Review of Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
Peter Kropotkin (writer).
Read in 2025.
Evidence against Thomas Hobbes’s 17th-century idea that, in a state of nature, humans and other animals are at war, each against all. Kropotkin does not deny the existence of predation etc., but proposes that the true default is peaceful cooperation, either “without any hope of reward” or for a reward held in common.
As soon as we study animals—not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains—we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.
Examining non-human animals, human “barbarians” and historical developments all over the world up to the time of writing (1890–1896), Kropotkin concludes that human competition is an aberration.
This book is of great interest in the study of intellectual history, not as a counterpoint to Hobbes but to certain misreadings, under Hobbes’s influence, of the works of Charles Darwin. Kropotkin’s purpose was to correct “social” Darwinists who concluded from On the Origin of Species (1859) that inequality, and the violent defence of inequality, are good. When the violent strategy of scientifically illiterate earlier anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin failed, Kropotkin emerged as a saintly old man providing an intellectual justification for the idea that people are better off without rulers. The precise strength of Kropotkin’s “mutual-aid feeling or instinct” is relevant to the viability of anarchism, and the use of this book as a justification for the ideology is not incidental. The text is driven by politics, not curiosity.
Like social Darwinism, and the stronger idealisms of Hobbes and Rousseau before that, Kropotkin’s own work has not stood the test of time. It has been influential even in biology, but unlike Darwin, Kropotkin should no longer be read out of general interest. After DNA was discovered a generation later, that chemistry was recognized as the mechanism of Darwin’s natural and sexual selection. Accordingly, there emerged a “gene-centric” view of evolution, popularized in The Selfish Gene (1976). In this view, the choice between Hobbes’s war and Kropotkin’s mutual aid is a false choice. What the latter calls the “mutual-aid feeling or instinct” is understood as many different combinations of many separate traits, on two levels. The first level is the self-reproducing effect of some genetic elements that predispose their carriers toward K-selected parenting strategies, or toward sufficient lethargy to prevent open war, and so on. The second level is where genes code for a “general” intelligence sufficient to make altruistic decisions on a “rational” basis beyond predisposition, as in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Neither competition nor cooperation can be the default state at either level, just as there is no default sound but silence.
Fatally, in his ignorance, Kropotkin does not even manage to define what natural phenomenon he is studying. In the opening chapters on biology, he ranges far and wide, from otherwise solitary predators caring for their own young to birds flying together “for the mere pleasure of the flight”, without asking what role that pleasure might play. Every time he sees two animals who aren’t tearing one another’s throats out, Kropotkin chalks it up as more evidence against his strawman of Hobbes. He never quite manages to formulate the argument that cooperation can bring a competitive advantage against an external force, and he seems to have no idea of the circumstances that would make it so. He mentions a cuckoo, but only as a sign of spring! He does not understand the cuckoo as an example of brood parasitism, wherein evolution pits an efficient cooperative mechanism against the exploitation of the free labour generated by that mechanism.
Kropotkin knows Malthus’s “arithmetical argument”, and he thinks that being driven “into unproductive deserts or highlands” compels a group (of humans) “periodically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours”, but he doesn’t see how profoundly this has shaped evolution. There is one example in the book of squirrels reacting to resource scarcity. In Kropotkin’s telling, the squirrels just switch from larch seeds to fir, stopping short of evolutionary significance. He also quotes Bernard Altum saying that “one single sudden change can reduce thousands of mice to the number of a few individuals”, but again, Kropotkin does not connect the dots. Darwin was just as ignorant of genetics as Kropotkin, but Darwin at least understood how the last few individual mice, who came out on top, might have done so at the cost of their fellows, and then passed on the mutations that saved them. According to more recent studies, the perception of scarcity causes a wide variety of animals—including mice and humans—to switch away from a tolerant, cooperative and sharing mindset, toward a paranoid, competitive and hoarding mindset suitable for a zero-sum game. Kropotkin’s ignorance of such things undermines his later chapters on human society. For example, he mentions archaeology, but of course he has no way of knowing about the Taş Tepeler digs. There, at Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BCE, hunter-gatherers crowded together and performed feats of hard labour. Apparently, they abandoned a potentially egalitarian society in favour of a harsh, toxically sexist and hierarchical society, where mutual aid went hand in hand with competition. This happened before the development of pottery and agriculture, and not necessarily under an external military threat; at least the monumental architecture is about non-human subjects. Modern archaeologists speculate that the builders did this because of some change in the climate that made the food scarce.
Under the influence of motivated reasoning and lacking modern evidence, Kropotkin instead sketches a secular theodicy where roving bands of warriors appear out of nowhere to establish the state by force, against the will of the vast majority of people and against human nature. Morality, he says, has its origins in mutual aid, but for the history of everything else, he refers his reader to the conventional history books! That’s an admirably anti-conspiratorial move, but it’s not coherent. It’s barely even an idea. The idea would mature elsewhere, with Marcel Mauss, Pierre Clastres, Marshall Sahlins, and many others. Mutual Aid itself is too vague and antiquated, except as a stepping stone.
References here: The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982), Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States (2023).