Introduction The State: Its Historic Role was written originally as a lecturer. intended to be delivered at the Milles Colonnes Hall in Paris' on March 7,, 1896. For some reason, the lecture was not given, aruf it was later printed in pamphlet form. An English translation was published by Freedom Press in 1903, and reprinted in 1920. The present edition is a somewhat drastic revision of that translation. The State was written in the third period of Kropotkin's active life, the period of mature reflection and creative elucidation of social knowledge which followed his scholastic youth and his revolutionary manhood. In 1886 Kropotkin was released from the French prison to which he had been consigned for his activities in connection witli the French anarchist movement and the reconstituted International. He attempted to settle· in Paris with Elie Redus, like himself a scientist of considerable ability whose research into the life of hUIJlllllity and the evolution· of human · institutions had forced him ;rresistably along th~ road to anarchism. But the French authorities would have nothing- to do with a man they considered· to be so dangerous a revolutionary, and Kropotkin was expelled from France. He found a home in England, which at the time still gave refuge to a· great many of the exiled revolutionaries of the continent. Cut off from the scene of active revolutionary work, he did not give up interest and fall into the lethargy and disillusionment which had submerged so many rebels under similar circumstances. Instead, he applied his scholastic gifts, his scientific training ancj,his revolutionary enthusiasm to the task of erecting a· body of anarchist theoretical writing, and during the next thirty years he lived quietly in his cottage at Harrow, · among his . home-made furniture, cultivating his own garden and producing a· great mass of theoretical books and pamphlets which not only .became classics of revolutionary writing but also had a great influence on the development 9f sociological thought since Kropotkin's day. The influence of Mutual Aid, indeed, went beyQBd both politics and sociology an!i. was probaply ihe major influence in the. recent changes in eyolutionary theory which have tended to .dis~ · credit the Huxleyan and neo-Malthusiarqendency of early DarwWsm, with its emphasis on the bloody struggle for existence, and to accept in its place an evolutionary theory much nearer to that enunciated by Kropotkin. . . · · • Indeed, it might be said.of ~qpotkin, as_Hazlitt saicj,of Godwin, that 'his works are standarq in m~_history of. tl!~ gitellep',- jU~tilS they 3 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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