Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Glossary
A
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- The co-discoverer of natural selection alongside Darwin, credited by Kropotkin as one of the two scientists who introduced the struggle-for-existence concept into science, opening the way for the wide range of generalizations Kropotkin himself builds on.
- Related: Charles Darwin, The Struggle for Existence
B
- Bird-Mountains
- Kropotkin's term for the Arctic coastal cliffs teeming with nesting sea-birds of many species — oyster-catchers, barges, turnstones, swans, kittiwake-gulls, polar guillemots — that he offers as vivid field evidence of mutual protection and cooperative living among wild animals, each species contributing its own character to the collective defense of the colony.
- Related: Mutual Aid
C
- Charles Darwin
- The naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection Kropotkin builds on and reinterprets throughout the book. Kropotkin credits Darwin with observing that communities including the greatest number of sympathetic, mutually supportive members flourish best, but faults him for never fully investigating the relative importance of individual struggle versus mutual support, and for occasionally lapsing into Malthusian language about the 'weak in mind and body.'
- Related: The Struggle for Existence, Thomas Malthus, Alfred Russel Wallace
- Co-operation and Free Associations
- The dense network of voluntary societies Kropotkin catalogs in his own late-19th-century Europe — for economic self-help, rescue, learned inquiry, and countless other purposes — which he presents as proof that mutual aid remains a living force even in an era of individualist ideology and state centralization, down to spontaneous personal aid in slum life.
- Related: Labour-Unions, Mutual Aid
- Compensation for Wrongs (vs. Blood-Revenge)
- The barbarian legal innovation Kropotkin credits to the settled agricultural peoples of post-migration Europe: a system of negotiated compensation for injuries and offenses that replaced the older tribal cycle of blood-revenge, developed alongside their systems of land tenure as evidence of advancing cooperative self-governance.
- Related: Village Community, Scholae (Warrior Bands)
H
- Henry VIII's Destruction of the Guilds
- Kropotkin's example, from English history, of the centralized State's campaign against mutual-aid institutions: Henry VIII confiscated guild properties with even less pretext than he used for seizing monastery estates, a process his successor Edward VI completed, after which Parliament took over regulating trade disputes the guilds had once settled by federation and agreement.
- Related: The Guild, The Medieval City
- Hunting and Fishing Associations
- Kropotkin's examples of animals — birds, wolves, and other predators — that cooperate in organized groups to hunt or fish more effectively than any individual could alone, cited as evidence that mutual aid extends even into activities usually assumed to be purely competitive.
- Related: Bird-Mountains, Mutual Aid
I
- Inter-Tribal Law
- The customary rules Kropotkin documents governing relations between distinct clans and tribes among barbarian and contemporary 'primitive' peoples, covering matters like the protected market and safe-conduct for traders, which he presents as proof that law and mutual restraint existed well before the state claimed a monopoly on enforcing them.
- Related: The Kabyles, Medieval Market
L
- Labour-Unions
- The modern successors to the destroyed medieval guilds, which Kropotkin describes rising from the ashes of guild suppression to continue the mutual-aid tradition through strikes, cooperation, and organized solidarity among industrial workers — evidence, in his argument, that the mutual-aid tendency survives even under the hostile conditions of the modern centralized State.
- Related: The Guild, Co-operation
M
- Mutual Aid
- Kropotkin's name for voluntary cooperation among members of the same species — the practice he argues is at least as important as competition in the struggle for existence, and the chief factor of progressive evolution, from insect colonies through savage clans, medieval guilds, and modern labor unions.
- Related: The Struggle for Existence, Sociability as a Law of Nature
S
- Savage Tribal Society
- Kropotkin's term, discussed through Bushmen, Hottentots, Australians, Papuas, Eskimos, and Aleuts, for the earliest form of durable human social organization, which he argues preceded the separate nuclear family and was bound together by common law, common descent, and mutual obligation rather than a supposed primordial 'war of each against all.'
- Related: Mutual Aid, The Dayak Conception of Justice
- Scholae (Warrior Bands)
- The roaming brotherhoods of unruly armed men, gathered around temporary chieftains, that Kropotkin describes as separate from the settled agricultural mass of barbarian society. While these bands pursued family feuds and offered themselves as protectors, the great bulk of Teutons, Saxons, Celts, and Slavonians quietly returned to tilling the soil and building village communities.
- Related: Village Community
- Sociability as a Law of Nature
- Kropotkin's summary claim: sociability and mutual support, not just mutual struggle, are as much a 'law of nature' as competition — and the more sociable a species, the more prosperous and evolutionarily successful it tends to be. This thesis organizes the book's entire progression from ants and bees to modern trade unions.
- Related: Mutual Aid, The Struggle for Existence
- Social Darwinism
- The late-19th-century reading of evolution, associated with Thomas Henry Huxley among others, that treats ruthless competition between individuals as both the engine and the moral justification of progress. Kropotkin's entire book is a sustained rebuttal, marshaling evidence from zoology, anthropology, and history to show cooperation as an equally powerful evolutionary force.
- Related: Thomas Henry Huxley, The Struggle for Existence
T
- The Buryates
- A Siberian pastoral people whose communal customs Kropotkin, drawing on his own Siberian travels, cites as a living illustration of barbarian-stage mutual aid, alongside the Kabyles of North Africa and Caucasian mountaineers.
- Related: Village Community, Kabyles
- The Conclusion's Synthesis
- Kropotkin's final chapter, drawing together the evidence from animal societies, savage clans, barbarian villages, medieval cities, and modern associations into a single sustained argument: that the species and societies which most successfully combined individual initiative with mutual support, rather than those most given to internecine struggle, have been the most evolutionarily and socially successful.
- Related: Mutual Aid, Sociability as a Law of Nature
- The Dayak's Conception of Justice
- Kropotkin's example of a communal, restitution-based system of law among the Dayak people of Borneo, offered as evidence that 'savage' peoples possessed sophisticated common-law institutions for resolving disputes without a centralized state — a recurring counterpoint to European assumptions about primitive lawlessness.
- Related: Savage Tribal Society
- The Guild
- The craft or trade association at the heart of medieval urban life, which Kropotkin treats as possessing quasi-state attributes of its own — regulating labor, quality, and mutual support among its members — and as one of the two roots, alongside the village community, from which the free medieval city grew.
- Related: The Medieval City, Village Community
- The Kabyles
- A Berber people of North Africa whose institution of the annaya, a sacred protected space around the marketplace and along women's footpaths where no feud or violence could be prosecuted, Kropotkin cites as a direct parallel to the protected medieval market and evidence of a widespread, independently-evolved mutual-aid tradition.
- Related: Village Community, The Medieval Market
- The Medieval City
- Kropotkin's central historical case study, spanning two chapters: the self-governing medieval commune, born from the fortified market-town's revolt against feudal lords, which achieved self-jurisdiction and self-administration and became, in his account, a large-scale, sophisticated instrument of mutual aid that produced medieval Europe's greatest achievements in art and learning.
- Related: The Guild, Medieval Market
- The Medieval Market
- The protected trading space at the heart of the medieval city, which Kropotkin traces back to the sacred, feud-free barbarian barter-place, and which no quarrel or vendetta could disturb — a direct institutional ancestor of the free city's self-governing charter.
- Related: The Guild, The Kabyles
- The State-Period
- Kropotkin's term for the historical era, beginning roughly in the sixteenth century, in which centralized monarchies and later nation-states systematically absorbed or destroyed the self-governing mutual-aid institutions — village communities, guilds, free cities — that had organized medieval and barbarian life, replacing horizontal federation with vertical authority.
- Related: The Medieval City, The Guild, Henry VIII's Destruction of the Guilds
- The Struggle for Existence
- Darwin's phrase, which Kropotkin reinterprets: not chiefly a war of individuals within a species against each other, but more often a joint struggle of the species, or of associations of individuals, against the surrounding physical conditions and against other species. Kropotkin insists this wide Darwinian sense, not the narrow Malthusian one, is the correct reading of Darwin's own idea.
- Related: Mutual Aid, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus
- The Village Community
- Kropotkin's central institution of barbarian and later peasant society: a self-governing settlement holding land in common, resolving disputes through communal judicial procedure, and organizing labor cooperatively. He traces its persistence from the great barbarian migrations through the Russian mir, the Swiss commune, and villages across France and Germany into his own time, despite centuries of state efforts to abolish it.
- Related: Mutual Aid Among the Barbarians, The Guild
- Thomas Henry Huxley
- The prominent Darwinian biologist, nicknamed 'Darwin's bulldog,' whose essay depicting nature as a gladiators' show of endless individual competition Kropotkin sets out explicitly to refute, arguing Huxley took the narrowest and least characteristic aspect of animal life as its universal law.
- Related: Social Darwinism, Charles Darwin
- Thomas Malthus
- The economist whose theory of population competing for scarce resources Kropotkin identifies as the narrow lens through which many Darwinists, though not always Darwin himself, misread the struggle for existence as chiefly a war of each against all within a species.
- Related: The Struggle for Existence, Social Darwinism, Thomas Henry Huxley