Books by Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

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 - a study of the needs of humanity, and of the economic means to satisfy them.

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."

A classic in philosophy and ethics, and one of the foundational texts of the anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Starting with the moral principle in nature, to the moral conceptions of primitive people, Kropotkin traces the development of moral teachings from ancient Greece, Christianity and the Middle Ages through to the 19th century philosophers. In this way Ethics gives answers to two fundamental problems of morality: its origin and historical development, and its goals and standards. Kropotkin is still today one of the most influential moral voices in the quest for universal human happiness. He wanted this book "to inspire the young generation to struggle, to implant in them faith in the justice of social revolution, and to light in their hearts the fire of self-sacrifice." This was Kropotkin's final masterpiece which was left unfinished at his death and is the swan song of this great humanitarian, scientist, and anarchist. It constitutes the crowning work and the resume of all his scientific, philosophical, and sociological views, at which he arrived in the course of his long and unusually rich life.