Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) is remembered as a theoretician of anarchism and one of the leading exponents of anarcho-communism, a doctrine he helped to elaborate with his comrades Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus in the late 1870s. He grew up in what he described as Moscow’s Faubourg Saint-Germain, into considerable privilege, and attended the prestigious corps of pages, an elite military academy in St Petersburg, from 1857. In 1860 he edited his first revolutionary paper, then as a constitutionalist. Two years later, looking for more outlets for his rebellious instincts, Kropotkin passed up the opportunity of a glittering career at the imperial court and joined the Cossacks stationed in the far east of Russia.

‘Liberty or death!’ entered the lexicon of revolutionary action during the American War of Independence. Usually invoked as an exulting, rallying cry, it also captured the horrendous prospect of revolutionary collapse that socialists began to contemplate in the early twentieth century. Kropotkin's assessment of the counter-veiling pressures on evolutionary development posed the choice between anarchy and the state in these stark terms and he was indeed circumspect about the prospects for liberty. His formulation, mutual aid or death, more closely resembled Rosa Luxemburg's socialism or barbarism than the romantic maxim of the American rebels. Admittedly, Kropotkin did not share her good estimation of the policies that European social democratic parties had pursued in the period following the defeat of the Commune. Yet, just as she re-evaluated the vigour of European socialism towards the outbreak of the 1914–18 war, Kropotkin harboured similar doubts about the popularity of anarchist doctrines and the likely kindling of a pan-European Commune movement.

Unlike the eighteenth-century patriots, Kropotkin understood revolution as a process, not a marshalling of militias, as their call presupposed. At the start of his exile in France, when he believed that Europe stood on the brink of revolution, Kropotkin argued that the crisis sparked by the land question presented an opportunity for transformation. The ensuing struggle was likely to be protracted and shaped equally by the potential of popular movements to resist new forms of revolutionary domination as by their power to liberate themselves from the forms of enslavement that had arisen in the aftermath of the English, America and French revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Kropotkin's writings on revolution can be read as contributions to this struggle. His commentaries on social transformation set out insurrectionary and organisational principles for anarchists. He demonstrated how small groups of activists could harness the strength of mass movements and showed how those movements might be sustained in times of crisis, and insulated against elite usurpation of their power.

Kropotkin continually reviewed the prospects for revolution in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth.

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.

Kropotkin began to write about Russia at length only in the late 1890s, when he published the Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature. During the same period, Kropotkin began working on the theory of mutual aid. As he explained in the posthumously published Ethics, one of his key concerns was to address the failure of nineteenth-century science to present a compelling ethical theory capable of explaining the natural origins of moral instincts and providing criteria for judgement. Kropotkin turned to Darwin's theory of evolution to frame his own conception and in the early formulations of the theory of mutual aid, he looked closely at the work of T. H. Huxley, whom he associated with the popularisation of Social Darwinian doctrines. Kropotkin set out to refute Huxley's description of nature as red in tooth and claw in order to also reject Huxley's conclusions: that the basis of morality could only be found in the divine, not the natural world.

Kropotkin continued to work on the theory of mutual aid until he returned to Russia in 1917 and the arguments became very technical, resulting in the rejection of Darwin's Malthusian assumption of scarcity, a Lamarckian interpretation of Darwin and a speculative discussion of biological transmission, supporting Kropotkin's thesis that environmental adaptations could be inherited, and his claim that Darwin also adopted this view. Yet Kropotkin's motivation to set out an anarchist ethical theory was political. He had already presented the substance of the historical account of ethical development that appeared in Mutual Aid in the 1880s. His decision to return to and elaborate this work was made in the context of his growing concerns about the hold that Nietzschean ideas seemed to be gaining within the anarchist movement. In Kropotkin's view, the negative influence of Nietzschean philosophy helped explain the disastrous turn within the anarchist movement to terrorist violence and it created a wrongful impression in the public mind about the relationship between anarchism, nihilism and violence.

When Kropotkin decided to include an account of nihilism in his autobiography, the death of his friend Stepniak (Sergey Mikhailovich Kravchinsky) in 1896 particularly prayed on his mind.

Nicholas Walter's irritation with Wilde's tribute to Kropotkin stemmed from the symbolism that attached to Kropotkin's goodness and the purity of his vision. Yet for all its extravagance, Wilde's phrase is richly suggestive. Woodcock and Avakumović use Wilde's accolade as a chapter heading, reduced to ‘White Jesus’. Kropotkin's nobility is trumpeted and the idea of his removal from Russia is subsumed by his virtues. Read differently, Wilde's handle rightly directs attention to the character of Kropotkin's politics when he came out of Russia in 1876.

The Chaikovskii Circle (also known as, for example, the Circle of Tchaikovsky and Circle of Chaikovtsy), which Kropotkin joined in 1872, is often said to have had a lasting influence on his politics. Drawing on the warm recollection of the Circle that Kropotkin gives in his memoirs, Caroline Cahm describes its influence as ‘formative’ and adds that ‘the idealism of the Chaikovskists continued to influence him long after he left Russia – especially in his view of revolutionary action’. Drawing on a wealth of Russian sources, Martin Miller's study details Kropotkin's participation in the Circle and also considers how his manifesto, Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal of a Future System?, contributed both to the politics of the wider revolutionary movement and the development of his own political ideas. Miller describes Kropotkin as a budding Bakuninist. Departing from this account, Cahm emphasises how Kropotkin was affected by the Chaikovskists’ personal virtues and impressed by the constitutional principles of the group. According to Kropotkin, these principles were adopted ‘in opposition to the methods of Nechayev’. The Chaikovskists had decided, ‘quite correctly, that a morally developed individuality must be the foundation of every organization, whatever political character it may take afterward and whatever programme of action it may adopt in the course of future events’. The Circle operated on the basis of trust, openness, transparency and close friendship. Yet beyond the rejection of elite conspiracy, which Kropotkin combines with the advocacy of a Bakuninist spontaneous insurrectionary politics, the ways in which this influence marked his anarchism is difficult to discern. The clue that Kropotkin gives is that the behaviours of the Chaikovskii Circle were ‘characteristic of the Nihilist’.

Peter Kropotkin has an unenviable reputation for being one of the foremost anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century. Keeping company with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, famous for adopting the epithet ‘anarchist’ to describe his political views and Mikhail Bakunin, Marx's fiercest foe, he is also often said to be the most accessible anarchist. There are a number of reasons for this: he left a substantial body of work that gives a good account of his conception of anarchism; he published a substantial part of this work in English; and perhaps above all, he took a leading role in the propagation of anarchist ideas and exercised a profound influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century activist movements. Pre-eminence in a political tradition is not typically disadvantageous to an individual, except where the tradition itself is outlawed. Kropotkin's reputation as one of anarchism's central figures and canonical writers is unenviable nevertheless, not just because his work has attracted sustained attention from critics and protagonists within and outside the anarchist movement, but also because he has assumed a representative status as an anarchist of a particular type. Probably more than any other anarchist, Kropotkin defines classical anarchism.

The primary aim of this book is to rescue Kropotkin from the framework of classical anarchism and highlight aspects of his political thought that have been lost as a result of the interest that his science has generated, particularly the theory of mutual aid. The chapters situate his thought in the context of late nineteenth-century debates and show how he helped shape anarchism as a distinctive politics that was quite different to the philosophy ascribed to him. Like his friend Élisée Reclus, Kropotkin was part of a European movement that, as Marie Fleming argues, ‘developed in response to specific social-economic grievances in given historical circumstances’. Kropotkin contributed enthusiastically to the formation of an anarchist tradition and even endorsed Paul Eltzbacher's dispassionate, analytical study Anarchism: Seven Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy. However, his understanding of anarchism was more fluid and open than Eltzbacher's and instead of seeking to define a set of characteristic core concepts, Kropotkin identified anarchism with a tradition of political thought and a set of political practices.

The principle aims of this book were to rescue Kropotkin from the framework of classical anarchism and to explain the politics that led him to support the Entente powers in 1914. The two objectives were to open up more space for serious engagement with the history of anarchist ideas and to offer an alternative to the ideological, exclusionary accounts of anarchism that the invention of the classic tradition has helped to stimulate.

The emergence of classical anarchism and Kropotkin's place in it is set out in the first part of the study. Two dominant narratives have been promoted: in their keenness to disassociate anarchism from revolutionary violence, leading new anarchists turned Kropotkin into a poster-boy for a type of non-violent, gradualist politics that overplayed and distorted the role that evolution played in his work and helped create a philosophy that could be detached from practice. Removing the wedge that new anarchists placed between Kropotkin-brand anarchism and Bakuninism, postanarchists fastened on a dubious account of science to mount a critique of grand narratives, essentialism and utopianism. The shakiness of the application of the classical model to Kropotkin's political thought is discussed in the conclusions to the second and third parts of the study. Neither the new anarchist nor the post-anarchist renderings of Kropotkin's evolutionary theory, his understanding of science, his theory of change or his idea of the state bear close scrutiny. Kropotkin thought that the world was knowable and that knowledge advanced through a process of continual revision. But he also thought that the world could be re-imagined and that its remodelling was achievable by the application of science. He was a scientist, not a metaphysician and an empiricist not a rationalist but he was also a utopian, not a realist. Nihilism shaped Kropotkin's thinking, tailoring science to the achievement of anarchist goals where the removal of fear enabled individuals to investigate a plethora of questions that statism repressed. Rather than root anarchy in a conception of human nature, he grounded it in resistance.

Kropotkin's view was that flawed, ordinary people were capable of taking responsibility for their actions and negotiating their differences without recourse to institutionalised systems of law. This is not an unproblematic view, as the discussion of wilfulness indicates, but the questions that it raises are quite different from those associated with the thesis of natural goodness.

Kropotkin has a place in the anarchist canon as a foremost advocate of anarchist communism. His reputation as a classical anarchist extends from this advocacy but equally from his standing as the scientist of anarchism. New anarchists found the interpretative value of Kropotkin's science principally in a conception of evolution. Kropotkin's evolutionary theory not only provided an answer to critics keen to identify anarchism with violence, it also served as a foundation for the articulation of a politics based on small-scale grass-roots experimentation and continual innovation. New anarchists did not use the term ‘prefiguration’ to describe this politics, but the conception of anarchism they offered fits this broad understanding of anarchist change.

In anarchism's third, post-anarchist, wave, usually dated to the rise of the alter-globalisation movement in the late 1990s, Kropotkin's science has been interpreted very differently. Post-anarchist readings of Kropotkin's anarchism also emphasise the centrality of science to Kropotkin's anarchism. However, in post-anarchism science becomes the byword to describe Kropotkin's political theory, providing an exemplar for classical anarchism. Kropotkin is not so much painted as a savant but one of a handful of intellectuals who fixed the politics and philosophy of anarchism. This politics is often described as teleological, based on a particular concept of human nature and linked to a form of revolutionary utopianism that promises the realisation of anarchy. Post-anarchists dissolve the distance between Bakunin and Kropotkin that new anarchists attempted to instantiate and claim the territory of prefigurative politics as their own. In doing so, post-anarchists establish a boundary between philosophical traditions that cuts across the canon: leading anarchists are placed in or abstracted from a classical tradition or classed as precursors of post-anarchism. Post-anarchist classifications have helped solidify a set of ideological and cultural boundaries between apparently historically bounded and contemporary anarchisms, for example, classstruggle anarchism and individualism, and social and lifestyle anarchism. Kropotkin is usually placed on one side of these divisions: as a representative of a classical tradition, he emerges as a scientist who believed in the necessity of class-based revolution.

The premium that Kropotkin placed on the role of ideas and the value of imagining the implementation of anarchist practices conferred a utopian flavour on his anarchism. Because of the ways in which utopian socialism was commonly understood in nineteenth-century circles, Kropotkin was careful to qualify the nature of his utopianism, but he was also keen to show that anarchists had inherited the mantel of the innovative, experimental principles of the earlier generation of utopians, especially Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. The concept of utopia also helped Kropotkin to distinguish his own approach to design from contemporaries on the left and in the establishment.

Kropotkin presented several accounts of anarchist organisation, the most sustained being in the book Fields, Factories and Workshops. His willingness to outline his ideas and to use them as motivators for change attracted considerable criticism from within the anarchist movement, particularly from anti-communists. Kropotkin met these critiques and countered them by showing why his proposed solutions to the land question and slavery were superior to those advanced by individualists. These arguments highlight the grounds of Kropotkin's rejection of the individualist anarchism of Benjamin Tucker and the egoism of Stirner.

In the 1890s Kropotkin also openly confronted the professed antiutopianism of the social democrats, and his development of the theory of mutual aid illuminated the gap that existed between the uncertainty of the evolutionary principles that ran alongside his utopian schemes and the confidence that anti-anarchist Marxist critics derived from their accounts of the logic of history. There was an ideal towards which evolution was pointing and this was the realisation of nihilist ethics. As a utopian, Kropotkin presented these ethics as the aspiration concealed in a tradition of political thought. Even though evolutionary processes were rooted in nature, anarchist ethics would never be fully realised unless their self-regulatory mechanisms were widely recognised. By attacking Social Darwininsm and supplementing biological evolutionary theory with an account of cultural evolution, Kropotkin challenged one of the theoretical mainsprings for statism and capitalism and demonstrated the advantages of anarchist institutions. In both practical and philosophical realms, utopia meant changing the environment in ways that enabled different behaviours to flourish.

Kropotkin described the work he completed for Le Révolté as the ‘foundation of nearly all I have written later on’. What did that mean? His early writings pointed up several themes: that anarchism was an ethical approach to politics; that the problems that socialists confronted were global; that science, construed poetically, offered a key to the resolution of those problems; that submissiveness and passivity were fatal barriers to social change and social solidarity was a catalyst for action; that change was a principle of life on Earth; and that fluid movements forged across diverse populations offered a model for cooperative living. Kropotkin presented these ideas in a distinctive way, using nihilism as his touchstone, but in developing his positions on nationality, slavery and the cementation of elite power, he aligned himself with Proudhonist and Bakuninist anti-authoritarianism. And his commentary on the Paris Commune formalised the ideological division that this alignment signalled. Yet there is scant evidence in Kropotkin's early writings that his identification with anti-authoritarian politics was a launch-pad for a theory resembling classical anarchism.

One of the foils for classical anarchism is Landauer's conception of the state as a social relationship, which we destroy by behaving differently. Kropotkin advanced a similar view. The relationships he sought to change were those that instilled obedience and slavishness, on the one hand, and command and supremacy on the other. In a recent discussion of Landauer's work, Dominique Miething notes the influence of the sixteenth-century French humanist Étienne de la Boétie on his work, specifically, la Boétie's observation that the capacity of a ruler to exercise his will over his subjects extended from a social and psychological capacity, not merely coercion. Newman also draws on Boétie to explore post-anarchist principles, and the willingness of individuals to consent to their own subjection, comparing la Boétie to Landauer. Kropotkin's analysis of nihilism touches on similar themes, but demonstrates how subjection is overcome through rebellious action: nihilism showed how. Kropotkin's description of the insurgence of nihilist women and his rebuttal of the literatures that ridiculed, objectified and demonised their rebellion richly illustrates the character of the dominating relationships he had in mind when he thought about the operation of power in the state.