Insect Nations: Visions of the Ant World from Kropotkin to Bergson

This is an essay in Cultural Entomology; unlike most works in this field, however, which owe a great deal to anthropology or to the study of comparative religions, this essay is determinedly modern in focus. The starting point for this essay are those few pages early on in Mutual Aid (1902) in which Kropotkin discusses the social insects and, in particular, ants. Kropotkin argues that ants have 'renounced the Hobbesian war' of an incessant struggle, and he maintains that, in contrast, ants have achieved a delicate, and thoroughly anarchist balance between social cohesion and 'individual initiative.' Drawing on the work of the French entomologist, Auguste Forel, Kropotkin directs our attention to a remarkable feature of ant anatomy, the 'social crop', in which a social, even communal life seems to be built into the body of the individual ant. A year earlier, the famous student of T. H. Huxley, H. G. Wells, had offered another image of an ant-like collective society in his novel, The First Men in the Moon (1901). Here Wells describes the creatures met with on the Moon, the 'Selenites', as 'compact, bristling insects.' More particularly, they are ants, with the same division of labour, industry and animal husbandry (the 'moon-calves') as many ant nests. Whether the ant-like world of the Selenites is utopian or dystopian is a problem in the text, however, for the picture Wells offers us of their collective is divided between that of the scientist, Cavor, who sees this world in utopian terms, and that of Bedford, the flawed, humanist narrator, who is repelled by it. Lastly, this essay explores the work of the philosopher and 'vitalist', Henri Bergson who, in the thirties, offers us a description of ant communality which includes a strangely natured sense of moral duty. Dr Simon King was born in Cheltenham, and educated at Loughborough, Sussex and Worcester. Insect Nations is his first book. He is currently researching a companion to this volume, focused on plants. He is also the owner of an ant farm. . Modern essay in Cultural Entomology . Original philosophical commentary on ant communality . Wide ranging literary and cultural analysis, from Kropotkin, Forel and Wells to Bergson and Maeterlinck 'Someone has given Simon King an ant-farm to play with; they will wish they hadn't. For as soon as he opens the box it turns, in his hands, into a Pandora's box, out of which tumbles not just a tiny world of ants but an enormous world about ants. This is a bizarre and labyrinthine world peopled or anted by, it seems, everything and everyone: from the masses to Maeterlink, the Daleks to Dali, our brains to Bergson, and tanks to time-machines.' Professor John Schad, Lancaster University