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Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a book by Peter Kropotkin on the subject of mutual aid, written while he was living in exile in England. It was first published by William Heinemann in London in October 1902. The individual chapters had originally been published in 1890-96 as a series of essays in the British monthly literary magazine, Nineteenth Century. Written partly in response to Social Darwinism and in particular to Thomas H. Huxley's Nineteenth Century essay, The Struggle for Existence, Kropotkin's book drew on his experiences in scientific expeditions in Siberia to illustrate the phenomenon of cooperation. After examining the evidence of cooperation in nonhuman animals, savages, barbarians, in medieval cities, and in modern times, he concludes that cooperation and mutual aid are as important in the evolution of the species as competition and mutual strife, if not more so.

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Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842 -1921) was a zoologist, an evolutionary theorist, geographer and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers. Because of his title of prince, he was known by some as the Anarchist Prince. Some contemporaries saw him as leading a near perfect life, including Oscar Wilde, who described him as a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclop dia Britannica Eleventh Edition. Kropotkin's inspiration has reached into the 20th and 21st centuries as a vision of a new society based on the anarchist principles of anti-statism and anti-authoritarianism, the communist principles of the publicly owned means of production and his zoological theories on the mutual aid between all species and individuals. It is often positioned as a counter to the thinking of Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin which tended to imply centralised planning and control. To a large degree Kropotkin's emphasis is on local organisation, local production obviating the need for central government. Kropotkin's vision is also on agriculture and rural life, making it a contrasting perspective to the largely industrial thinking of communists and socialists. In his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin explored the widespread use of cooperation as a survival mechanism in human societies through their many stages, and animals. Written in accessible language, he used many real life examples in an attempt to show that the main factor in facilitating evolution is cooperation between individuals in free-associated societies and groups, without central control, authority or compulsion.

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