Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
Javascript must be enabled to continue!
Formulating an Anarchist Sociology: Peter Kropotkin’s Reading of Herbert Spencer
View through CrossRef
The work of Herbert Spencer was a crucial influence on the development of Peter Kropotkin’s historical sociology. However, scholars have underestimated this relationship; either overlooking it entirely, or minimizing Kropotkin’s attachment to Spencer with the aim of maintaining the utility of his political thought in the present. This article contests these interpretations by analyzing Kropotkin’s reading of Spencer’s epistemological, biological, and political ideas. It argues that Kropotkin was engaged in a critical dialogue with Spencer, incorporating many Spencerian principles in his own system, but also using this reading to articulate a distinctive anarchist politics.
Title: Formulating an Anarchist Sociology: Peter Kropotkin’s Reading of Herbert Spencer
Description:
The work of Herbert Spencer was a crucial influence on the development of Peter Kropotkin’s historical sociology.
However, scholars have underestimated this relationship; either overlooking it entirely, or minimizing Kropotkin’s attachment to Spencer with the aim of maintaining the utility of his political thought in the present.
This article contests these interpretations by analyzing Kropotkin’s reading of Spencer’s epistemological, biological, and political ideas.
It argues that Kropotkin was engaged in a critical dialogue with Spencer, incorporating many Spencerian principles in his own system, but also using this reading to articulate a distinctive anarchist politics.
Related Results
Estratégias da luta epistemológica de P. Kropotkin
Estratégias da luta epistemológica de P. Kropotkin
Objetiva-se, nesse artigo, compreender o contexto cultural, a trajetória e as estratégias que resultam no estabelecimento de P. Kropotkin como renomado cientista e militante anarqu...
Introduction
Introduction
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 ado...
Pyotr Kropotkin: Foundations of Anarchist Prison Abolition
Pyotr Kropotkin: Foundations of Anarchist Prison Abolition
This chapter examines the fascinating life and thought of Pyotr Kropotkin, arguably the most important figure in the anarchist tradition of prison abolition. Starting with his chil...
From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism
From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism
This chapter examines contemporary anarchist critiques of Kropotkin, especially post-anarchist analysis. It argues that science has become a byword to describe Kropotkin's politica...
Mapping the State
Mapping the State
This chapter outlines three parallel accounts of the state that Kropotkin developed in the 1870s and 1880s as an anarchist critic of Tsarism. The first was an explanatory account f...
Kropotkin: 'The Conquest of Bread' and Other Writings
Kropotkin: 'The Conquest of Bread' and Other Writings
The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin was the world's foremost spokesman of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The Conquest of Bre...