Modern Science and Anarchism

Front matter

Freedom Library

MODERN SCIENCE

AND

Chapter 1: The Origin of Anarchism

MODERN SCIENCE AND ANARCHISM.

By Peter Kropotkin.

I. THE ORIGIN OF ANARCHISM.

Anarchy does not draw its origin from any scientific researches, or from any system of philosophy. Sociological sciences are still far from having acquired the same degree of accuracy as physics or chemistry. Even in the study of climate and weather (in Meteorology), we are not yet able to predict a month or even a week beforehand what weather we are going to have; consequently, it would be foolish to pretend that with the aid of such a young science as Sociology is, dealing moreover with infinitely more complicated things than wind and rain, we could scientifically predict events. We must not forget either that scientific men are but ordinary men, and that the majority of them belong to the leisured class, and consequently share the prejudices of this class; most of them are even in the pay of the State. It is, therefore, quite evident that Anarchy does not come from universities.

Like Socialism in general, and like all other social movements, Anarchism originated among the people, and it will preserve its vitality and creative force so long only as it remains a movement of the people.

From all times two currents of thought and action have been in conflict in the midst of human societies. On the one hand, the masses, the people, worked out, by their way of life, a number of necessary institutions in order to make social existence possible, to maintain peace, to settle quarrels, and to practise mutual aid in all circumstances that required combined effort. Tribal customs among savages, the village communities, later on industrial guilds in the cities of the Middle Ages, the first elements of international law that these cities elaborated to settle their mutual relations; these and many other institutions were developed and worked out, not by legislation, but by the creative spirit of the masses.

On the other hand, there have always flourished among men, magi, shamans, wizards, rain makers, oracles, and priests, who were the founders and the keepers of a rudimentary knowledge of Nature, and of the first elements of worship (worship of the sun, the moon, the forces of Nature, ancestor worship). Knowledge and superstition went then hand in hand—the first rudiments of science and the beginnings of all arts and crafts being thoroughly interwoven with magic, the formulæ and rites of which were carefully concealed from the uninitiated. By the side of these earliest representatives of religion and science, there were also the experts in ancient customs—those men, like the brehons of Ireland, who kept in their memories the precedents of law. And there were also the chiefs of the military bands, who were supposed to possess the magic secrets of success in warfare.

These three groups of men formed among themselves secret societies for the keeping and transmission (after a long and painful initiation) of the secrets of their knowledge and crafts; and if at times they opposed each other, they generally agreed in the long run; they leagued together and upheld one another in different ways, in order to be able to command the masses, to reduce them to obedience, to govern them, and to make them work for them.

It is evident that Anarchy represents the first of these two currents, that is to say, the creative constructive force of the masses, who elaborated common-law institutions in order to defend themselves against a domineering minority. It is also by the creative and constructive force of the people, aided by the whole strength of modern science and technique, that to-day Anarchy strives to set up institutions that are indispensable to the free development of society, in opposition to those who put their hope in laws made by governing minorities.

We can therefore say that from all times there have been Anarchists and Statists.

Moreover, we always find that institutions, even the best of them, that were built up to maintain equality, peace, and mutual aid, become petrified as they grow old. They lose their original purpose, they fall under the domination of an ambitious minority, and gradually they become an obstacle to the ulterior development of society. Then individuals, more or less isolated, rebel against these institutions. But while some of these discontented, who rebel against an institution that has become irksome, strive to modify it for the common welfare, and above all to overthrow an authority, not only alien to the institution, but grown to be more powerful even than the institution itself—others endeavour to emancipate themselves from the mutual aid institutions altogether. They reject the tribal customs, the village community, the guilds, etc., only to set themselves outside and above the social institutions altogether, in order to dominate the other members of society and to enrich themselves at society's expense.

All really serious political, religious, economic reformers have belonged to the first of the two categories; and among them there have always been individuals who, without waiting for all their fellow citizens, or even a minority of them, to be imbued with similar ideas, strove to incite more or less numerous groups against oppression, or advanced alone if they had no following. There were Revolutionists in all times known to history.

However, these Revolutionists appeared under two different aspects. Some of them, while rebelling against the authority that oppressed society, in nowise tried to destroy this authority; they simply strove to secure it for themselves. Instead of a power that had grown oppressive, they sought to constitute a new power, of which they would be the holders; and they promised, often in good faith, that the new authority, handed over to them, would have the welfare of the people at heart and would be their true representative—a promise that later on was inevitably forgotten or betrayed. Thus were constituted Imperial authority in the Rome of the Caesars, ecclesiastical authority in the first centuries of our era, dictatorial power in the decaying cities of the Middle Ages, and so forth. The same line of thought brought about royal authority in Europe at the end of feudal times. Faith in an emperor "for the people," a Cæsar, is not yet dead, even in the present day.

But side by side with this authoritarian current, another current asserted itself, every time the necessity was felt of revising the established institutions. At all times, from ancient Greece till nowadays, there were individuals and currents of thought and action that sought, not to replace any particular authority by another, but to destroy the authority that had grafted itself on popular institutions, without creating a new one to take its place. They proclaimed the sovereignty of both the individual and the people, and they tried to free the popular institutions from authoritarian overgrowths; they worked to give back full liberty to the collective spirit of the masses, so that popular genius might freely reconstruct institutions of mutual aid and protection, in harmony with new needs and new conditions of existence. In the cities of ancient Greece, and especially in those of the Middle Ages—Florence, Pskov, etc.—we find many examples of this kind of conflict.

We may therefore say that Jacobins and Anarchists have existed at all times among reformers and Revolutionists.

Formidable popular movements, stamped with the character of Anarchism, took place several times in the past. Villages and cities rose against the principle of government, against the supporters of the State, its tribunals, its laws, and they proclaimed the sovereignty of the rights of man. They denied all written law, and asserted that every man should govern himself according to his conscience. They thus tried to found a new society, based on the principles of equality, full liberty, and work. In the Christian movement in Judea, under Augustus, against the Roman law, the Roman State, and the morality, or rather the immorality, of that epoch, there was unquestionably much Anarchism. Little by little this movement degenerated into a Church movement, fashioned after the Hebrew Church and Imperial Rome itself, which naturally killed all that Christianity possessed of Anarchism at its outset, gave the Christian teachings a Roman form, and soon made of it the mainstay of authority, State, slavery, and oppression. The first seeds of "Opportunism" introduced into Christianity are already strong in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—or, at least, in the versions of the same that are incorporated in the New Testament.

The Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century, which in the main inaugurated and brought about the Reformation, also had an Anarchist basis. But, crushed by those Reformers who, under Luther's rule, leagued with princes against the rebellious peasants, the movement was suppressed by a great massacre of peasants and the poorer citizens of the towns. Then the right wing of the Reformers degenerated little by little, till it became the compromise between its own conscience and the State which exists to-day under the name of Protestantism.

Thus, to summarise: Anarchism had its origin in the same creative, constructive activity of the masses which has worked out in times past all the social institutions of mankind—and in the revolts of both the individuals and the nations against the representatives of force, external to these social institutions, who had laid their hands upon these institutions and used them for their own advantage. Those of the rebels whose aim was to restore to the creative genius of the masses the necessary freedom for its creative activity, so that it might work out the required new institutions, were imbued with the Anarchist spirit.

In our times, Anarchy was brought forth by the same critical and revolutionary protest which gave rise to Socialism in general. However, one portion of the Socialists, after having reached the negation of Capitalism and of society based on the subjection of labour to capital, stopped in its development at this point. They did not declare themselves against what constitutes the real strength of Capitalism: the State and its principal supports—centralisation of authority, law, always made by a minority for its own profit, and a form of justice whose chief aim is to protect Authority and Capitalism. As to Anarchism it did not stop in its criticism before these institutions. It lifted its sacrilegious arm, not only against Capitalism, but also against these pillars о Capitalism: Law, Authority, and the State.

Chapter 2: The Intellectual Movement of the Eighteenth Century

II.

THE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

If Anarchism, like all other revolutionary movements, originated among the people during the tumult of strife, and not in a scientist's study, it is important, nevertheless, to know the position it occupies among the various currents of scientific and philosophic thought that exist at the present time. What is its attitude in respect to these divers currents? To which of them does it turn for support? Which method of research does it make use of in order to prove its conclusions? In other words what school of Philosophy of Law does Anarchy belong With what current of modern science does it show most affinity?

In view of the infatuation for metaphysical economics which we have recently seen in Socialist circles, this question presents considerable interest. I will therefore try to reply to it as briefly and simply as possible, avoiding all difficult terms when they can be avoided.

The intellectual movement of the nineteenth century originated from the works written by Scotch and French philosophers in the middle and towards the end of the preceding century.

The awakening of thought which took place in those times human stimulated these thinkers with the desire of encompassing all human knowledge in a general system—а System of Nature. Putting aside the scholastic and metaphysical views of the Middle Ages, they had the courage to conceive all Nature—the universe of stars, our solar system, our globe, the development of plants, of animals, and of human society on its surface—as a series of facts to be studied in the same way as natural sciences are.

Making use of the true scientific method, the inductive-deductive method, they undertook the study of all facts presented to us by Nature—whether belonging to the world of stars or of animals, or to that of beliefs or human institutions—absolutely in the same way as a naturalist would study questions of physical science. They began by collecting facts, and when they ventured upon generalisations, they resorted to induction. They sometimes made hypotheses, but they attributed no more importance to these suppositions than Darwin attributed to his hypothesis concerning the origin of new species by means of natural selection in the struggle for existence, or that Mendéléeff attributes to his "periodic law." They looked upon them as suppositions affording a temporary explanation ("working hypotheses") and facilitating the grouping of facts, as well as their subsequent study; but these suppositions were not accepted before they were confirmed by applying them to a multitude of facts, and explained in a theoretical, deductive way; and they were not considered as natural "laws"—that is, proved generalisations—so long as they had not been carefully verified, and until the causes of their constant exactitude had been explained.

When the centre of the philosophic movement was transferred from Scotland and England to France, the French philosophers, with that perception of system which belongs to the French thinkers, began to construct all human sciences, both natural and historical, on a general plan and on the same principles. They attempted to construct "generalised knowledge"—that is, the philosophy of the Universe and its life—upon a strictly scientific basis. They consequently put aside all metaphysical constructions of the preceding philosophers, and explained all phenomena by the action of those same physical forces (that is to say, mechanical actions and reactions) that sufficed them to explain the origin and the evolution of the terrestrial globe.

It is said that when Napoleon I. remarked to Laplace that in his "Exposition of the System of the Universe" the name of God was nowhere to be found, Laplace answered: "I nowhere felt the need of that hypothesis." But Laplace did more. He never resorted either to the grand metaphysical words behind which lies the incomprehension or the obscure semi-comprehension of phenomena, together with the inability to consider facts in their concrete form, as measurable quantities. Laplace dispensed with Metaphysics as well as with the hypothesis of a Creator; and although his "Exposition of the System of the Universe" contains no mathematical calculations and was written in a style comprehensible to all educated readers, mathematicians could later on express each separate thought of that work in mathematical equations—that is to say, as conditions of equality between two or more given quantities. So exactly had Laplace thought out every detail of his work.

What Laplace did for the celestial mechanics, the French philosophers of the eighteenth century did also for the study of most phenomena of life, as well as for those of the human understanding and feeling (psychology). They gave up the metaphysics that prevailed in the works of their predecessors and in those of the German philosopher, Kant.

It is known, indeed, that Kant, for instance, explained man's moral feeling by saying that it represents "a categorical imperative," and that a particular principle of behaviour is obligatory "if we conceive it as a law capable of universal application." But every word in this definition represents something nebulous and incomprehensible ("imperative" and "categorical," "law," "universal"!) that has been introduced instead of moral facts, known to us all, and of which he attempted to give the explanation.

The French Encyclopaedists could not be satisfied with such "grand words" by way of "explanations." Like their Scotch and English predecessors, when they wanted to explain whence man obtained his conception of good and evil, they did not insert, as Goethe said, "a little word where the ideas were wanting." They studied man himself; and, like Hutcheson (1725), and later on Adam Smith in his best work, "The Origin of Moral Feeling," they found that the moral sentiment of man derives its origin from a feeling of pity and of sympathy which we feel towards those who suffer; that it springs from our capacity of identifying ourselves with others; so much so that we almost feel physical pain when we see a child beaten in our presence, and our nature revolts at such behaviour.

Beginning with such every-day observations as these and with well-known facts, the Encyclopaedists arrived at broad generalisations. By this method they really explained moral feeling, which is a complex fact, by showing from which simpler facts it originates. But they never put, instead of known and comprehensible facts, incomprehensible and nebulous words, which explained absolutely nothing—such words as "imperative" and "categorical," or "universal law."

The advantage of this method is obvious. Instead of looking for an "inspiration from on high," instead of seeking for a supernatural origin, placed outside of humanity, for the moral sense, they said: "Here is your human feeling of pity and sympathy, inherited by man at his very origin, which man has confirmed by his observations of his fellow creatures, and perfected little by little by his experience of social life."

We thus see that the thinkers of the eighteenth century did not change their method when they passed from the stars and physical bodies to the world of chemical reactions, or from the physical and chemical world to the life of plants and animals, to Man and to the development of economical and political forms of human society, and finally, to the evolution of the moral sense, the religions, and so on.

The method remained the same. To all branches of science they applied the inductive method. And neither in the study of religions, nor in the analysis of the moral sense and in that of thought altogether, did they find a single case in which their method failed, or in which another method was necessary. Nowhere did they find themselves compelled to have recourse to metaphysical conceptions ("immortal soul," "imperative and categorical laws" inspired by a superior being, etc.), or to any sort of purely dialectic method. And consequently they endeavoured to explain the whole of the universe and all its phenomena in the same way, as naturalists.

During those memorable years of awakening of scientific thought, the Encyclopaedists built their monumental "Encyclopaedia." Laplace published his "System of the Universe," and Holbach his "System of Nature." Lavoisier asserted the indestructibility of matter, and consequently of energy and movement. Lomonosoff, inspired by Bayle, sketched already at that time his mechanical theory of heat; Lamarck explained the origin of the infinitely varied species of plants and animals by adaptation to their divers surroundings; Diderot gave an explanation of moral feeling, of moral customs, of primitive and religious institutions, without having recourse to inspiration from above; Rousseau endeavoured to explain the birth of political institutions following upon a social contract—that is to say, by an act of human will. In short, there was not a sphere which they did not study by means of facts, by the same method of scientific induction and deduction verified by facts.

Of course, more than one error was committed in that great and bold attempt. There, where knowledge was wanting, erroneous and unconfirmed suppositions were sometimes made. But a new method had been applied to whole of human knowledge, and, thanks to this new method, the errors themselves were easily recognised and corrected later on. By this means the nineteenth century received the inheritance of a powerful instrument of research. And with this instrument, modern science was enabled to build our whole conception of the universe on a scientific basis, and to cast away the prejudices that obscured it, as well as the nebulous words which meant nothing, but, from fear of religious prosecution, were thrust in everywhere in order to get rid of difficult questions.

Chapter 3: The Reaction at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

III.

THE REACTION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, after the defeat of the Great Revolution, Europe passed, as is known, through a period of general reaction in the domain both of politics and of science and philosophy. The White Terror of the Bourbons in France; the Holy Alliance concluded in 1815 at Vienna between Austria, Germany, and Russia; mysticism and pietism at the Courts and in the upper classes, and State police everywhere, triumphed all along the line. However, with all that, the fundamental principles of the Revolution did not perish. The gradual liberation of the peasants and the town workers from a state of semi-serfdom in which they had been living till then, equality before the law, and representative government—these three principles promulgated by the Revolution and carried by the French armies all over Europe, as far as Poland and Russia, gradually made headway in France and elsewhere. After the Revolution, which had begun to preach the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the slow evolution began—that is to say, the slow transformation of institutions, and the application to every-day life of the ideas proclaimed in France in 1789–1793. Such a slow realisation, during a period of evolution, of the principles that have been proclaimed during the preceding revolutionary period, can even be considered as a general law of human development.

If the Church, the State, and Science trampled under their feet the banner on which the Revolution had inscribed its device: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; if compromise with existing conditions, political and economical servitude, had become the watchword of the moment, even with philosophers of that period—Hegel in Germany and Cousin in France—nevertheless, the great principles of Liberty gradually began to penetrate into life. True, that serfdom for the peasants all over Eastern Europe, and the Inquisition that had been abolished in Italy and Spain by the armies of the Revolution, were re-established. But a death-blow had been dealt to these institutions, and never since could they recover from it.

The liberation wave first reached Western Germany; then it rolled as far as Prussia and Austria in 1848; it spread over the peninsulas of Spain and Italy, and, flowing further eastwards, it finally reached Russia, where serfdom was abolished in 1861, and the Balkan States, where it ceased to exist in 1878. Slavery disappeared in North America in 1863.

At the same time, the idea of equality of all before the law, and that of representative government also, spread from West to East, and at the end of the nineteenth century Russia and Turkey alone remained under the yoke of autocracy—already weakened, however, and doomed to a certain death in a near future.

More than that. On the line of demarcation separating the eighteenth century from the nineteenth, we already find the ideas of economic enfranchisement loudly advocated. Immediately after the overthrow of the King by the uprising of the people of Paris of August 10, 1792, and especially after the overthrow of the Girondins on June 2, 1793, there was, both in Paris and the provinces, an outburst of Communist feeling, leading to direct action in this sense in the revolutionary sections of the large cities and the municipalities of the small towns and villages over large portions of France.

The people proclaimed that the time had come when Equality must cease to be a shallow word: it must become a fact; and as the burden of the war that the Republic had to fight against the allied monarchies, fell especially upon the poor, the people forced the Commissaries of the Convention in the provinces to take Communistic measures.

The Convention itself was compelled by the people to take Communistic measures tending towards the "abolishing of poverty" and "levelling the fortunes." And after the bourgeois Republican party of the Girondists had been thrust out of power on May 31—June 2, 1793, the National Convention and the Radical bourgeois Club of the Jacobinists were compelled to agree to a series of measures tending to nationalise not only the land, but also all the commerce in the main necessaries of life.

This deeply seated movement lasted till July, 1794, when the bourgeois reaction of the Girondists, combining with the Monarchists, to@k the upper hand. But it was this movement which gave to the nineteenth century its specific character—the Communist and Socialist tendency of its advanced elements.

So long as that movement lasted, it found several spokesmen from among the people. But amongst the writers of the period there was none who would have been able to give a literary expression to its aspirations and foundations, and to advocate it in such a way as to produce a lasting impression upon the minds of his contemporaries.

It was only in 1793, in England, that William Godwin brought out his truly remarkable work: "An Enquiry into Political Justice and its Influence on Public Morality," which made him the first theoriser of Socialism without government—that is to say, of Anarchism; while Babeuf, aided and perhaps inspired by Buonarotti, came forward, in 1796, as the first theoriser of centralised Socialism, i.e., of State Socialism.

Later on, developing the principles already put forth at the end of the preceding century by the people of France, came Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen—the three founders of modern Socialism, representing its three principal schools; and later on, in the "forties," we have Proudhon, who, without knowing Godwin's work, laid anew the foundations of Anarchism.

The scientific basis of Socialism under both aspects, governmental and anti-governmental, was thus elaborated from the beginning of the nineteenth century with a wonderful richness of development. Unfortunately, this is too much ignored by our contemporaries. But the reality is that modern Socialism, which dates from the International Working Men's Association, founded in 1864, has outdistanced its founders by two points only—both, no doubt, quite essential. Modern Socialism has declared that its aims can only be brought into life by a social revolution—which Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen did not wish or dare to say; and it has completely broken with the conception of "Christ being a Socialist and revolutionist," which was so often paraded before 1848.

Modern Socialism has understood that to realise its aspirations a social revolution is absolutely necessary, not in the sense in which the word "revolution" is made use of when an "industrial revolution" or a "revolution in science" is spoken of, but in its exact concrete meaning: that of a general and sudden reconstruction of the foundations themselves of society. Moreover, modern Socialism has ceased to mix its conceptions with certain innocent reforms of a sentimental order mentioned by a few Christian reformers. But this last—we must point out—had had already been done by Godwin, Fourier, and Robert Owen. As to centralisation and the cult of authority and discipline, which humanity owes to theocracy and to Imperial Roman law—all survivals of an obscure past—these survivals are still retained by many modern Socialists, who consequently have not yet reached the level of their two predecessors, Godwin and Proudhon.

It would be difficult to give here an adequate idea of the influence which reaction, having become supreme after the Great French Revolution, exercised upon the development of science. Suffice it to remark that what modern science is so proud of to-day was already indicated, and often more than indicated—it was sometimes put forth in a definite scientific form—towards the end of the eighteenth century. The mechanical theory of heat; the indestructibility of movement (preservation of energy); the variability of species by the direct influence of surroundings; physiological psychology; the anthropologic comprehension of history, of religions, and of legislation; the laws of development of thought—in a word, the whole mechanical conception and synthetic philosophy (a philosophy that discusses the foundations of all physical, chemical, vital, and social phenomena as a whole) were already sketched and partly elaborated in the eighteenth century.

But when the reactionaries had got the upper hand, after the defeat of the Great French Revolution, for fully half a century, they stifled all these discoveries. Reactionary scientists represented them as "unscientific." On the pretext of "first studying facts" and accumulating "materials" for science in scientific societies, they even went so far as to repudiate any research which was not merely mensuration. Such remarkable discoveries as the elder Séguin's and, later on, Joule's determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat (the quantity of mechanical friction necessary in order to obtain a certain quantity of heat) were repudiated by these keepers of tradition. Even the Royal Society of Great Britain, which is the English Academy of Science, refused to print Joule’s work, finding it "unscientific." As to Grove's remarkable work on the unity of all physical forces, written in 1843—no attention was paid to it till 1856. One must read the history of science in the first half of the nineteenth century to realise how dense was the obscurity which enveloped Europe at that time.

The veil was suddenly rent when, towards the end of the "fifties," under the impulse of the revolutionary year of 1848, there began in Western Europe the movement which brought about Garibaldi's rising, the liberation of Italy, the abolition of slavery in America, liberal reforms in England, and a few years later the abolition of serfdom and the knout in Russia. The same movement overthrew in Europe the philosophical authority of Schelling and Hegel, and in Russia it gave vise to an open rebellion against intellectual serfdom and cringing to all sorts of authority, which rebellion was known by the name of Nihilism.

Now that we can look backwards upon the history of those times, it is evident for us that it was the propaganda of Republican and Socialist ideas in the "thirties" and "forties" of the nineteenth century, and the Revolution in 1848, which helped science to rend the bonds that had stifled it since the anti-revolution reaction had begun after the crushing, by the united Kings, of the revolutionary French Republic of 1789–1793.

Without entering into details, it will be sufficient to remember a few facts. Séguin, whose name has just been mentioned as the promoter of the mechanical theory of heat; Augustin Thierry, the historian who first laid the basis of the study of the rule of the people in the small Republics of the early Middle Ages, and of the Federalist ideas of those times; Sismondi, the historian of the free mediæval Republics in Italy, were followers of Saint-Simon—one of the three great founders of Socialism in the first half of the nineteenth century; and Alfred R. Wallace, who discovered at the same time as Darwin the theory of origin of species through natural selection, was in his youth a convinced partisan of Robert Owen; Auguste Comte was a follower of Saint-Simon; Ricardo, as well as Bentham, followed Owen; and the materialists Carl Vogt and George Lewes, as well as Grove, Mill, Herbert Spencer, and so many others, were under the influence of the Radical-Socialist movement in the "thirties" and "forties." From this movement they drew their scientific courage.