Survival of the Kindest?: Perspectives on Evolution and Post-Capitalism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

Author: Joe Zeng

Field of Study: Undeclared

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Will Glovinsky

Easel: 47

Timeslot: Morning

Abstract: At the end of the nineteenth century, anarchist political thought drew from biological debates to help sketch out possible post-capitalist futures. In particular, Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid challenged mainstream Darwinian evolutionary views by arguing that horizontal cooperation within species is a primary factor in evolutionary success. Comparing the arguments in the works of Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902), Thomas Huxley’s “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society” (1888), and William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890), this paper considers how political theorists debated the role of the state through the lens of competing evolutionary theories. These conflicting ideals of evolution can help contextualize the friction between capitalist, anarchist, and libertarian-socialist futures, which parted ways on the biological possibility of cooperative social structures.