile in Switzerland and France, where he was sent to prison. There was a big campaign to get him released, and he came to England in the early 1880s. He was known as a geographer, a scientist, and an aristocrat. There was certainly a negative press against him, but he also had a bedrock of support, and he was well integrated in some literary circles. So it’s not surprising that he would have been asked to write something on anarchism for the Britannica. Of course I can’t imagine someone like him being invited to write an encyclopedic article now. It can seem odd, but really the early 20th century was a different time, and they simply thought of him as an expert. There had already been a couple of books published on anarchism, one by the Austrian journalist Ernst Viktor Zenker, and another famous one by the German law professor Paul Eltzbacher. So anarchism was getting coverage, people were trying to work out what it meant. In his article, Kropotkin also mentions Leo Tolstoy , who by that time had already done a lot to promote anarchist ideas, even though he didn’t call himself an anarchist. So these ideas were circulating, and being taken seriously in some quarters. For a long time I thought this entry on anarchism in the Britannica was quite dull. I always preferred his shorter and earlier essays; his Appeal To The Young is a fantastic piece of writing. But the more I read the entry, the better I think it is. In a way, the whole article is a definition, and he looks at anarchism from many different perspectives. He starts off with this idea that anarchism is about free agreement, and he tries to unpack what ‘free agreement’ means. It’s not a contract, it’s any kind of accord that you enter into voluntarily; it’s a very liberal idea, in a way. But he takes away any kind of authority from it, by saying that free agreement can only come from the bottom, and through negotiation with your fellow beings, with whom you live and you share outlooks. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Free agreement is what defines your politics, and it’s linked theoretically to ideas of fluidity and flux. In anarchy there’s no such thing as a final accord, or a set of rules against which we judge everything else. It’s a process we enter into. That’s the starting point. He then explains that this idea has been around forever: we can see it in the Greeks, in ancient Chinese thought, it’s everywhere. It was crystallised in the modern day through the organisation of the First International. From the 1860s onwards, we see a political movement we can call anarchist, which is taking this timeless idea of fluidity, flux and free agreement, and putting it within the particular context of the struggle of workers against exploiters. He also talks about masters and slaves, and domination. In this sense he says that you can put anarchism on the left of socialism, because anarchists are not people who simply want to take control of the government and use its instruments in order to bring about equality; they want to completely abolish this system that imposes sets of rules and regulations that you must always judge your practice against. That’s why it’s on the left. One of the things I like about this essay is that Kropotkin tries to distinguish the concept of ‘anarchy’ from the ideology of ‘anarchism’. There is a resistance politics and there’s an idea, based on the assertion of individual sovereignty, that admits that people are born into a social context, but that ultimately, any decision that they make must revert back to them. Proudhon is important because he’s the first person to use the concept that everybody fears, anarchy, and define it positively. In doing so, he establishes the springboard for the anarchist movement. For him, anarchy is not, as conventional thought would have it, the corruption of democracy, it’s something that we should embrace wholeheartedly. That’s a huge statement to make. Kropotkin does a great job of asking what anarchy means, in terms of freedom, fluidity and change. And when Proudhon calls himself an anarchist, that’s exactly what he’s talking about: the flow of free forces, and the way in which people interact without third-party intervention. Kropotkin liked to quote the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, saying: “Take a box of stones and shake them, and they’ll organise themselves.” When anarchists say that individuals cooperate, they don’t mean that they’re necessarily good, just that they’re cooperative. Their critique of both Hobbes and Rousseau is that in their thought experiments, people are alone. And their isolation sets the conditions for their survival. It means that they end up competing with one another. But there are no conditions in the world where people are alone. Anarchists say that when people find themselves living in conditions where there are limited resources, their best option is to cooperate, because you can provide much more through collaboration than as a single person. And cooperation will breed its own rules; it’s not for anybody outside this framework to judge what the rules should be. The rules will change over time, and people will adopt new practices, but they will always be cooperative. Proudhon distinguishes between two types of property: property in use, and property as dominion. When he says that property is theft, he’s talking about the constitutional right to exclusive ownership. If the constitution upholds somebody’s right to exclusively possess land, labour, or anything, then that necessarily sets up an inequality, because we have limited resources. Some people will become owners, and others will be dispossessed as a result. The insight here is that there is no moral basis for individual ownership. In the world, everything belongs to everybody in common; you have to invent a principle to justify why I should have more than you. And as soon as you do that, Proudhon says, you deprive everybody else of ownership. The dispossessed become reliant on the owners for everything, to maintain their well-being and subsistence. And although they work and produce, they have to give up most of it to somebody else. That’s the theft. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t possess something; people often ask, ‘Can I still call this my toothbrush?’ Yes, you can! Max Stirner has come back into vogue, largely through the work of people like the British political theorist Saul Newman on post-anarchism. Stirner has always been problematic for socialist anarchists; in the United States, he and other individualist anarchist thinkers have been taken up by anarcho-capitalists, and minimal-state right-wing libertarians. So it looks as if there’s an overlap, which socialist anarchists always deny. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kropotkin’s treatment of Stirner is really interesting; he’s very positive about him, as he is about Friedrich Nietzsche . He says that they produced fantastic, incredibly inspiring literature. Stirner’s big idea is that you should not have to subordinate yourself to some greater ideal which is not of your own making. In The Ego and His Own , he explains how individuals are coerced into accepting certain principles by groups who say that they have a programme which will deliver for humanity. But he asks: what’s humanity? And why should I accept constraints in order to deliver this programme that you claim will benefit everybody? At some point he writes that the French Revolution started off by declaring the rights of man, and ended up chopping off the heads of men. The corruption is something we need to be aware of. Kropotkin would be fully signed up to that. The fact that he also says that anarchy is about recognising the individual’s sovereignty, is a statement about the importance of each of us as an individual. “Anarchism isn’t just a phenomenon of the past… it continues to resonate in the present.” But the difference between them is that Stirner abstracts the individual from any kind of social context, and in doing so then sees any kind of social arrangement as a constraint. Kropotkin says that you can’t extract us from our social context, and that means you should think about how you can organise social relations in ways that allow individuals to challenge norms, traditions, habits, customs. The mistake that Stirner makes is to say, ‘theoretically, I’ll abstract the individual from the social context; and normatively, I’ll therefore assert the right of the individual to realise any end, against anybody else.’ That, Kropotkin says, is problematic, because it’s aristocratic, competitive, and likely to end up in an inequality based on ‘might is right.’ It has no regard for the wellbeing of less able, less capable, less powerful, or simply different people who don’t want to live in that way. Ethically, that’s a fundamental difference between a socialist like Kropotkin, and individualists like Stirner. Having said that, I don’t think that just because anarcho-capitalists claim his heritage, it should lead us to say that all of his ideas are necessarily tainted. For example, I think Stirner had some very interesting things to say about education.

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Ruth Kinna

"I’m not sure who invited him but, by 1911, Kropotkin was certainly quite established within literary circles. He was exiled from Russia, and spent the first part of his exile in Switzerland and France, where he was sent to prison. There was a big campaign to get him released, and he came to England in the early 1880s. He was known as a geographer, a scientist, and an aristocrat. There was certainly a negative press against him, but he also had a bedrock of support, and he was well integrated in some literary circles. So it’s not surprising that he would have been asked to write something on anarchism for the Britannica. Of course I can’t imagine someone like him being invited to write an encyclopedic article now. It can seem odd, but really the early 20th century was a different time, and they simply thought of him as an expert. There had already been a couple of books published on anarchism, one by the Austrian journalist Ernst Viktor Zenker, and another famous one by the German law professor Paul Eltzbacher. So anarchism was getting coverage, people were trying to work out what it meant. In his article, Kropotkin also mentions Leo Tolstoy , who by that time had already done a lot to promote anarchist ideas, even though he didn’t call himself an anarchist. So these ideas were circulating, and being taken seriously in some quarters. For a long time I thought this entry on anarchism in the Britannica was quite dull. I always preferred his shorter and earlier essays; his Appeal To The Young is a fantastic piece of writing. But the more I read the entry, the better I think it is. In a way, the whole article is a definition, and he looks at anarchism from many different perspectives. He starts off with this idea that anarchism is about free agreement, and he tries to unpack what ‘free agreement’ means. It’s not a contract, it’s any kind of accord that you enter into voluntarily; it’s a very liberal idea, in a way. But he takes away any kind of authority from it, by saying that free agreement can only come from the bottom, and through negotiation with your fellow beings, with whom you live and you share outlooks. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Free agreement is what defines your politics, and it’s linked theoretically to ideas of fluidity and flux. In anarchy there’s no such thing as a final accord, or a set of rules against which we judge everything else. It’s a process we enter into. That’s the starting point. He then explains that this idea has been around forever: we can see it in the Greeks, in ancient Chinese thought, it’s everywhere. It was crystallised in the modern day through the organisation of the First International. From the 1860s onwards, we see a political movement we can call anarchist, which is taking this timeless idea of fluidity, flux and free agreement, and putting it within the particular context of the struggle of workers against exploiters. He also talks about masters and slaves, and domination. In this sense he says that you can put anarchism on the left of socialism, because anarchists are not people who simply want to take control of the government and use its instruments in order to bring about equality; they want to completely abolish this system that imposes sets of rules and regulations that you must always judge your practice against. That’s why it’s on the left. One of the things I like about this essay is that Kropotkin tries to distinguish the concept of ‘anarchy’ from the ideology of ‘anarchism’. There is a resistance politics and there’s an idea, based on the assertion of individual sovereignty, that admits that people are born into a social context, but that ultimately, any decision that they make must revert back to them. Proudhon is important because he’s the first person to use the concept that everybody fears, anarchy, and define it positively. In doing so, he establishes the springboard for the anarchist movement. For him, anarchy is not, as conventional thought would have it, the corruption of democracy, it’s something that we should embrace wholeheartedly. That’s a huge statement to make. Kropotkin does a great job of asking what anarchy means, in terms of freedom, fluidity and change. And when Proudhon calls himself an anarchist, that’s exactly what he’s talking about: the flow of free forces, and the way in which people interact without third-party intervention. Kropotkin liked to quote the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, saying: “Take a box of stones and shake them, and they’ll organise themselves.” When anarchists say that individuals cooperate, they don’t mean that they’re necessarily good, just that they’re cooperative. Their critique of both Hobbes and Rousseau is that in their thought experiments, people are alone. And their isolation sets the conditions for their survival. It means that they end up competing with one another. But there are no conditions in the world where people are alone. Anarchists say that when people find themselves living in conditions where there are limited resources, their best option is to cooperate, because you can provide much more through collaboration than as a single person. And cooperation will breed its own rules; it’s not for anybody outside this framework to judge what the rules should be. The rules will change over time, and people will adopt new practices, but they will always be cooperative. Proudhon distinguishes between two types of property: property in use, and property as dominion. When he says that property is theft, he’s talking about the constitutional right to exclusive ownership. If the constitution upholds somebody’s right to exclusively possess land, labour, or anything, then that necessarily sets up an inequality, because we have limited resources. Some people will become owners, and others will be dispossessed as a result. The insight here is that there is no moral basis for individual ownership. In the world, everything belongs to everybody in common; you have to invent a principle to justify why I should have more than you. And as soon as you do that, Proudhon says, you deprive everybody else of ownership. The dispossessed become reliant on the owners for everything, to maintain their well-being and subsistence. And although they work and produce, they have to give up most of it to somebody else. That’s the theft. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t possess something; people often ask, ‘Can I still call this my toothbrush?’ Yes, you can! Max Stirner has come back into vogue, largely through the work of people like the British political theorist Saul Newman on post-anarchism. Stirner has always been problematic for socialist anarchists; in the United States, he and other individualist anarchist thinkers have been taken up by anarcho-capitalists, and minimal-state right-wing libertarians. So it looks as if there’s an overlap, which socialist anarchists always deny. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kropotkin’s treatment of Stirner is really interesting; he’s very positive about him, as he is about Friedrich Nietzsche . He says that they produced fantastic, incredibly inspiring literature. Stirner’s big idea is that you should not have to subordinate yourself to some greater ideal which is not of your own making. In The Ego and His Own , he explains how individuals are coerced into accepting certain principles by groups who say that they have a programme which will deliver for humanity. But he asks: what’s humanity? And why should I accept constraints in order to deliver this programme that you claim will benefit everybody? At some point he writes that the French Revolution started off by declaring the rights of man, and ended up chopping off the heads of men. The corruption is something we need to be aware of. Kropotkin would be fully signed up to that. The fact that he also says that anarchy is about recognising the individual’s sovereignty, is a statement about the importance of each of us as an individual. “Anarchism isn’t just a phenomenon of the past… it continues to resonate in the present.” But the difference between them is that Stirner abstracts the individual from any kind of social context, and in doing so then sees any kind of social arrangement as a constraint. Kropotkin says that you can’t extract us from our social context, and that means you should think about how you can organise social relations in ways that allow individuals to challenge norms, traditions, habits, customs. The mistake that Stirner makes is to say, ‘theoretically, I’ll abstract the individual from the social context; and normatively, I’ll therefore assert the right of the individual to realise any end, against anybody else.’ That, Kropotkin says, is problematic, because it’s aristocratic, competitive, and likely to end up in an inequality based on ‘might is right.’ It has no regard for the wellbeing of less able, less capable, less powerful, or simply different people who don’t want to live in that way. Ethically, that’s a fundamental difference between a socialist like Kropotkin, and individualists like Stirner. Having said that, I don’t think that just because anarcho-capitalists claim his heritage, it should lead us to say that all of his ideas are necessarily tainted. For example, I think Stirner had some very interesting things to say about education."

Anarchism · fivebooks.com