PETER KROPOTKIN
"Anarchism:its philosophy and ideal."
San Francisco: Free Society, 1898.
IT is not without a certain hesitation that I have decided to take the
philosophy and ideal of Anarchy as the subject of this lecture.
Those who are persuaded that Anarchy is a collection of visions relating to
the future, and an unconscious striving toward the destruction of all present
civilization, are still very numerous; and to clear the ground of such
prejudices of our education as maintain this view we should have, perhaps, to
enter into many details which it would be difficult to embody in a single
lecture. Did not the Parisian press, only two or three years ago, maintain that
the whole philosophy of Anarchy consisted in destruction, and that its only
argument was violence?
Nevertheless Anarchists have been spoken of so much lately, that part of
the public has at last taken to reading and discussing our doctrines. Sometimes
men have even given themselves trouble to reflect, and at the present moment we
have at least gained a point: it is willingly admitted that Anarchists have an
ideal. Their ideal is even found too beautiful, too lofty for a society not
composed of superior beings.
But is it not pretentious on my part to speak of a philosophy, when,
according to our critics, our ideas are but dim visions of a distant future? Can
Anarchy pretend to possess a philosophy, when it is denied that Socialism has
one?
This is what I am about to answer with all possible precision and
clearness, only asking you to excuse me beforehand if I repeat an example or two
which I have already given at a London lecture, and which seem to be best fitted
to explain what is meant by the philosophy of Anarchism.
You will not bear me any ill-will if I begin by taking a few elementary
illustrations borrowed from natural sciences. Not for the purpose of deducing
our social ideas from them-far from it; but simply the better to set off certain
relations, which are easier grasped in phenomena verified by the exact sciences
than in examples only taken from the complex facts of human societies.
Well, then, what especially strikes us at present in exact sciences, is the
profound modification which they are undergoing now, in the whole of their
conceptions and interpretations of the facts of the universe.
There was a time, you know, when man imagined the earth placed in the
center of the universe. Sun, moon, planets and stars seemed to roll round our
globe; and this globe, inhabited by man, represented for him the center of
creation. He himself-the superior being on his planet-was the elected of his
Creator. The sun, the moon, the stars were but made for him; toward him was
directed all the attention of a God, who watched the least of his actions,
arrested the sun's course for him, wafted in the clouds, launching his showers
or his thunder-bolts on fields and cities, to recompense the virtue or punish
the crimes of mankind. For thousands of years man thus conceived the universe.
You know also what an immense change was produced in the sixteenth century
in all conceptions of the civilized part of mankind, when it was demonstrated
that, far from being the centre of the universe, the earth was only a grain of
sand in the solar system-a ball, much smaller even than the other planets; that
the sun itself-though immense in comparison to our little earth, was but a star
among many other countless stars which we see shining in the skies and swarming
in the milky-way. How small man appeared in comparison to this immensity without
limits, how ridiculous his pretensions! All the philosophy of that epoch, all
social and religious conceptions, felt the effects of this transformation in
cosmogony. Natural science, whose present development we are so proud of, only
dates from that time.
But a change, much more profound, and with far wider reaching results, is
being effected at the present time in the whole of the sciences, and Anarchy,
you will see, is but one of the many manifestations of this evolution.
Take any work on astronomy of the last century, or the beginning of ours.
You will no longer find in it, it goes without saying, our tiny planet placed in
the center of the universe. But you will meet at every step the idea of a
central luminary-the sun-which by its powerful attraction governs our planetary
world. From this central body radiates a force guiding the course of the
planets, and maintaining the harmony of the system. Issued from a central
agglomeration, planets have, so to say, budded from it; they owe their birth to
this agglomeration; they owe everything to the radiant star that represents it
still: the rhythm of their movements, their orbits set at wisely regulated
distances, the life that animates them and adorns their surfaces. And when any
perturbation disturbs their course and makes them deviate from their orbits, the
central body re-establishes order in the system; it assures and perpetuates its
existence.
This conception, however, is also disappearing as the other one did. After
having fixed all their attention on the sun and the large planets, astronomers
are beginning to study now the infinitely small ones that people the universe.
And they discover that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are peopled
and crossed in all imaginable directions by little swarms of matter, invisible,
infinitely small when taken separately, but all-powerful in their numbers. Among
those masses, some, like the bolide that fell in Spain some time ago, are still
rather big; others weigh but a few ounces or grains, while around them is wafted
dust, almost microscopic, filling up the spaces.
It is to this dust, to these infinitely tiny bodies that dash through space
in all directions with giddy swiftness, that clash with one another,
agglomerate, disintegrate, everywhere and always, it is to them that today
astronomers look for an explanation of the origin of our solar system, the
movements that animate its parts, and the harmony of their whole. Yet another
step, and soon universal gravitation itself will be but the result of all the
disordered and incoherent movements of these infinitely small bodies-of
oscillations of atoms that manifest themselves in all possible directions. Thus
the center, the origin of force, formerly transfered from the earth to the sun,
now turns out to be scattered and disseminated: it is everywhere and nowhere.
With the astronomer, we perceive that solar systems are the work of infinitely
small bodies; that the power which was supposed to govern the system is itself
but the result of the collisions among those infinitely tiny clusters of matter,
that the harmony of stellar systems is harmony only because it is an adaptation,
a resultant of all these numberless movements uniting, completing, equilibrating
one another.
The whole aspect of the universe changes with this new conception. The idea
of force governing the world, of pre- established law, preconceived harmony,
disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of:
the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless
hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each other
in equilibrium.
If it were only astronomy that were undergoing this change! But no; the
same modification takes place in the philosophy of all sciences without
exception; those which study nature as well as those which study human
relations.
In physical sciences, the entities of heat, magnetism, and electricity
disappear. When a physicist speaks today of a heated or electrified body, he no
longer sees an inanimate mass, to which an unknown force should be added. He
strives to recognize in this body and in the surrounding space, the course, the
vibrations of infinitely small atoms which dash in all directions, vibrate,
move, live, and by their vibrations, their shocks, their life, produce the
phenomena of heat, light, magnetism or electricity.
In sciences that treat of organic life, the notion of species and its
variations is being substituted by a notion of the variations of the individual.
The botanist and zoologist study the individual-his life, his adaptations to his
surroundings. Changes produced in him by the action of drought or damp, heat or
cold, abundance or poverty of nourishment, of his more or less sensitiveness to
the action of exterior surroundings will originate species; and the variations
of species are now for the biologist but resultants-a given sum of variations
that have been produced in each individual separately. A species will be what
the individuals are, each undergoing numberless influences from the surroundings
in which they live, and to which they correspond each in his own way.
And when a physiologist speaks now of the life of a plant or of an animal,
he sees rather an agglomeration, ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Go to the beginning of the document
Go to previous page
Go to next page
Go to the end of document
