This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

Recently, we did an episode on Tafield Steinland,

who was an artist, and we talked about his connections to anarchists

and anarchist groups in France.

And after that discussion, I wanted to return to the topic of anarchism. because we have talked about anarchists on the show before,

but we've not really talked about anarchism as a philosophy.

A lot of the time it's like we were talking about labor organizers who were also anarchists,

or fears of anarchy that were driving things like the first red scare and

some of the CIA's co-intel prose like we haven't really talked about when people were talking

about anarchy.

What did they mean beyond a very dictionary-level definition of believing that governments and sometimes also other systems

of authority are harmful and should be abolished.

So, Piotr Kruppatkin, who is called Peter, pretty universally in English-language writing,

was incredibly influential in the development of anarchism as a political philosophy in the 19th and early

20th centuries. This was especially true in the UK and Russia, but also in France, Belgium,

Switzerland, and the United States. And he was also a scientist and a prince. And I just find him deeply fascinating.

Unlike a lot of our two-parters, I had a feeling from the beginning that this might need more than

one episode. Karpotkin's most famous work, which is sometimes described as his masterpiece,

...