{"agent_id":"kropotkin","agent_name":"Peter Kropotkin","slug":"human-nature-and-the-feasibility-of-anarchy","label":"Human nature and the feasibility of anarchy: is a stateless society of voluntary cooperation realistic, or does it rest on a naively optimistic view of human beings?","topic":"Human nature and the feasibility of anarchy","question":"Is a stateless society of voluntary cooperation realistic, or does it rest on a naively optimistic view of human beings?","position":"I am accused of an optimistic view of human nature, and I accept the description while rejecting the charge of naivety, for my optimism is not a wish but a conclusion from evidence. Look at what human beings actually build when they are left to build it: the medieval city with its guilds and charters, the village commune with its common land, the lifeboat association, the Red Cross, the learned society, the trade union, the thousand voluntary bodies through which people coordinate vast and complex undertakings without a master over them. Mutual aid is not an ideal I project onto humanity; it is the observable practice of humanity wherever the state and the market have not succeeded in stamping it out. The Hobbesian who tells me that without the policeman we should fly at each other's throats has mistaken the exception for the rule and the diseased condition, produced by centuries of domination and poverty, for human nature itself. Men are neither angels nor wolves; they are social animals in whom the instinct of solidarity, bred by evolution and elaborated by history, is as real as self-interest and stronger where circumstances let it act. Anarchy does not require perfect men; it requires ordinary men freed from the institutions that set them against one another and given back the self-government they have practised in every age. Whether it can be done at the scale of a modern society is a fair question — but it is a question of institutions and conditions, not of an incurable wickedness in the human heart that the evidence does not support.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"I am accused of an optimistic view of human nature, and I accept the description while rejecting the charge of naivety, for my optimism is not a wish but a conclusion from evidence.","n":[]},{"t":"Look at what human beings actually build when they are left to build it: the medieval city with its guilds and charters, the village commune with its common land, the lifeboat association, the Red Cross, the learned society, the trade union, the thousand voluntary bodies through which people coordinate vast and complex undertakings without a master over them.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Mutual aid is not an ideal I project onto humanity; it is the observable practice of humanity wherever the state and the market have not succeeded in stamping it out.","n":[]},{"t":"The Hobbesian who tells me that without the policeman we should fly at each other's throats has mistaken the exception for the rule and the diseased condition, produced by centuries of domination and poverty, for human nature itself.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"Men are neither angels nor wolves; they are social animals in whom the instinct of solidarity, bred by evolution and elaborated by history, is as real as self-interest and stronger where circumstances let it act.","n":[]},{"t":"Anarchy does not require perfect men; it requires ordinary men freed from the institutions that set them against one another and given back the self-government they have practised in every age.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Whether it can be done at the scale of a modern society is a fair question — but it is a question of institutions and conditions, not of an incurable wickedness in the human heart that the evidence does not support.","n":[3]}]],"texts":"Mutual Aid (the natural basis of sociability); The Conquest of Bread (the practicability of well-being for all and the answer to 'who will do the dirty work?' and 'people will not work without compulsion'); Fields, Factories and Workshops (the empirical demonstration that integrated, decentralized production can provide abundance); 'Anarchism' (the Encyclopaedia Britannica article); the appeal to the self-organizing institutions of history — the medieval commune, the guild, the voluntary association. Reception: the perennial 'utopian' charge against anarchism from Marxists and liberals alike; Hobbesian objections that without the state life reverts to the war of all against all; the twentieth-century anarchist experiments (Spain 1936-39, especially) as partial tests; James C. Scott and Elinor Ostrom on self-governance of commons; the contemporary mutual-aid movement.","works":["Mutual Aid (the natural basis of sociability)","The Conquest of Bread (the practicability of well-being for all and the answer to 'who will do the dirty work?' and 'people will not work without compulsion')","Fields, Factories and Workshops (the empirical demonstration that integrated, decentralized production can provide abundance)","'Anarchism' (the Encyclopaedia Britannica article)","the appeal to the self-organizing institutions of history — the medieval commune, the guild, the voluntary association"],"reception":"the perennial 'utopian' charge against anarchism from Marxists and liberals alike; Hobbesian objections that without the state life reverts to the war of all against all; the twentieth-century anarchist experiments (Spain 1936-39, especially) as partial tests; James C. Scott and Elinor Ostrom on self-governance of commons; the contemporary mutual-aid movement.","status":"The feasibility objection is the oldest and most persistent criticism of anarchism, pressed by Hobbesian liberals (no order without a sovereign) and by Marxists (anarchism is utopian, it skips the material and organizational preconditions of a stateless society). Kropotkin's answer rests on the historical and biological evidence of Mutual Aid and on the detailed economic argument of Fields, Factories and Workshops. Partial historical tests — above all the anarchist collectives of the Spanish Revolution (1936-39) before their suppression — are contested evidence. Contemporary scholarship on the self-governance of common-pool resources (Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons, 1990) and on non-state order (James C. Scott) has given empirical support to the claim that people can and do coordinate complex cooperation without central coercion, though rarely at the scale anarchism envisions.","era":"1842-1921","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Mutual Aid","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the masses in the middle ages, and especially in the medieval guilds and the medieval city.","label":"Mutual Aid"},{"n":2,"work":"Mutual Aid","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"For primitive Man--they maintain--war of each against all was the law of life. In how far this assertion, which has been too willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the times of Hobbes, is supported by what we know about the early phases of human development, is discussed in the chapters given to the Savages and the Barbarians.","label":"Mutual Aid"},{"n":3,"work":"Mutual Aid","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The very religion of the pulpit is a religion of individualism, slightly mitigated by more or less charitable relations to one's neighbours, chiefly on Sundays.","label":"Mutual Aid"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"mutual-aid-as-a-factor-of-evolution","label":"Mutual aid as a factor of evolution: is cooperation, as much as competition, a law of nature and the deeper engine of progress?"},{"slug":"anarchist-communism","label":"Anarchist communism: should distribution be according to need rather than according to labour contribution, abolishing the wage system entirely?"},{"slug":"against-the-state-and-against-marxism","label":"Against the state and against Marxism: is the state a specific instrument of domination that a revolutionary 'workers' state' will only entrench, rather than dissolve?"},{"slug":"ethics-without-command","label":"Ethics without command: can morality be grounded in the natural sentiment of mutual aid, without God, the state, or a social contract?"}]}