Excerpt from Modern Science and Anarchism At all times two tendencies were continually at war in human society. On the one hand, the masses were developing, in the form of cus toms, a number of institutions which were neces sary to make social life at all possible - to in sure peace amongst men, to settle any disputes that might arise, and to help one another in everything requiring cooperative effort. The savage clan at its earliest stage, the village com munity, the hunters', and, later on, the indus trial guilds, the free town-republics of the mid dle ages, the beginnings of international law which were worked out in those early periods, and many other institutions, - were elaborated, not by legislators, but by the creative power of the people. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Contents. I. Two fundamental tendencies in Society: the popular and the governmental. — The Kinship of Anarchism and the Popular-creative Tendency II. The Intellectual Movement of the XVIII century; its fundamental traits: the investigation of all phenomena by the scientific method. — The Stagnation of Thought at the Beginning of the XIX century. — The Awakening of Socialism: its influence upon the development of science. — The Fifties III. Auguste Comte's Attempt to build up a Synthetic Philosophy. — The causes of his failure: the religious explanation of the moral sense in man IV. The Flowering of the Exact Sciences in 1856-62. — The Development of the Mechanical World-Conception, embracing the Development of Human Ideas and Institutions. — A Theory of Evolution V. The Possibility of a New Synthetic Philosophy. — Herbert Spencer's attempt: why it failed. — The Method not sustained. — A False Conception of "The Struggle for Existence." VI. The Causes of this Mistake. — The Teaching of the Church: "the World is steeped in Sin." — The Government's inculcation of the same view of "Man's Radical Perversity." — The Views of Modern Anthropology upon this subject. — The Development of forms of Life by the "Masses," and the Law. — Its Two-fold Character VII. The Place of Anarchism in Science. — Its Endeavor to Formulate a Synthetic Conception of the World. — Its Object VIII. Its origin. — How Its Ideal is Developed by the Natural-Scientific Method IX. A Brief Summary of the Conclusions Reached by Anarchism: Law. — Morality.—Economic Ideas — The Government X. Continuation:—Methods of Action. — The Understanding of Revolutions and their Birth.—The Creative Ingenuity of the People.—Conclusion

"Modern Science and Anarchism" is a 1903 work by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. A classic of anarchist literature this volume will appeal to those with an interest in anarchy-communism and social science in general. Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a Russian writer, activist, revolutionary, economist, scientist, sociologist, essayist, historian, researcher, political scientist, geographer, geographer, biologist, philosopher and advocate of anarcho-communism. He was a prolific writer, producing a large number of pamphlets and articles, the most notable being "The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops" and "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution". This classic work is being republished now in a new edition complete with an excerpt from "Comrade Kropotkin" by Victor Robinson.

This was Peter Kropotkin's final book, in which he theorizes about the development of the modern state and how modern science and technology can assist in freeing working people from capitalism. First published in 1912 in France, sections of this book have been translated and published in English (as short books and pamphlets and journal articles), but never as a whole work as Kropotkin intended. More than 10 percent of this book has never before appeared in English. Introduced and annotated by Iain McKay.