P.A. Kropotkin’s Ideas About Society Outside the State and About Civil Self-Government

P. A. Kropotkin considered it possible to form and exist in the future a society in which state coercion and inequality of individuals separated by class and class barriers would be replaced by their voluntary associations and free cooperation. His social ideal is the unification of equal and free citizens in the absence of centers of concentration of power. In such a society, the former State should be replaced by a federation of self-governing communities. P. A. Kropotkin’s conversion to anarchism was facilitated by his participation in the narodnik movement, but the main reasons were his rejection of autocracy and the state centralization of the Russian Empire with the privileged position of the feudal nobility. His proposed way of strengthening society from below and destroying the all-powerful state turned out to be a social utopia, especially in Russia. However, P. A. Kropotkin’s ideas about the need to develop civil self-government and cooperation have partially been realized in most countries of Western and Central Europe and in those countries of the world where the central government does not interfere in the competence of local communities.