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Formulating an anarchist sociology: Peter Kropotkin's reading of Herbert Spencer

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posted on 2016-10-10, 13:31 authored by Matthew AdamsMatthew Adams
The work of Herbert Spencer was a crucial influence on the development of Peter Kropotkin’s historical sociology. However, scholars have underestimated this relationship; either overlooking it entirely, or minimizing Kropotkin’s attachment to Spencer with the aim of maintaining the utility of his political thought in the present. This article contests these interpretations by analyzing Kropotkin’s reading of Spencer’s epistemological, biological, and political ideas. It argues that Kropotkin was engaged in a critical dialogue with Spencer, incorporating many Spencerian principles in his own system, but also using this reading to articulate a distinctive anarchist politics.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

Journal of the History of Ideas: an international quarterly devoted to intellectual history

Volume

77

Issue

1

Pages

49 - 73

Citation

ADAMS, M.S., 2016. Formulating an anarchist sociology: Peter Kropotkin's reading of Herbert Spencer. Journal of the History of Ideas, 77(1), pp. 49-73.

Publisher

© by Journal of the History of Ideas

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

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/

Acceptance date

2016-01-01

Publication date

2016

Notes

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.

ISSN

1086-3222

Language

  • en

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