The pre-eminent position that Kropotkin attained as an exponent of anarchism in anarchism's second wave explains the exhaustion of his political thought in its post-anarchist third incarnation. Kropotkin achieved canonical status as a classical anarchist. Instead of questioning the premises of this representation of his ideas, third-wave anarchists accepted it and used it against him, rejecting Kropotkin as an exponent of classical anarchism. The most important challenge to this view reverses the judgements of dominant second-wave new anarchists, reinforcing an association with a form of revolutionary politics that the third-wave activists hold at arm's length. In many ways, Kropotkin emerges as an old man: worthy but out-of-time.

George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovi ć's biography makes quite a lot of play about the effects of Kropotkin's maturation on his political thought. The period of his late scholarship is peppered with reminders about the deterioration of his health, his life as an invalid and the start of his ‘virtual retirement’. Increasing ill-health, they also note, resulted in Kropotkin's detachment from the anarchist movement, explaining his ‘mitigated French patriotism’, increasing ‘political abstractionism’ and aggressively Germanophobic turn to militarism. Kropotkin aged not just in years, but in his judgments. By the time of his death in 1921, his support for the war demonstrated just how old and out of touch he had become. This impression of Kropotkin's exhaustion is reinforced by post-anarchist critiques of nineteenth-century traditions. The ‘politics and ethics of classical anarchism can be understood only within a certain Enlightenment rationalist-humanist paradigm … which supposes there to be an objective truth to social relations that is suppressed by power and yet will be revealed’. Enlightenment thinking should not be abandoned, Newman argues, but it is important to recognise that aspects of ‘the paradigm have broken down and are no longer sustainable’.

Kropotkin's comrade Jean Grave remembered Kropotkin differently. According to Grave, despite the hardships he suffered, Kropotkin remained youthful in his outlook, a twenty year-old all his life. Class-struggle anarchists find a similar youthfulness in his political legacy. But the success of the label leaves them swimming against the tide.