Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings

Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), one of the few members of the Czarist nobility to go over to the revolution, was the ablest and most influential theoretical anarchist of his time. For 42 years, he lived in exile (mainly in England), making a scanty living, before he was allowed to return to Russia in 1917, at the age of 75. During this time he wrote a great number of popular books and pamphlets in which he advocated complete social reorganization based on mutual aid, sympathy, individual liberty through free cooperation and solidarity. Kropotkin saw anarchism as simply the formulation of an ancient and universal desire of mankind. As a principle of freedom, it carried him far outside the economic and political struggle (he was bitterly opposed to Marxist socialism) into all social relations - marriage, education, the treatment of crime, the function of law and the basis of morality. The pamphlets reprinted here include the brief but moving "Spirit of Revolt", "Anarchist Communism," a brief summary of the leading principles of revolutionary anarchism, "Law and Authority," an argument for social control through custom and education alone: an unparalleled description of the evils of the prison system, "Prisons and their Moral Influence on Prisoners"; a note on the 1917 revolution and the Soviet government; and four others. Kropotkin's Encyclopedia Britannica article, "Anarchism, " is also reprinted, as the best statements in English of hte meaning, history and aims of revolutionary anarchism.