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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. This is the second part of our two-parter on Peter Kropotkin, who was deeply influential in the development of anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We are picking up with Krapotkin's return to Russia from the Jura Mountains, which was in May of 1872.

But first, we are going to take a quick jump ahead in the timeline for just a moment.

In 1911, Kropotkin wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on anarchism,

and it seems useful at this point for context to talk a little bit

about what anarchism is as a political philosophy. Since there are a lot of different types of

anarchism today, and they all have their own various goals and nuances, it's also helpful to spell out

what Kropotkin, who was an anarchist

communist, meant by this terminology, and like what he thought that somebody consulting the

encyclopedia about anarchism would need to know about it.

Krapotkin began his entry on anarchism with its etymology, from Greek words meaning contrary to authority.

He defined it as, quote, the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government.

Harmony in such a society being obtained not by submission to law or by obedience to any authority,

but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional,

freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction

of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations, which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity,

would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions.

...