#title Rejecting the American Model
#subtitle Peter Kropotkin’s Radical Communalism
#author Matthew S. Adams
#LISTtitle Rejecting the American Model: Peter Kropotkin’s Radical Communalism
#SORTauthors Matthew S. Adams
#SORTtopics Pëtr Kropotkin, history, anarchist history, communalism, anarcho-communism, utopianism, communalism, intentional communities, Social Darwinism, Charles Fourier, utopia
#date 2014
#source *History of Political Thought*, 25 (1), pp. 147-173.
#lang en
#notes This item was submitted to Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository by the author. Citation: ADAMS, M.S., 2014. Rejecting the American model: Peter Kropotkin’s radical communalism. History of Political Thought, 25 (1), pp. 147 — 173. This paper was accepted for publication in the journal History of Political Thought and the definitive published version is available at [[http://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/hpt/2014/00000035/00000001/art00007][www.ingentaconnect.com]].
Metadata Record: [[https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/22030][dspace.lboro.ac.uk]]. This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: [[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/][creativecommons.org]].
Please cite the published version.
*** Abstract
Kropotkin’s anarchism looked to a future defined by communalism. However, his
understanding of this potential communal future has rarely been subject to analysis.
Particularly important was his distinction between communalism and the tradition of
communal experimentation in the US, which drew heavily on the ideas of Charles Fourier.
Kropotkin was influenced by Fourier, but thought that attempts to found phalanstèries had
been disastrous, vitiating the power of communalist propaganda. To defend the idea of a
communal future, Kropotkin therefore advanced a tripartite critique of the US model of
utopian experimentation. The image of American utopianism he created consequently served
as a useful rhetorical device, allowing him to advance a counter-image of the anarchist
communal theory that lay at the heart of his political theory.[1]
[1] Matthew S. Adams, Department of History, Durham University, 43 North Bailey, Durham, DH1 3EX.
*** Introduction
Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist utopia The Conquest of Bread attempted to anticipate the
multiple objections to the viability of anarchism. Addressing the critical questions of an
imaginary interlocutor was one of Kropotkin’s favoured rhetorical devices, and in his 1892
work, it was applied thoroughly to present a detailed exposition of what an anarchist world
might look like. In a preface added to the 1906 translation, Kropotkin made it clear that
communalism would be a defining feature of any future anarchist society.[2] The Paris
Commune of 1871, a prominent event in socialist mythology, had revealed the continuing
practicability of communal organisation in the context of mass society, he argued, and
anarchist revolutionaries should look to the ‘agro-industrial commune’ as the vehicle of
anarchism.[3] Yet, Kropotkin observed that communalism was not only the surest means of
approximating anarchism in a future society, but also a guiding logic of the revolutionary
transition itself. Instead of a state-led revolution of a Marxian variety, he suggested that the
spirit of communalisation would necessarily emerge in the earliest days of an upheaval, as the
state retreated and popular initiative filled the vacuum. Kropotkin’s reading of the French
Revolution confirmed the truth of this theory, demonstrating at once the seductive qualities of
untrammelled power, but also the formidable resourcefulness slumbering in the cities and
villages.[4] History too had revealed the power of communal organisation.
While The Conquest of Bread was keen to distinguish anarchism from competing strands of
socialist thought by emphasising Kropotkin’s antipathy to the state, a feature less commented
upon is its specific theoretical understanding of communalism. A central aspect of
Kropotkin’s political theory was a criticism of the ‘intentional communities’ that he believed
characterised a certain type of futile socialism prevalent in the United States.[5] Although
greatly inspired by the work of Charles Fourier, a figure Kropotkin placed at the apex of the
history of modern socialism, he believed that attempts to realise communal societies in a
Fourierian mould had damaged the power of communalist propaganda. Kropotkin felt that the
experimental societies that proliferated during the economically insecure antebellum period
were defined by an elitist and self-centred desire to escape the iniquities of everyday life
under capitalism. That the quality of life achieved by these communities was often abysmal,
was further testament to the futility of trying to achieve socialism in isolation. His specific
knowledge of these communities may have been limited, but this image of American
communalism served a useful rhetorical purpose, as Kropotkin delineated his image of
anarchist communalism in contradistinction to experiments in socialist living. Moreover, it
shows him engaged in a creative reading of Fourier’s ideas, a thinker that Kropotkin believed
had offered precious theoretical insights, but who was also partly responsible for the failures
of the communal movement.
[2] See: Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (New York, 1907), pp.iii-xii.
[3] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.8.
[4] See, for instance: P.A. Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution1789-1793 (London, 1909), pp.257–8.
[5] Although a product of contemporary social science, and therefore not a term that Kropotkin employed,
‘intentional’ community is a useful shorthand for those utopian experiments that flourished in nineteenth-
century America. Denoting communities established to preserve a ‘unique collective purpose’ and ‘usually
comprised of a relatively small group of individuals who...created a unique way of life for the attainment of an
articulated set of goals’, experiments like this, taking inspiration from a variety of ideas, grew on the intellectual
and physical landscape. John W. Friesen and Virginia Lyons Friesen, The Palgrave Companion to North
American Utopias (New York, 2004), pp.15–16. See also: Barry Shenker, Intentional Communities: Ideology
and Alienation in Communal Societies (London, 1986), pp.10–12.
The present article seeks to recover this overlooked argument in The Conquest of Bread and
his oeuvre more generally, and clarify both Kropotkin’s perception of what intentional
communities in the United States were like, and what he believed to be their central
weaknesses. It demonstrates that his critique of these communities formed an important
aspect of his political identity. In rejecting their structural and qualitative features, he
constructed an image of anarchist communalism that sought to address these problems. In this
vein, Kropotkin developed a vision of anarchist communalism in which localised distribution
of resources was allied to inter-communal cooperation in practical and intellectual matters.
Owing much to Proudhon’s federalism, Kropotkin’s desire to break the physical isolation of
the commune was an attempt to prevent parochialism, finding expression in his comment
that:
Pour nous, «Commune» n’est plus une agglomeration territoriale; c’est plutôt un nom générique, un synonyme de groupement d’égaux, ne connaissant ni frontiers ni murailles.[6]{1}
{1} For us, "Commune" is no longer a territorial agglomeration; it is rather a generic name, a synonym of grouping of equals, knowing neither frontiers nor walls.
This organisational ethos underpinned Kropotkin’s anarchist communalism, and the
flexibility it enshrined found an echo in his approach to the question of work and leisure in an
anarchist society. These ideas emerged from an interaction with a tradition of communal
thinking, particularly in its Fourierian origins, which he was critical of in its practical
manifestations but, nonetheless, fundamentally indebted to.
[6] Pierre Kropotkine, Paroles D’un Révolté (Paris, [1885] N.D.), p.117. For a useful commentary on Proudhon’s
federalism, see: K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism
(Oxford , 1984), pp.209–228,
To gain a clearer picture of Kropotkin’s engagement with communalist history, and its
influence on his utopian political theory, the three points of analysis below make a number of
interrelated claims. First, the act of contextualising Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread in
terms of his broader corpus hints at the surprising comprehensiveness of his work.
Appreciating his intellectual context and particularly his indebtedness to a tradition of
system-building social philosophy represented by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer,
makes this essential unity clearer, and challenges attempts to discern any significant
theoretical break in his work. Whilst influenced by Comte and Spencer’s synthetic
epistemologies, Kropotkin’s reading of the two mostly elided their political divergences –
namely, Comte’s sympathy for centralised planning and Spencer’s overt hostility to
centralisation. Kropotkin’s politics therefore lay closer to Spencer’s, a proximity that he
acknowledged, but on Comte’s Saint-Simonian heritage, he remained largely silent.[7] Despite
adopting the nomenclature of the system builders, Kropotkin’s remained an activist
philosophy, even though his later life was dominated by his scholarly preoccupations. The
communalist arguments advanced in The Conquest of Bread are therefore crucial to his
broader social theory. The second section investigates Fourier’s overlooked influence on
Kropotkin, before considering the profound impact of Fourier’s work on utopian
experimentation in mid-nineteenth century America. Cognisant of the failures of these
societies, Kropotkin’s critique of Fourier must be seen through this lens, as he attempted to
salvage the enduring importance of certain ideas from a history of disaster. The final section
looks at Kropotkin’s excoriating comments on these communities themselves, and his
counter-image of anarchist communalism. Condemning the structural basis of these
communities and the kind of life they offered their inhabitants, Kropotkin painted an image
of an anarchism purged of their deficiencies, a rhetorical engagement that unmasks the
complexity of his overarching political system.
[7] For a useful discussion of Comte’s ideas, see: H.S. Jones, “Introduction” to Auguste Comte, Early Political
Writings (Cambridge, 1998), especially pp.xii-xv. For a classic statement of Spencer’s political position and its
incompatibility with Comte’s, consider: Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State: containing “The New
Toryism,” “The Coming Slavery,” “The Sins of Legislators” and “The Great Political Superstition” (London,
1881). For Kropotkin’s sympathetic, but critical, view of Spencer’s politics, see: P.A.K., “ Anarchism” in The
Encyclopaedia Britannica: Eleventh Edition: Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1910), pp.914–919; P. Kropotkine, “Co-
Operation: A Reply to Herbert Spencer” in Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism (Jan., 1897), pp.1–2;
“Herbert Spencer” in Freedom (Feb., 1904), pp.7–8; “Herbert Spencer II” in Freedom (April-May, 1904), pp.15;
“Hebert Spencer III” in Freedom (June, 1904), pp.23; “Herbert Spencer III Continued” in Freedom (Aug.,
1904), pp.31; “Herbert Spencer III Continued” in Freedom (Sept., 1904), pp.35.
*** Situating The Conquest of Bread
By the time the first edition of The Conquest of Bread appeared in France in 1892, Kropotkin
had already risen to notoriety in Europe. His controversial French imprisonment in 1883, on
the grounds of belonging to the International Workingmen’s Association, an organisation
prohibited at the time of the Commune, sparked an outcry. That the International had largely
ceased to exist post-1877 suggested that the prosecutors were anxious to be seen taking action
after a recent spate of terrorist acts.[8] Nevertheless, despite spurious evidence, Kropotkin was
imprisoned. Indicative of his growing scholarly renown, at this stage a consequence of his
work in the field of orography, a petition was started that attracted the signatures of a cross-
section of British cultural life, including many academics, writers and scientists.[9] Upon his
release in 1886, Kropotkin sensed that France was no longer a comfortable place to propagate
anarchist ideas, and so began a thirty-one year exile in Britain. Plagued by ill health, the
pressures of supporting his family through his writing, and the comparatively embryonic
nature of the anarchist movement in Britain meant that his extended sojourn marked a period
of decreasing involvement with practical politics.
[8] George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin
(New York, 1971), pp.189–191.
[9] Woodcock, Anarchist Prince, p.194.
Whilst signalling a decline in practical activity, Kropotkin’s British exile also marked the
period when he rose to prominence as the major theorist of anarchism – a mantle he inherited
from Mikhail Bakunin.[10] Although hostile to the idea of leadership, and sceptical of anything
that might imply intellectual authority, even Kropotkin’s anarchist opponents tended to
concede his stature.[11] In contrast to the notoriously chaotic and impulsive Bakunin,
Kropotkin’s major achievement was the patient elaboration of his ideas in a variety of forms,
and his attempt to relate anarchist thought to contemporary developments in science and
philosophy. Convinced of the importance of providing anarchism with robust epistemological
foundations, in pursuing this self-appointed task Kropotkin contributed to the continuing
definition of anarchism as an independent political tradition, in particular the anarchist-communist strand of which he became the predominant theorist. Whereas Bakunin exchanged
polemical barbs with Marx in missives and circulars, Kropotkin tended towards delineation
and definition. This technique is captured in his entry on anarchism for the celebrated
eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910 – probably one of the few
contributions to that work that continues to be referenced.[12] As Kropotkin justifiably stated in
his article, although anarchism remained a multifaceted set of ideas and a splintered
movement, the ‘anarchist-communist’ direction exercised the most significant influence,
having displaced the ‘collectivist’ anarchism associated with Bakunin.[13] Although
conspicuously uncritical of Bakunin, Kropotkin’s politics principally diverged on the idea of
remuneration in a post-capitalist society. Adopting a communist distributive ethic, captured
in his oft-quoted slogan ‘all is for all’, Kropotkin argued that reward for work would allow
hierarchy to insidiously return.[14] Whilst appearing to be a minor distinction, Kropotkin
endeavoured to demonstrate the viability of distributive communism by highlighting the
importance of mutuality in biological evolution and human history, and pointing to a latent
anarchist ethical theory emerging from these processes. His desire to uncover the broad
implications of anarchism, and emphasise its continuing relevance, meant that Kropotkin’s
systematic exposition of anarchist philosophy has proven his enduring contribution.
[10] James Joll, The Anarchists (London, 1979), p.107.
[11] In particular, see: Errico Malatesta, Errico Malatesta: His Life & Ideas (London, [1931] 1993), pp. 257–268;
Rudolf Rocker, The London Years (Nottingham, [1956] 2005), pp.75–78.
[12] P.A.K., “Anarchism”, pp.914–919. On the continuing use of this definition, see: Ruth Kinna, Anarchism: A
Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, 2005), p.17; Colin Ward and David Goodway, Talking Anarchy (Nottingham, 2003),
p.25.
[13] P.A.K., “Anarchism”, p.917.
[14] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.26. For an exposition of his position on remuneration, see: Peter Kropotkin,
“Communism and the Wage System [1888]” in Nicolas Walter and Heiner Becker (eds.) Act for Yourselves:
Articles from Freedom: 1886–1907 (London, 1998), pp.103–113.
Kropotkin was well aware of the Comtean nature of his project. In Modern Science and
Anarchism, a work written at the turn of the century, but not translated into English until
1912, he made his desire to develop the credentials of anarchism as a synthetic philosophy.
Offering a detailed intellectual history of European social and scientific thought, the work
sought to demonstrate that the liberation of scientific reasoning from religious dogma was
mirrored by the emergence of socialist thinking. For Kropotkin, thinkers like Comte and
Spencer demonstrated the growing power and sophistication of modern science, as its
methods were transposed from the natural to social worlds, and sociology pointed to the
potential for the elaboration of provisional laws of social development. Kropotkin even
attributed Comte’s inability to escape deist thinking in his moral theory a consequence of his
failure to abide by his own scientific strictures, a weakness amplified by his historical
isolation from Darwinism. Overlooking the ‘positivist conclusions’ to which his observation
of mutual support in animal communities pointed, due to the immaturity of ‘biological
knowledge’, theology crept back into Comte’s social thought, tarnishing his considerable
intellectual achievement.[15] Placing his own work at the zenith of this intellectual trajectory,
Kropotkin believed that his anarchism rested on firmer foundations, and was able to achieve
the synthetic philosophical ambitions that partially eluded Comte and Spencer. Although
couched in terms of scientific truth, Kropotkin was nevertheless anxious to insist that an
element of provisionality remained, and that the revolutionising tendencies of modern
scientific discovery would not cease.[16] Given this scope for constant innovation, the anarchist
must be attentive to the future progress of science.
[15] Italics are Kropotkin’s own. Peter Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism [1912]” in George Woodcock
(ed.) Evolution and Environment (Montréal, 1995), pp.15–107, p.33.
[16] Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism”, p.93. See also: Ruth Kinna, “Anarchism and the Politics of
Utopia” in Laurence Davis and Kinna (eds.) Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester, 2009), pp.221–240, p.233.
These themes came together in Kropotkin’s most famous work, Mutual Aid, completed whilst
in Britain, and responding chiefly to British thinkers. As his critique of Comte implied,
Kropotkin was convinced of the validity of Darwinian theory and its potential for wider
application, but bristled at its perversion into an apologia for domination at the hands of
Social Darwinists. The idea that Darwinian evolutionary theory was useful for
comprehending social development more broadly was a characteristically Victorian view,
something Spencer’s voluminous output alone is testimony. Yet, whilst Spencer’s dalliance
with Darwinism is only remembered for his pithy summation of natural selection in the
phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in his long forgotten Principles of Biology (1864), Kropotkin’s
controversial intervention remains influential.[17] Originally conceived as a series six articles
for the periodical Nineteenth Century and published between 1890 and 1896, the thrust of
Kropotkin’s argument was that the complexity of the ‘struggle for survival’ thesis had been
overlooked due to the ideological hegemony of capitalist individualism.[18] Darwin’s great
insight, which allowed us to ‘embrace an immensely wide range of phenomena in one single
generalization’, had been deformed by the persistence of the ‘old Malthusian leaven’ that the
competition ‘between each and all’ was the law of life.[19] T.H. Huxley, the man who did so
much to popularise Darwin’s work, is charged with being particularly guilty of this crime, in
his ‘atrocious’ article “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society”, which also appeared in
Nineteenth Century.[20] Kropotkin inveighed against Huxley’s cavalier approach to
empiricism, commenting that his scientific observation of the natural world was as reliable as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ruminations on early humanity, the only difference being that
whereas one saw nature drenched in blood, the other saw ‘love, peace and harmony’
prevailing. That Kropotkin rejected Rousseau’s vision of nature as equally absurd is
important, and foreshadowed his argument that, although the tendency to self-assertion and
aggression was a significant factor in survival, its overemphasis had skewed our
understanding of evolution. Instead, he concluded that those animal societies most effective
in practising mutual aid were those most likely to proliferate and advance, whereas ‘the
unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay’.[21]
[17] Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (London, 1864), p.444, 453, 469, 474. Kropotkin’s importance is
suggested by his foregrounding in popular works on altruism, Social Darwinism and evolutionary theory.
Consider: Oren Harman, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness
(London, 2011) and Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London, 1997). On Mutual Aid, see: Ruth Kinna,
“Kropotkin and Huxley” in Politics, 12:2 (1992), pp.41–7; Ruth Kinna, “Kropotkin’s Theory of Mutual Aid in
Historical Context” in International Review of Social History 40 (1995), pp.259–283.
[18] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Montréal, [1902] 1989), p.1.
[19] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.3.
[20] Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (London, [1899] 1978), p.336.
The broader intellectual context of Mutual Aid is important, for whilst Kropotkin spent only
two chapters musing on the sociable habits of marmots and mice, he devoted six to tracing
cooperation in human societies. In these chapters the real significance of his argument
becomes clear, particularly his attempt to conceive evolution contra both Huxley and
Spencer. Although he thought Spencer had recognised the importance of solidarity in animal
communities, Kropotkin objected that he failed to carry this through to understanding human
relations.[22] This is mirrored in his reading of Huxley, where although Kropotkin reproached
the biologist for his sanguine vision of nature, the real thrust of Huxley’s argument was that
animal communities could not be a matrix for human ethics, a position he would develop in
his famous Romanes Lecture at Oxford in 1893.[23] Kropotkin did not engage explicitly with
this argument in Mutual Aid, and instead charged Huxley with a thinly veiled ‘Hobbesian’
bias in his portrayal of nature.[24] A subtext in this work, however, and one that Kropotkin was
to expand elsewhere, was that seeing human ethics in relation to nature was indeed fruitful.
In chapters investigating the social life of the tribe, village community and the medieval
commune, Kropotkin traced the supposed continuation of the mutual aid principle through
history, in a variety of customs and institutions introduced to help life prosper. Culminating
in an analysis of mutual aid ‘amongst ourselves’, he suggested that in spite of the
development of the modern state and its ‘iron rules’, the mutual aid tendency continued to
assert itself in a quixotic mix of associations including friendly societies, bicycling clubs and
Swiss Cantons. Mutual Aid thus paved the way for Kropotkin to draw a connection between
the instinctually cooperative actions of animals that secured survival, and the ‘higher moral
sentiments’ refined by humans that had their ‘origins’ in ‘the practice of mutual aid.’[25]
Conscious that human history did not represent the steady triumph of solidarity however,
Kropotkin reminded the reader that egotistical and competitive principles could occasionally
predominate, an oscillation that structured the historical process.[26] The latent constructive
power of cooperation was nonetheless cause for optimism, and in the right social context,
held before it a rich future.
[21] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.5, 293.
[22] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.xliii.
[23] Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London, 1893).
[24] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.77. For Kropotkin’s more detailed engagement with Huxley, see: Prince Kropotkin,
Ethics: Origin and Development (Dorchester, [1924] N.D.) especially pp.284–287.
In a series of texts, Kropotkin endeavoured to texture this conception of anarchist politics,
whilst at the same time maintain its credentials as an activist philosophy. The pamphlet
Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1897) developed Kropotkin’s notion of science as a
decentring force, and suggested that this tendency would develop in social life, with anarchist
organisation the surest approximation of this metaphysical malleability.[27] Indeed, Kropotkin
proposed that human history was defined by a clash between these competing forces, with
local and communal organisation continually confronted by the powers of reaction,
manifested historically in the states of antiquity, ‘barbarian’ kings and petty despots and
contemporarily in the modern nation-state.[28] This representation of the historical process was
an important theme in Mutual Aid, but also in the extended pamphlet The State: Its Historic
Role (1896), which was written in the same year that Kropotkin completed his more famous
work.[29] In both, Kropotkin sketched a philosophy of history in which the conflict between
authority and liberty was perpetual across the ages, with the ‘pendulum’ swing between these
tendencies defining European history.[30] In certain epochs, the communal spirit had proven
resilient and ‘oases amidst the...forest’ emerged, as with the emergence of communalism in
the twelfth century.[31] During others, reaction triumphed, and Rome provided Kropotkin with
a useful analogy for a state that was strongly centralised and strived to spread this
domination.[32]
[25] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.60, 300.
[26] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.295. Kropotkin’s view of history is sketched out most clearly in: Peter Kropotkin,
“The State: Its Historic Role [1896]” in Woodcock (ed.) Fugitive Writings, pp.159–201, esp. p.200–1.
[27] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Philosophy and Ideal [1897]” in George Woodcock (ed.)
Fugitive Writings (Montréal, 1993), pp.99–121.
[28] Although Victorian convention gave Kropotkin little lexical latitude, he was nevertheless sceptical of the term
‘barbarian’, and often placed it in knowing quotation marks. See: Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.124.
[29] Peter Kropotkin, “The State: Its Historic Role [1896]” in Woodcock (ed.) Fugitive Writings, pp.159–201, esp.
p.200–1.
[30] This phrase actually occurs in Anarchist Morality, but Kropotkin used similar metaphors in The State. Peter
Kropotkin, “Anarchist Morality [1892]” in Fugitive Writings, pp.127–153, p.127. For more on Kropotkin’s
historical narrative, see: Matthew S. Adams, “Kropotkin: Evolution, Revolutionary Change and the End of
History” in Anarchist Studies, Vol.19, No.1 (2011), pp.56–81; David Miller, Anarchism (London, 1984), p.70-77.
[31] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.166.
[32] On his varied use of ‘Roman’, consider: Kropotkin, “The State: Its Historic Role”, p.160, 168, 169, 171, 198.
Kropotkin’s epistemological writings aimed at uniting anarchism and modern science, and his
historical reflections uncovered a world defined by a clash between centralisers and
decentralisers since time immemorial. Yet, these were not intended as academic ruminations,
and an image of the life worth living formed a central pillar of Kropotkin’s social philosophy.
In this vein, he persistently defended the utility of utopianism as a means of animating action
in the present. Writing a foreword to Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget’s syndicalist utopia
How We Shall Bring About the Revolution (1909), Kropotkin offered a qualified defence of
thinking in concrete terms about the kind of society that revolutionaries desired. It was
important, he maintained, not to ‘attach more importance to a book’ than was appropriate, for
‘a book is not a gospel’, and revolution was the product of multiple wills and factors that a
single author could not comprehend.[33] But in spite of this, he conceded that Pouget and
Pataud’s provocative work ‘makes us think’ about the potential problems that might confront
revolutionaries, and ‘the better we understand what we want...the fewer obstacles the
Revolution meets on its way; the fewer struggles it will have to sustain, and the fewer victims
it will cost.’[34] It was this spirit, Kropotkin noted, that informed his own dalliance with
utopian literature ‘thirty years ago’ when he ‘sketched a communal utopia in “The Conquest
of Bread”’.[35]
[33] Peter Kropotkin, “Preface [1911]” to Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget, How We Shall Bring About the
Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth (London, 1990), pp.xxxi-xxxvii (p.xxxii).
[34] Kropotkin, “Preface [1911]”, p.xxxvii.
[35] Kropotkin, “Preface [1911]”, p.xxxiv.
That Kropotkin felt The Conquest of Bread remained an important contribution to the field is
suggested by the fact that it was printed in English in 1906, and then again in 1913, with only
superficial changes. It was Kropotkin’s most explicit statement of anarchist-communist
principles, as in a series of chapters he imagined a populace gripped by a revolutionary
fervour akin to that of the Paris Commune. The seventeen substantive chapters centred on a
variety of issues that might confront a community as it challenged existing social structures,
but Kropotkin’s main ambitions were to demonstrate the practicability of anarchism as a form
of organisation, and advance a moral argument showing its superiority to capitalism. Thus,
early chapters ‘Our riches’ and ‘Well-being for all’, reflect on the enormous productive
capacities secured by human ingenuity, and bemoan the ‘wrong direction’ in which
production ‘tends’ as ‘speculators’ direct decision-making.[36] Given this increase in the
powers of production, a consequence of ‘all that our ancestors’ had achieved, Kropotkin
suggested that universal ‘well-being’ was no phantasm.[37] Having presented this preparatory
argument, and suggested that ‘expropriation’ must be confidently initiated to universalise
these benefits, Kropotkin offered a series of technical discussions concerning issues such as
‘food’, ‘dwellings’ and ‘clothing’. In each case, he concluded that an almost spontaneous
‘communalization’ initiated by the people would secure equitable distribution during any
upheaval.[38] Comparatively Spartan conditions might prevail during the revolutionary period,
but Kropotkin was adamant that revolutionary success rested on achieving more than bread
and shelter alone.[39] Anarchism must offer a qualitatively better life than the morally
corrupting atmosphere nurtured under capitalism, and the latter chapters of The Conquest of
Bread were devoted to elaborating this image of a communal society characterised by
purposeful labour, relative luxury, and the space for intellectual improvement. In short, his
argument amounted to an assertion that any anarchist future must also be communalist.
[36] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.11.
[37] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.15
[38] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.62. See also, pp.77–9, 100–9.
[39] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.124.
An idea of communalisation was therefore an integral one to Kropotkin’s normative political
vision, but the commune also occupied a prominent position in the historical narrative that his
political identity rested upon. An early piece in his book Paroles d’un Révolté (1885), which
collected a range of articles published in the propagandist newspaper Le Révolté between
1879 and 1882, revealed a conviction that the commune was the revolutionary unit of the
future, just as it had been crucial to previous social struggles:
Les Communes, absolument indépendants, affranchies de la tutelle de l’Etat, qui pourront seules nous donner le milieu nécessaire à la révolution et le moyen de l’accomplir.[40]{2}
{2} The Communes, absolutely independent, freed from the supervision of the State, who alone can give us the necessary medium for the revolution and the means to accomplish it.
Kropotkin did not envisage his historical investigations as a fundamentally academic pursuit,
but was a firm believer in the idea that knowledge of the past could help avoid pitfalls in the
present. In this vein, he warned that historical reflection bears only a ‘valeur relative’,{3} and ‘la Commune, aujourd’hui ne peut revêtir les forms qu’elle pernait il y a sept siécles.’{4}[41]
Nevertheless, for tomorrow’s radical communes to pose any significant threat to the state,
Kropotkin insisted that familiarity with the history of communalism was vital. It is little
surprise, therefore, that Kropotkin regularly returned to the medieval communalism as
symbolic of past struggles against imperious despots, expressed in the middle chapters of
Mutual Aid. His British context is important here, for Kropotkin’s romantic proclivities were
encouraged by the romantic reaction to capitalism that was a prominent thread in British
socialist thinking in the late nineteenth-century, an approach that led to a general
reassessment of medievalism by the likes of William Morris.[42] Although he did not buy into
this mythology wholesale, he was nevertheless impressed by what he perceived as the
essentially organic emergence of the communalist movement, and its subsequent civic
achievements. Casting his eye over European history, Kropotkin suggested that the vitality of
the communal movement lay in its spontaneous growth in resistance to the ‘pretty
rulers...theocracies and despotic States’ that had begun to colonise social life.[43] The ‘fortified
city’ rose to resist the ‘lord’s castle’ and in these city-states ‘they instituted their “co-jurations”, their “fraternities”, their “friendships”, united in one common idea, and boldly
marching towards a new life of mutual support and liberty’.[44] These societies may have been
riddled with structural and political weaknesses ensuring their eventual collapse, but he
believed that history’s greatest cultural and scientific advances had obvious roots in the
cobbled streets of those city-states.[45] If only this social form could be revitalised and purged
of these imperfections, Kropotkin was confident a brighter future would dawn.
{3} relative value
{4} the Commune today can not assume the forms that it perished seven centuries ago.
[40] Kropotkine, Paroles D’un Révolté , p.105.
[41] Kropotkine, Paroles D’un Révolté, p.106.
[42] Ruth Kinna, William Morris: The Art of Socialism (Cardiff, 2000), pp.37–43.
*** The Influence of Fourier: Communes and Communalists
The notion that communalism held before it the possibility of redemption was a common one
in the history of socialist thought. In Russian radical history the peasant commune, or mir,
held a prominent place in the affections of dissenting intellectuals, and a young Kropotkin
was profoundly influenced by this mythology. Alexander Herzen for instance, who Kropotkin
deemed a ‘profound thinker’ and a gifted propagandist, returned to the peasant commune as a
source of inspiration once his illusions were shattered by the docility of workers in the west.[46]
In Herzen’s open letter to Jules Michelet, reacting to the historian’s unsympathetic depiction
of the Russian people in a recent work on the oppression of Poland, Herzen opined that the
peasant commune offered an important example of socialism in action that revolutionaries in
the west should heed.[47] The equally cosmopolitan Bakunin, who enjoyed a fractious
friendship with Herzen, held a less enthusiastic image of the mir, but still insisted upon the
revolutionary potential of the peasantry – despite, that is, lamenting that ‘les paysans français sont parfaitement ignorants.’{5}[48] Even so, whilst criticising the ‘patriarchalism’ and
parochialism of the mir, the commune remained the basic unit of Bakunin’s utopian society.[49]
Kropotkin held a more romantic view of the mir than Bakunin, but whereas both Bakunin and
Herzen’s image of the peasant commune remained essentially static as they travelled from
east to west, Kropotkin’s physical journey was mirrored in a reduced focus on the mir. In his
first political statement, the tedious ‘Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the
Ideal of a Future System?’ (1873), written after Kropotkin’s brief involvement with the
populist Circle of Chaikovsky, the obshchina[50] featured heavily as the agent and locus of
social transformation.[51] As his politics matured in Switzerland, France and Britain, the
imagery of Russian populism gave way to examples more fitting to his immediate context.
The medieval city-state and the Paris Commune dominate Paroles D’un Révolté{6}, and the
symbols of urbanism litter his British writings: ‘museums, free libraries’, ‘parks and pleasure
grounds’ and ‘tramways and railways’.[52] While Kropotkin groped for an effective
vocabulary, he remained unflinchingly consistent in his aim: to emphasise the constructive
power of communalism.
{5} the French peasants are perfectly ignorant
{6} Words of a Revolt
[43] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.162.
[44] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.163.
[45] For the commune’s achievements, see: Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.209–215 and for its weaknesses see: Mutual
Aid, pp.215–222.
[46] Peter Kropotkin, Russian Literature: Ideals and Realities (Montréal, [1905]1991), p.298. For a general
overview, see: Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Afterword: The Problem of the Peasant” in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.)
The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1968), pp.263–284, p.272.
[47] Alexander Herzen, From the Other Side and The Russian People and Socialism (London, [1851] 1956),
pp.165–208, p.189.
[48] Michel Bakounine, Oeuvres: Tome II (Paris, 1907), p.93.
[49] Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge, [1873] 2005), p.209.
[50] Although technically referring to different forms of organisation, writers often used obshchina and mir
interchangeably. See: Moshe Lewin, ‘The Obshchina and the Village’ in Roger Bartlett (ed.) Land Commune
and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society (London, 1990),
pp.20–35.
[51] Peter Kropotkin, “Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal of a Future System? [1873]”
in Fugitive Writings, pp.13–68. On the Circle of Chaikovsky, see: Kropotkin, Memoirs, p.212–223.
It is clear that history was important to Kropotkin, and he began many of his articles and
books by situating his brand of anarchism in a broader history of socialism, in which the
nineteenth-century pioneers of communalism occupied an important place. The eccentric
Charles Fourier (1772–1837), described by one commentator as ‘a visionary and crank of the
first order’, was a figure frequently mentioned by Kropotkin, who praised his theoretical
attempts to unite a communistic distributive ethic with communal living.[53] Kropotkin’s friend
Max Nettlau, commonly described as the ‘Herodotus of anarchism’ (although the persistently
contrarian Nicolas Walter objected that, in fact, he was its Thucydides), observed that
Kropotkin was frustrated by the time constraints that meant he could not devote more time to
writing on Fourier.[54] Despite this regret, Kropotkin did return to the Frenchman frequently,
believing that his great insight was that the commune or ‘phalanx’ might operate as
storehouse for goods and thereby offer ‘the solution of the great problem of Exchange and
Distribution of Produce’.[55] The commune would merely serve as the ‘depositary’ for these
goods, and offer a means of organising their distribution that bypassed the profiteering
intermediaries of capitalism. Kropotkin adopted this idea in The Conquest of Bread,
suggesting that an anarchist society might make use of ‘communal stores’ from which
individuals were free to take what they please:
[52] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles [1887]” in Fugitive Writings, pp.72–94,
p.83.
[53] Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, p.71. It should be noted, however, that Fourier remained
committed to private property and was sceptical of the idea of equality. See: Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P.
Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA, 1979), pp.666–667.
[54] Max Nettlau, “Peter Kropotkin at Work [1921]” in The Raven, Vol.5, No.4 (Oct.-Dec. 1992), pp.379–388,
p.387; Nicolas Walter, “A flawless reminder of life left of left” in Times Higher Education Supplement, 10th
October 1997, pp.27.
The peasant would only withhold what he needed for his own use, and would send the rest into the cities, feeling for the first time in course of history that these toiling townsfolk were his comrades – his brethren, and not his exploiters.[56]
In Kropotkin’s reading of Fourier two values underpinned this enviable form of association,
and both found their way into The Conquest of Bread as fundamental features of an anarchist
society. First, production should be organised so that there ‘must be no disagreeable labour’;
and secondly, befitting a ‘society organised on the principle of free association’ it was crucial
that ‘no sort of coercion must be exercised.’[57]
[55] Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism”, p.71.
[56] Italics are Kropotkin’s own. Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.110, 89.
[57] Italics are Kropotkin’s own. Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism”, p.72.
[58] For a discussion of the complex relationship between early socialists and the question of violence, see:
Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France
(Guildford, 2000), pp.27–38.
Despite Kropotkin’s obvious indebtedness to Fourier’s communalist ideas, the two parted
ways in how they believed this future might be secured. Coming of age during the
bloodletting of the Terror, Fourier, like many contemporary pioneers of socialism, baulked at
the prospect of a period of transition defined by violence.[58] Marx and Engels famous
dissection of utopian socialism stemmed in part from a critique of this interpretation, for
theorising a post-capitalist future whilst capitalism was in its infancy, led to failure to
appreciate the structural factors necessary to engender revolutionary consciousness. Socialists
like Fourier therefore looked to ‘historical action...to yield to their personal inventive action’,
and understood communalism as the agent of a millennial reconciliation of the antagonistic
forces unleashed by capitalist economics.[59] Interestingly, even though Kropotkin was deeply
sceptical of Marxism’s claims to scientific validity, he concurred with the assessment that
Fourier had a faulty understanding of the change from capitalism to communism. He noted
that Fourier, as a witness to the Revolution, ‘naturally’ inclined ‘to advocate peaceable
solutions only’, but that this was inadequate.[60] Modern socialism, he concluded, had rid itself
of the optimistic belief that universal agreement could usher in a new civilisation, and now
‘social revolution’ lay at the heart of its emancipatory philosophy. Whereas Fourier returned
home every day to await the arrival of the benevolent capitalist to bankroll his new society, to
Kropotkin’s mind, modern socialism had uncovered a more realistic solution.[61] The
‘Commune insurgée, seen in Paris in 1871, hinted at the existence of a fresh revolutionary
tradition:
Sous le nom de Commune de Paris, naquit une idée nouvelle, appelée à devenir le point de depart des revolutions futures.[62]{7}
{7} Under the name of the *Commune of Paris*, a new *idea* was born, destined to become the point of departure for future revolutions.
[59] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, [1848] 2002), p.254. Engels advanced a
more sympathetic analysis of Fourier, ‘one of the greatest satirists of all time’, in Anti-Dühring. See: Frederick
Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Düring) (New York, 1939), p.284.
[60] Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism”, p.72.
[61] This anecdote is taken from Carl J. Guarneri’s excellent study. See: Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative:
Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 1991), p.20.
[62] Italics are Kropotkin’s own. Kropotkine, Paroles D’un Révolté, p.138, 120.
Crucially, however, in reflecting on the centrality of the insurgent commune to the
revolutionary opportunities that might lie ahead, Kropotkin was not renouncing the
Fourierian tradition, but modernising it. Aspects of the future that Fourier had imagined
continued to appeal, but now Kropotkin thought saw more clearly how it might be achieved.
The theoretical emphasis that Kropotkin placed on the commune as a unit of social
transformation is an important area of divergence from Fourier. Whilst the two held broadly
congruent images of the organisational potential of the commune, an important difference
was that for Kropotkin communalisation was a means of struggle as well as an end in itself.
Fourier’s fixation on the size of the phalanstère and its combination of personalities – 810
‘passional types’ meaning an ideal community size of 1,620 so that everyone had a partner –
implies an essential fixity to his vision, even if he postponed the liberation of certain sexual
mores to a future state of Harmony.[63] To Kropotkin, in contrast, the commune represented an
essentially malleable form of organisation. Keenly aware of the logistical difficulties that
exist in revolutionary situations, the commune would offer the organisational élan to deal
with a period of stress – securing the evocative ‘bread’ in the title of his book. The commune
was therefore a resolutely revolutionary agent, charged by Kropotkin with adopting essential
functions like the distribution of food and housing amidst social dislocation.[64] The ethos that
predominates during this change, a ‘natural Communism’ that allows the free use of anything
possessed in abundance and voluntary rationing for scarce resources, he thought would
endure, it being ‘so inherent in common sense’.[65] With the period of revolutionary transition
successfully negotiated, the real promise of the commune lay in its supposed ability to secure
material abundance and, in turn, create new spaces for individual expression.
[63] Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (London, 1986), p.242; Guarneri, The
Utopian Alternative, p.365.
[64] See: Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp.61–113.
[65] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.77.
Fourier waited in vain for someone to fund his experiment in communal living, but in the
years following his death plenty of people inspired by his ideas sought to build communes
upon Fourierist lines.[66] It was the legacy of these adventures in communal living that
Kropotkin would later combat, in an attempt to rescue Fourier’s valuable contribution to
socialist theory. Albert Brisbane was to become the chief populariser of Fourier’s ideas in the
US, publishing the Social Destiny of Man: or, Association and Reorganization of Industry in
1840, which raised Fourier to the level of a ‘bold and original genius...like Columbus,
Copernicus and Newton’.[67] Such hagiography might appear peculiar given that Fourier was
reluctant to engage with Brisbane, who found himself in Paris in 1833, only to be persuaded
by the offer off five-francs an hour to tutor the young American. Returning home the
following year, Brisbane’s zealous propagandizing began in 1839 with a variety of short-lived periodicals, before his breakthrough in the form of an invitation to contribute a regular
column to the New York Tribune entitled ‘Association; or, Principles of a True Organization
of Society’.[68] These articles were collected as A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of
Association, or Plan for a Re-Organization of Society (1843), which replaced the lengthy
quotations from Fourier’s work, characteristic of his earlier book, with a pithier exposition of
his principles.[69] Selling surprisingly well, Brisbane was able to establish the journal The
Phalanx, which ran for six years as ‘the chief organ of a national Fourierist movement.’[70]
In importing Fourier’s ideas, Brisbane’s efforts led to an explosion of intentional
communities founded on the belief that Fourier’s diagnosis of the inhumanity of capitalism
was correct, and his alternative vision compelling. One of the earliest was Brook Farm in
Massachusetts, co-founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne who would later fictionalize his
experiences in The Blithedale Romance (1852). Initially inspired by Transcendentalism,
Brook Farm shifted to Fourierism in 1844 once Brisbane’s influence began to take hold.[71]
The number of intentional communities organised upon avowedly Fourieristic lines peaked in
these years, and was reflected in the names many adopted. The pioneering North American
Phalanx in New Jersey was followed by self-described phalanxes in LaGrange Co., Indiana;
Leraysville, Pennsylvania; Sodus Bay, New York; Trumbull, Ohio; Clermont Co., Ohio;
Ripon, Wisconsin; Mahaska Co., Iowa; Sangamon Co., Illinois; Muskingum Co., Ohio and
Fulton Co., Illinois. The unequivocally named Pigeon River Fourier Colony in Sheboygan,
Wisconsin and Fourier Phalanx in Dearborn, Indiana, made the debt these communities owed
to the Frenchman’s communalist ideas explicit.[72]
[66] There was one attempt to realise a Fourierist scheme in 1832 near Condé-sur-Vesgre, but Fourier was
distinctly dissatisfied with the results. Brian J.L. Berry, America’s Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens
from Long-Wave Crises (Hanover, 1992), p.88.
[67] Albert Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man: or, Association and Reorganization of Industry (Philadelphia, 1840),
p.iv.
[68] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, p.30, 33.
[69] Albert Brisbane, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, or Plan for a Re-Organization of
Society (New York, 1844).
[70] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, p.34.
[71] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, p.2, 51–9. See also: Friesen and Friesen, North American Utopias, pp.132-
136.
[72] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, pp.407–408. See also: Robert P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the
American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824–2000 (West Port, CA, 2004), pp.23–52.
Although unfamiliar with the exact nature of many of these communal experiments,
Kropotkin was keenly aware of the damage that these intentional societies had done to
communalist propaganda. This fed into a layered critique of practical communalism, a
critique deployed by Kropotkin in order to stress the uniqueness of his own vision of the
commune. Despite being influenced by Fourier, and seeing many of his ideas as enduringly
relevant, in part Kropotkin felt that the weaknesses of these societies lay in Fourier’s own
system. His lack of a vigorous revolutionary strategy left his scheme reliant on the whim of
‘some great ruler’.[73] And at the heart of Fourier’s project Kropotkin saw a failure in nerve
similar to that which confounded Comte. Opening up ‘the wide horizons’ of possibility, both
thinkers flinched, falling back on a religious dogma: Comte’s secular Christianity, and
Fourier’s messianism. The ‘experiments’ of Fourier therefore served only to tutor ‘human
thought’ in what might be achieved, but the anarchist commune would be moulded and tested
in the heat of revolution.[74]
An important practical factor in Kropotkin’s relationship to American intentional societies
was that whilst Fourierian communes had proliferated, these experiments did not prove
robust. Indeed, it became common, one commentator has noted, for “Four-year-ites” to
replace Fourierite as the epithet for some of the more half-hearted denizens of these
communes.[75] They were ephemeral for a number of reasons, ranging from economic
mismanagement and the selection of agriculturally inappropriate locations, to the lack of
durable mechanisms for solving disputes. Brook Farm, one of the most successful, was
ravaged by fire in 1846.[76] As one writer pointed out, although there was a boom in Fourierist
colonies, there also tended to be considerable movement between them, as refuges from one
communal disaster sought refuge in another.[77] For Josiah Warren, later America’s ‘first’
anarchist, the experience of communal living, whilst not an unmitigated disaster, was a lesson
in the preciousness of individuality.[78] Warren’s early heeding of this perhaps explains John
Stuart Mill’s comment that his On Liberty (1859) bore traces of this ‘remarkable American’,
as Warren bristled at the conformity he felt at the Owenite colony of New Harmony in
Indiana.[79] His reaction was not to dismiss the utility of communal experimentation, indeed he
would participate in several other ventures, but to vociferously declaim the ‘SOVEREIGNTY
OF THE INDIVIDUAL.’[80] For Warren, this was something many communes forgot, and was
summed up in his perhaps apocryphal conclusion that New Harmony had suffered ‘from too
much democracy – the community was talked to death.’[81] For Kropotkin, born in the year
that Brook Farm became Fourierist, comments like these offered an important dissection of
the ideas behind utopian schemes. More importantly, it was criticisms of this type that his
communitarian political thought would seek to address.
[73] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.viii, xii.
[74] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.xii.
[75] Dan McKanan, “Making Sense of Failure: From Death to Resurrection in Nineteenth-Century American
Communitarianism” in Utopian Studies, Vol.18, No.2 (2007), pp.159–192, p.159.
[76] McKanan, “Making Sense of Failure”, pp.163–166; Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and
Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (Ithaca, 2007), p.38.
[77] Everett Webber, Escape to Utopia: The Communal Movement in America (New York, 1959), pp.192–199.
[78] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (London, 1962), p.431. For a
useful discussion of Warren’s interpretation of Fourier and the broader relationship between American
anarchism and the phase of communal experimentation, see: James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The
Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908 (New York, 1957), pp.11–107.
[79] John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London, [1873] 1989), p.191.
[80] Josiah Warren, “True Civilization: A Subject of Vital and Serious Interest to All People; but most
Immediately to Men and Women of Labor and Sorrow” in Irvin Horowitz (ed.) The Anarchists (New Jersey,
2005), pp.322–330, p.322.
[81] Warren quoted in Webber, Escape to Utopia, p.154.
*** “American Deserts”: Austerity, Piety and Hegemony
Whilst scholars have tended to neglect the influence of Fourier upon Kropotkin, the extent to
which Kropotkin was combating the legacy of Fourierists has been totally ignored.[82] This
complex engagement with a tradition of political thinking and praxis formed a crucial aspect
of Kropotkin’s anarchist communalism, as he attempted to demonstrate the enduring potential
of communal ideas against a history riddled with failure. In defending communalism,
Kropotkin developed a significant critique of communal experiments of a Fourierist variety,
challenging their economic, social and cultural composition, whilst maintaining that Fourier’s
principal theses remained valid. The Conquest of Bread made this explicit, but across
Kropotkin’s oeuvre, his criticism of intentional communities served to define his own brand
of communal utopia, in which the inadequacies of the American communalists were
overcome. Rejecting the American model, Kropotkin presented an anarchist utopianism.
[82] For treatments of Kropotkin that highlight the relevance of Fourier’s thought, see: Brian Morris, Kropotkin:
The Politics of Community (New York, 2004); Woodcock, The Anarchist Prince, p.10, 317.
He was not alone in challenging the basis of American communalism from an anarchist
perspective. His friend and fellow-geographer Elisée Reclus, who also perceived anarchism
through the lens of contemporary science, had advanced a parallel criticism of utopian
experimentation. Writing on ‘anarchy’ in the British periodical Contemporary Review, Reclus
began by noting that ‘to most Englishmen the word anarchy is so evil-sounding that ordinary
readers...will probably turn from these pages with aversion’. For the intrepid reader, Reclus
offered an overview of anarchist ideas similar in tone to Kropotkin’s exhortative Paroles
D’un Révolté, in which laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, and the dreadful delights of
London’s poverty were juxtaposed with the ‘long cry for...fraternal equality’ heard through
history.[83] American communalism, however, was not part of this cry, and Reclus condemned
the haughty isolationism of communalists seeking escape from the strife. ‘Here is the fighting
ground’, he wrote, ‘and us anarchists’ will never ‘separate ourselves from the world to build a
little church, hidden in some vast wilderness.’ Aside from the moral duty to engage in
struggle, Reclus pointed to the transience of many of these communities as a symbol of the
futility of retiring from the fight. ‘They carry within themselves the seeds of their own
dissolution’, and adopting a characteristically scientific metaphor, he concluded that the
members of these communities will inevitably be ‘reabsorbed by Nature’s law of gravitation
into the world which they have left.’[84]
Kropotkin’s critique of communalism was more substantial than Reclus’, and one that reveals
lines of continuity and disruption with Fourier’s work. In evaluating these communities his
first angle of investigation was economic, and despite the hardship endured by many
phalanxes, Kropotkin still found Fourier’s economic ideas compelling. A central tenet of
Fourier’s socialist vision was a hatred for the existing organisation of work, which he deemed
inherently dehumanizing. Whereas ‘beavers, bees, wasps, and ants’ went about their work
with ‘delight’, the ‘Russian...and Algerian...work out of fear of the whip or the cudgel; the
English and French work from fear of the hunger which besets their poor households.’[85] Yet,
Fourier insisted that compulsion or anxiety need not underpin labour, and if it were purged of
‘the loathsome aspects that make work in the present state so odious’ a newfound joy in
labour would emerge.[86] Typically, Fourier gave a series of prescriptions to correct this
situation, but central to them was the insistence that work must be made aesthetically
appealing, varied and purposeful.[87] Kropotkin’s vision of anarchism was similarly based on
the belief that labour must be remodelled, and he advanced a parallel condemnation of work
under capitalism painting a portrait of workers reduced to ‘flesh and bone’ appendages ‘of
some immense machinery’.[88] To overcome this situation, he proposed, it necessary to ‘return
to a state of affairs where corn is grown, and manufactured goods fabricated, for the use of
those very people who grow and produce them.’[89]
[83] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist” in Contemporary Review Vol.45 (Jan. 1884), pp.627–641, p.627,
628.
[84] Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist”, p.637.
[85] Charles Fourier in Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected
Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction (Boston, 1971), pp.144–5.
Although framed as a ‘return’, Kropotkin’s solution was not a primitivistic retreat from
industrial civilization.[90] Fourier railed against industrial production, and Kropotkin echoed
his condemnation of a factory system that stymied the physical and personal development of
those chained to the production line, but the medievalism that accompanied this refrain for
William Morris and Thorold Rogers did not appeal.[91] In the right social setting, Kropotkin
insisted, technological sophistication could ensure rather than retard emancipation, and he
rebuked Morris for failing to notice the ‘gracefulness’ of the machine.[92] Given the
complexity of Morris’ views on mechanisation, Kropotkin was unduly critical of this aspect
of his thought, but his defence of technology tapped into two deeper concerns: the issue of
pleasurable labour and abundance.[93] For free communism to be a viable system, he
recognised that labour must be attractive. Pleasurable labour therefore held a deeper meaning
than simply the absence of exploitative relations or wearying toil, with work itself becoming
an enlivening activity willingly performed. Here too there is a direct inheritance from
Fourier, but it was an influence felt acutely by Morris also.[94] Tapping into the romantic
defence of artisanal labour prevalent in nineteenth-century socialism, Kropotkin followed suit
and adopted the language of virility and authenticity to describe this future state. The failure
of modern art lay in its lack of ‘strength’, he wrote, something that could only be cured by the
purifying experience of labour: ‘the joy of hauling the heavy net...the joys...of the vivid light
of the blast furnace.’ In turn, uniting pleasurable labour with mechanical sophistication – ‘the
life in a machine’ – meant Kropotkin could address the issue of abundance.[95] Focusing his
gaze on the American experiments, he observed that the precarious livelihood they eked from
inhospitable soils fell short of the bounty that communalism might obtain. Writing in
Freedom, the British anarchist newspaper he helped found, Kropotkin noted that the
economic frugality demanded by these communal experiments served to undermine the
communal movement. ‘Peasants no doubt succeed in founding such colonies’, he observed,
arguing that the arduous labour interspersed with periods of indigence they experienced in
‘their mother country’ meant that after several years work ‘they feel better off’. Communities
that managed to scrape an existence in this manner were usually felled by the precariousness
of their isolation, Kropotkin noted, alluding to ‘special conditions’ like failed harvests or the
fire that swept through Brook Farm. Many communalists were workers from ‘civilised
countries’ unused to agricultural toil, they enter ‘worse material conditions than their
previous ones’ deprived of the palliative ‘trifles’ that make life endurable.[96] Fighting for ‘5,
10, often more, years’ the ‘most crushing difficulties’, the life left behind began to look
preferable to toiling in ‘American deserts’.[97]
[86] Fourier in The Utopian Vision, pp.274–5.
[87] Fourier in The Utopian Vision, p.275.
[88] Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (Montréal, [1899] 1994), p.1
[89] Italics are Kropotkin’s own. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p.20.
[90] Primitivism within the anarchist tradition is not a modern phenomenon, and such arguments would have been
familiar to Kropotkin. See: C. Alexander McKinley, Illegitimate Children of the Enlightenment: Anarchists and
the French Revolution, 1880–1914 (New York, 2008), p.96.
[91] A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (London, 1985), p.155.
29
[92] Kropotkin, Memoirs, p.95.
[93] On Morris’ ambiguity, consider: William Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live” in A.L. Morton
(ed.) Political Writings of William Morris (London, 1973), pp.134–158, p.152.
[94] Kinna, William Morris, p.149.
[95] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.141.
Kropotkin’s critique of the economic basis of American communalism fed directly into his
second line of analysis, a pronounced condemnation of the cultural asceticism he saw
reigning within them. Writing in The Conquest of Bread, he wryly observed that burdensome
labour was mirrored in an austere cultural climate:
They believed that if the community could procure sufficient cloth to dress all its members, a music-room in which the ‘brothers’ could strum a piece of music, or act a play from time to time, it was enough. They forgot that the feeling for art existed in the agriculturist as well as in the burgher.[98]
[96] P. Kropotkin, “Advice to Those About to Emigrate” in Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism (March,
1893), pp. 14.
[97] Kropotkin, “Advice to Those About to Emigrate”, p.14; Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.126.
[98] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.126.
Central to Kropotkin’s emancipatory vision was the notion that the material and intellectual
quality of life must be improved. Cautioning against economic austerity, his romantic faith in
the potential for individuality to flourish in the right environment led Kropotkin to call for a
society that offered opportunities for intellectual development as well. After all, when, in a
typically fin-de-siècle exhortation he bemoaned the cultural decadence of the bourgeoisie, he
pointed out that wealth was no guarantor of taste. Currently, ‘art can only vegetate’ with
‘philistine’ artists lagging ‘far behind the great masters of the Renaissance’, and even the
most skilful painters produced canvases devoid of authenticity.[99] Kropotkin’s positive sense
of liberty, a desire for humans to ‘be their own master’, carried with it a notion of the life
worth living, and this facet of his thought was prominent in his comments on the necessity of
luxury in a communal society.[100] The ‘founders of new societies’ in the deserts ‘never
understood’ the ‘infinite variety of human tastes’ Kropotkin objected, and as capitalism
would continue to stunt creativity, a successful anarchist community must address this issue
as a matter of urgency. To stifle individuality in this manner, as he suggested some of the
more monastic communal experiments had done, could only ever kill the communal spirit.
Inevitably, ‘individual tastes broke forth, and caused general discontent’ producing
disagreements and quarrels that, in Kropotkin’s reading, split such communities.
[99] Italics are Kropotkin’s own. Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.140, 139, 138, 141.
[100] Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Henry Hardy (ed.) Liberty (Oxford, 2002), pp.166–217, p.178.
The power of Kropotkin’s constructed image of these intentional communities lay in its
rhetorical utility in painting a counter-image of anarchist communalism. Concerned that
agricultural toil and cultural piety were not conducive to intellectual growth, he presented a
vision of a community defined by varied labour and cultural diversity. Vitally, Kropotkin
argued that these were intertwined goals; that the right kind of economic reorganisation held
before it the opportunity for aesthetic rebirth. In this sense, Kropotkin’s book Fields,
Factories and Workshops (1899), can usefully be seen as a companion project to The
Conquest of Bread.[101] A more scholarly text, in it he was at pains to expose Britain’s
potential for achieving agricultural self-sufficiency hidden in contemporary European
agricultural statistics. From the pages of Fields, Factories and Workshops remerges the
vision of an anarchist community visible at the start of his career, but in this instance, framed
as a critique of the assumptions of conventional political economy. In fact, the book begins
by challenging Adam Smith’s alleged obsession with the division of labour, ultimately
countering that small-scale production organised federally was the solution to the anarchy of
capitalist production.[102] Parallel to this, Kropotkin presented a utopian image contrasting with
the economic impoverishment and cultural mundanity he believed characteristic of earlier
communal experiments. Small-scale productive units had obvious ‘moral and physical
advantages’ when juxtaposed with industrial behemoths like Manchester – a city that
reoccurred in Victorian discourse as the exemplar of capitalism’s brutality.[103] With industrial
zoning overcome in the shape of the ‘factory amidst the fields’, Kropotkin believed that
working-life could be quickly revolutionized.[104] Echoing Fourier’s call for the variation of
labour, he concluded that the spatial implications of the ‘agro-industrial’ organization leant
itself admirably to the rotation of tasks.[105] And, coupled with the rational application of the
technological advances of the nineteenth-century that he had championed in The Conquest of
Bread, he optimistically assessed that the burden of work, particularly its most toilsome
varieties, could be exponentially reduced.[106]
[101] For more on this convincing argument, see: Ruth Kinna, “Fields of Vision: Kropotkin and Revolutionary
Change” in SubStance 113, Vol.36, No.2 (2007), pp.67–86.
[102] Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, pp.1–20.
[103] Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p.151. For a relevant discussion of Victorian visions of
Manchester, see: Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York, 1974), pp.3–66.
[104] Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p.148.
[105] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.x.
With the anarchist commune organised in such a manner, the manumission of proletarian
drones would supposedly bring with it a culture that would surpass the achievements of the
Renaissance. Although Kropotkin insisted that a return to medieval communalism was not an
option, nor necessarily desirable, he believed that the vibrant intellectual and cultural life of
the communal movement stemmed from its political and social organization. The developed
network of guilds that nurtured labour and encouraged pride in work, was one factor that
Kropotkin highlighted in the medieval commune that raised ‘handicraft’ to a position that had
not been matched.[107] But more than this, Kropotkin suggested that a ‘grand idea’ incandesced
within the walls of the commune. ‘Like Greek art’, he wrote, medieval culture ‘sprang out of
a conception of brotherhood and unity fostered by the city’.[108] In Fields, Factories and
Workshops, Kropotkin returned to this theme. Mentioning John Ruskin, an inveterate
enthusiast for medieval craftwork, he argued that culture would necessarily languish until
handiwork was placed on a similar level to that which it had occupied in the communes.
More crucially, the cooperation that communalism rested upon would lead this aesthetic
change, with ‘humanity breaking its present bonds... [and]...making a new start in the higher
principles of solidarity’. Communal life, in Kropotkin’s thinking, would stand in stark
contrast to the American experiments where the pleasures and variety of life were crushed by
dull necessity. He concluded with an affirmation of his romantic influences, by quoting
Goethe: ‘Greift nur hinen ins volle Menschenleben...Ein jeber lebt’s – nicht vielen ist’s
bekannt.’[109]{8} To seize this full life would embolden modern art, spark creativity and initiate a
social life textured by aesthetic sophistication, and for Kropotkin, the crucible for this
development was communalism.
{8} Only reach into full human life...Everybody lives, not many are known.
[106] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, pp.144–155.
[107] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.209, 192.
[108] Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p.211.
The third and final criticism that Kropotkin levelled at communal experiments concerned
their tendency to destroy the freedom that they sought through their overbearing
communality. In the history of political thought such anxieties are familiar, with both
Tocqueville and Mill’s concern that democratic societies could act tyrannically towards
dissenting inhabitants a common frame of reference.[110] Modern anarchistant thinkers like
Todd May advance similar charges against Kropotkin, albeit drawing inspiration from
continental philosophy. Commenting on Kropotkin’s suggestion that social care was the
surest way to deal with antisocial behaviour, May has accused Kropotkin of advancing a
‘concept of the norm as the prototype of the properly human.’ Diminutive communities might
increase the space for political participation, but this curtails the opportunity to escape the
judgemental gaze of one’s neighbours.[111] Objections like these pose legitimate questions of
Kropotkin’s communal approach to maximising freedom, but what tends to be neglected is
the fact that he repeatedly advanced an analogous critique of authoritarianism in utopian
experiments. He echoed, for instance, Marx’s depiction of ‘barrack communism’ when
approvingly discussing Proudhon’s opposition to ‘all schemes of communism, according to
which mankind would be driven into communistic monasteries or barracks’.[112] These
experiments in living, he had reflected earlier, had had the pernicious effect of deforming the
popular meaning of the word communism, with ‘most people’ thinking ‘of the more or less
Christian and monastic and always authoritarian communism advocated in the first half of
this century’.[113] Anarchist communalism, in contrast, must rest on a different set of premises.
[109] Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p.180.
[110] See: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: and Two Essays on America (London, [1835] 2003),
pp.292–300; J.S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge, [1859] 1989), p.8. For a useful analysis of
this theme, see: Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge, 1980).
[111] Todd May, “Is Post-Structuralist Theory Anarchist?” in Post-Anarchism: A Reader (London, 2011), p.43.
Fundamental to Kropotkin’s vision of a future anarchist community was that fulfilment and
improvement must become a realistic project for all members of the community.
Communalism would offer unparalleled opportunities for participation, but the space to
withdraw was equally precious. This would take a number of forms, but one aspect of
communal living he explicitly rejected was group dining. Returning to the motif of the
‘barrack’, he noted that such communal practices failed to take account of the fact that ‘when
folks have done working, they...desire the company of those with whom they find
themselves in sympathy.’[114] For Kropotkin this reflected the simple fact expressed in Mutual
Aid, that individuals often act oppressively – a point overlooked by those that see his moral
theory as narrowly optimistic.[115] ‘Even for two real brothers to live together in the same
house’, he reflected, was not always conducive to harmonious life, suggesting that the
onerous demand for continual association in utopian communities was naïve.[116] Statements
like this had implications for the size of Kropotkin’s imagined community. Although he
insisted that impersonal entities like the modern state must be superseded by comparatively
small communities, in voicing concerns at the potential for overbearing communality he
suggested that they must significantly larger than the communal experiments familiar in the
US. Adopting the example of the ‘steamboat’, Kropotkin highlighted the rapidity with which
‘20 passengers’ soon ‘begin to hate each other for small defects of individual character’.[117]
Embellishing this theme, he posed the counter-intuitive conclusion that the larger the
community, the smaller the burden of communal politics, and the greater the scope for
individual expression:
[112] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s
Association: Report and Documents Published by Decision of the Hague Congress of the International [1873]”
in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works: Volume 23 (London, 1988), pp.454–580, p.543;
Kropotkin, “Anarchism”, p.915.
[113] P. Kropotkine, “Communism and Anarchy” in Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism (July, 1901),
pp.30–31, p.30.
[114] P. Kropotkine, “Domestic Slavery” in Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism (July, 1891), pp.47–48,
p.47.
The individual and [the] individual’s personality more easily disappear in a group of 2,000 than in a group of 200 or 20. It is extremely difficult to keep 50 or 100 persons in continuous full agreement. For 2,000, or 10,000 this is not required. They only need to agree as to some advantageous methods of common work, and are free to live in their own way.
[115] In this vein, see: Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The
Breakdown (London, 2005), p.370. For a competing interpretation, see: David Morland, Demanding the
Impossible?: Human Nature and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Social Anarchism (London, 1998).
[116] Kropotkine, “Communism and Anarchy”, p.31.
[117] Peter Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement: A New Colony for Tyneside or Wearside” in The
Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 20th February, 1895, pp.4
With this in view, Kropotkin emphasised that bucolic isolation in American deserts was not
the vision of vibrant communalism he had in mind. The best place, in contrast, ‘is near
London or near Paris’, rather than secluded collectives serving as a ‘refuge for those who
have abandoned the battle’.[118]
*** Conclusion
Central to Kropotkin’s anarchism was an image of communal life in which the burdens of
work were reduced, labour shared, leisure rendered productive and self-improving, and the
opportunities for political participation maximised. Although fundamental to his politics,
Kropotkin’s active engagement with a deeper tradition of theoretical and practical utopianism
has been neglected. The transient popularity of Fourier’s work after his death was a testament
to the many truths in this eccentric complex of ideas, but Kropotkin was also conscious of the
multiple deficiencies of his system. For one, its very systematicity was a problem, and
Fourier’s tendency to present blueprints for the future conflicted with Kropotkin’s focus on
flux, temporality and contingency. The commune would ultimately create its own future in
the course of revolution, not follow the dictates of the philosopher. There was then in
Fourier’s theory a latent authoritarianism, and a distrust of ‘the masses’.[119] Lacking a realistic
understanding of revolution meant conversing with autocrats, and after all, Kropotkin’s
image of Fourier seeking Napoleon’s help was not apocryphal.[120] Nevertheless, Kropotkin
borrowed much from Fourier. The shared belief in the sanctity of labour and its centrality to
human happiness is patent, as is the assumption that the beautification of work itself is
necessary to remove the need for coercion. And Fourier’s great insight, his bold contribution
to socialist theory, was an indication of the unit that might make this system possible – the
phalanstère. The priggish Kropotkin was silent on Fourier’s keen interest in sex, but
otherwise the influence of Fourier is clear, and one that endures in anarchist political
thought.[121]
[118] Kropotkin, “Advice to Those About to Emigrate”, p.14.
[119] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.vii.
[120] Beecher, Charles Fourier, p.110, 134.
Those American pioneers of Fourierism that wandered into the wilderness to build heaven on
earth had, however, amplified their master’s weaknesses and achieved none of his great
insights. Kropotkin was well aware that these attempts had written a history of communalism
redolent of failure, and, seeking to popularise anarchism, he strove to disentangle Fourier
from these experiments. He used the image of the American commune – pious, austere and
controlling – as a rhetorical device to juxtapose the liberties proffered by anarchist
communalism. Modern analyses of anarchist utopianism overlook his multifaceted
engagement with theoretical and practical communalism. This was not a passing concern, but
formed a central pillar of his political vision. That Kropotkin, in his 1906 preface to The
Conquest of Bread confidently stated that the book’s ‘leading ideas must have been correct’,
hints at this continuity, but the broader view of his intellectual output taken here affirms it.[122]
Although his most explicit criticism of American communalism appeared in The Conquest of
Bread, the assumptions that this position rests upon, and the counter-image of anarchist
communalism he conjured, were pervasive aspects of his theoretical edifice. Not only does
this nuance our understanding of his communalism and its genesis, it also undermines the
narrative that sees Kropotkin sliding in scholarly solitude in Britain.[123] A fixation on the
communes’ history and potential lay was central to Paroles d’un Révolté at the dawn of his
career, and endured throughout his time in Britain, finding expression in scholarly texts like
Fields, Factories and Workshops as well as marginal pieces in Freedom. That these
expositions on the history and theory of communalism continued to be a prominent feature of
his work attests to the conviction that lay behind Kropotkin’s vision of a communal future,
and underscores the activist thrust of his philosophy. Utopianism, especially a belief that
thinking about the shape of tomorrow could edify and galvanise social actors in the present,
lay at the heart of Kropotkin’s politics.
[121] Terrance Kissack, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917
(Edinburgh, 2008), p.26, 100–1; Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, “Introduction” to The Utopian Vision
of Charles Fourier, pp.1–75, pp.55–65. For Fourier in modern anarchism, consider: Murray Bookchin, The
Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, 1982), pp.329–333.
[122] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.xi.
Fourier’s work allowed these revolutionaries to see further. To see, in Kropotkin’s words,
‘samples of the bricks out of which the great synthetic building will have to be built, and even
samples of some of its rooms.’[124] Fourierists, however, had undermined the vitality of the
vision. Their actions had clouded the image of communalism, and their social schemes
suffered three major deficiencies. First, their economic organisation resulted in a precarious
and unappealing existence; secondly, their isolation and poverty produced a culturally vapid
existence; and thirdly, the burdens of communal life gave little space for individuality to
develop. Kropotkin deployed this evaluation to contrast the diversity that his version of
communal political thought would supposedly offer, and, in rejecting the American model,
his utopianism came into clearer focus. The fairness of his characterisation of the variety of
schemes that defined communal experimentation in the US in the mid-nineteenth century is
certainly open to question, as is his certainty that anarchist communalism had the theoretical
resources to avoid these pitfalls. Yet, to understand Kropotkin’s utopianism, it is crucial to
comprehend his rhetorical construction of this image, and its deployment in his writing.
[123] For this narrative, see: Woodcock, Anarchist Prince, p.415–430; Miller, Anarchism, pp.71–77.
[124] Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, p.xii
Matthew S. Adams[125]
University of Durham
[125] I would like to thank Stuart Jones, Martin Adams, Catherine Feely, the editor, and two anonymous HPT
reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.