Description

[004367] Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution. London: William Heinemann, 1902. First Edition. 8vo. Hardback. Good / No Jacket. [5], vi-xix, [2], 2-348pp. Original cloth, title, author and publisher in gilt to spine, with title and author in gilt to upper cover, blind stamped device of publishers to centre of lower cover

Minor wear to covers, rubbed to extremities, with small amount of loss to head of spine. Internally the endpapers are browned, with foxing mainly to edges of text block, but occasionally to text (though mainly to margins). Many pages unopened

First English edition of Kropotkin’s important contribution to the evolutionary debate. Huxley’s The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, prompted Kropotkin to write a series of replies in The Nineteenth Century magazine, which developed into Mutual Aid. For Kropotkin, rather than competition, natural selection, “generated a historical tendency toward cooperation in nature, including human society before the emergence of the modern state. In both realms mutual aid was the chief source of evolutionary progress” (Todes, page 132)

Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay, Kropotkin Was No Crackpot, notes that Kropotkin “did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but he argued that the cooperative style had been underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over competition in considering nature as a whole”. For an excellent look at Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid and the Russian intellectual background from where it developed, see Todes’, Darwin Without Malthus

Adams, Radical Literature, page 59; Stammhammer III:181:24; Piro 267; Nursey-Bray 512 and Hug 1.7