Books by Peter Kropotkin

Der kan være mange grunde til at læse brevvekslingen fra slutningen af 1800-tallet til efter Den russiske Revolution mellem vor egen internationalt berømte litterat, Georg Brandes, og den ligeså navnkundige russiske anarkist og adelsmand, fyrst Peter Kropotkin, som Det Poetiske Bureaus Forlag nu for første gang udgiver i dansk oversættelse (de skrev sammen på fransk) ved Vagn Lyhne & Lis Norup, der også har udstyret bogen med forord og noter. Alene dette forord, med beskrivelse af de to mænds respektive baggrunde og fortællingen om det politiske mord, der første til korrespondancen, er spændende som en, ja … kriminalroman. Brevene beskriver både de to mænds politiske tanker og overvejelser og de hændelser i dagspressen, som de tager farve af.

In Mutual Aid, which was first published in 1903, the renowned geographer applies his explorations of Eastern Asia and his study of wild-animal behaviour to a critical examination of the theory of evolution. His arguments anticipate in a remarkable way the contention of contemporary ecologists that the world of nature is one of interdependence rather than strife. Born in 1942 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Czar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, Kropotkin had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and had attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could with with impunity to Lenin, "Vladimir Ilyich, your actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold." Kropotkin provides a potent argument for anarchism by showing that people tend to cooperate spontaneously and that the state destroys this natural inclination towards mutual aid by strangling initiative with the dead hand of regulation. With the exception of his memoirs, this is Kropotkin's best-known work, and it is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It forms the cornerstone of his philosophy, and constitutes the most successful attempt by any writer to put anarchism on a scientific foundation. Mutual Aid is still the best refutation of the Darwinian thesis of survival of the fittest.

Prince Peter Kropotkin (born in 1842) was best known as an anarchist philosopher, and many do not realize that in the early 20th-century he wrote and lectured in the United States on Russian literature. But Kropotkin, in his preface, complains that: "It is by no means an easy task to speak or to write about the literature of a country, when this literature is hardly known to the audience or to the readers."

The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin's most detailed description of the ideal society, embodying anarchist communism, and of the social revolution that was to achieve it. Marshall Shatz's introduction traces the evolution of Kropotkin's thought, and the volume also includes a number of his shorter writings.