The Essential Kropotkin

New York: Liveright, 1975. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Fair. 22 cm. xxiii, [1], 294, [2] pages. Footnotes. References. Front DJ flap clipped at bottom, but price is present at the top. DJ worn and soiled, edge tear in front DJ, some edge soiling. Prince Peter Kropotkin is generally acknowledged to be the most interesting, seminal, and readable of the great anarchist philosophers and writers. A general selection from the writings of the great Russian anarchist thinker. More than any Russian thinker of his time, Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) anticipated the great social and ethical problems of the twentieth century. This book is a definitive general selection from all his works, including Appeal to the Young, Law and Authority, The Wage System, and Anarchism. The major works represented include Memoirs of a Revolutionist; Mutual Aid; The Great French Revolution; and Fields, Factories, and Workshops. Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 - 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, economist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, political scientist, human geographer, philosopher, and activist who advocated anarcho-communism. Born into an aristocratic landowning family, Kropotkin attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France (where he was imprisoned for almost four years) and England. While in exile, he gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. Kropotkin returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but he was disappointed by the Bolshevik state. Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralized communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, but also Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, his principal scientific offering. He contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy.