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Before Kropotkin, the philosophers of Antiquity did not fail to realize the importance of mutual aid in animals. But the philosopher from whom Kropotkin drew most inspiration was Alfred Victor Espinas (1844–1922), one of the precursors of ethology and sociology. For Espinas, the study of animal societies should form the first chapter of any sociology; in 1878 he wrote Les Sociétés animales (On Animal Societies), in which he showed that ‘unions’ are omnipresent in the animal world, in three forms: accidental societies (between dissimilar beings), normal societies (between animals of the same species) and conjugal societies (families, whose aim is reproduction).

In 1902, twenty-four years after the publication of Espinas’s book, Kropotkin published Mutual Aid. In addition to presenting the latest discoveries, he placed human beings in a continuum with animals, thanks to his readings in ethnology. Even more original was the way he set mutual aid both animal and human within the framework of natural selection. Above all, Kropotkin was the first to bring out the fundamental role of environmental conditions in the evolution of mutual aid: in a hostile climate (cold, drought, etc.), mutual aid is a significant advantage in terms of survival.

It is interesting to note that Darwin carried out his observations mainly in the tropics, an environment of relative abundance and thermal comfort compared to Kropotkin’s Siberia. In a tropical environment, species grow much faster, saturating ecological niches (how many species of trees, insects or mammals are there on one hectare of tropical forest?) and thus revealing much more territorial and reproductive competition than in desert or icy environments. In the latter, there is much less abundance, and conditions are harsh. Those who do not help each other die: it’s as simple as that.

A second reason why Kropotkin found it easier to observe mutual aid than Darwin did probably derived from his culture. Educated in the humanist values of the Enlightenment, he then travelled extensively in Western Europe in contact with the working class, which was developing a culture of solidarity and association. In addition, Kropotkin, who had readers in the Western world (he was published in English and French), had a dual scientific culture: he had also been trained in the Russian school of zoology, represented by Karl Fedorovich Kessler (1815–81), who shared Darwin’s ideas of evolution and selection, but not his Malthusian worldview.

The scientific community, gradually won over to the West’s competitive representation of the world,⁶⁴ forgot Kropotkin. His ‘biased’ view of a cooperative nature did not mesh with that of modern evolutionary biology, predominantly English-speaking, imbued with anti-communism, and working more and more on genes and individuals (selfish, of course).⁶⁵ Few have tried to rescue Kropotkin from limbo. But it is worth remembering a work published in 1988 by the brilliant palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.⁶⁶ Today, the few scientists who cite Kropotkin do so with a mixture of embarrassment, condescension and fascination: his book is remarkable but uncritical,⁶⁷ it is ‘wonderfully well written’, but ‘Kropotkin tells of seeing animal cooperation (that is, mutual aid) at every turn’;⁶⁸ it’s a fascinating book, challenging as it does the predominance of the ‘struggle for life’ paradigm,⁶⁹ presenting ‘an unapologetically positivist and biased view of the natural world’.⁷⁰

However, even taken with a grain of salt, the book is consistently cited as announcing two major historic milestones: the break with an ultra-competitive vision of the living world, and the break with an ‘ultra-genetic’ vision of evolutionary processes.