Читать книгу Mutual Aid - Pablo Servigne - Страница 24

In 1859, the year of publication of Charles Darwin’s key work, On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection, the young Russian prince Peter Kropotkin was only seventeen years old. Over the following years, the work of the great English naturalist would have a decisive influence on the scientific training of this young nobleman. Passionate about the natural sciences, Kropotkin undertook several expeditions across the Eurasian continent, as far as eastern Siberia, to observe examples of the natural selection described by Darwin. But, curiously, what Kropotkin observed was mainly mutual aid: animal species, such as wolves, and small human societies without a state, combining to survive in difficult, even hostile climates. He drew from this a certainty that would become a principle: organizations that help each other are those that survive best.