INTRODUCTION live and maintain their vital influence in the growth of revolutionary thought among mankind. · At the time when The State was produced, Kropotkin had Alreadywritten some of his most important works. The Conquest of Bread appeared in 1888, In Russian and French Prisons in 1887 and by the time of the composition of The State, Mutual Aid has already been completed and had appeared in the form of a series of articles in The Nineteenth Century. The State and Mutual Aid were, therefore, composed at the same period, and the theories that dominated Mutual Aid are evident also in the smaller work. Indeed, The State might well be described as an application of the mutual aid theory to a particular human institution. Kropotkin shows how human communities based on mutual aid were successful and prosperous, and how, when they deserted that principle and accepted instead the domination of authority, they failed ,and eventually died while the individuals within them lived progressively ibore unhappily under the domination of the State. Much of this pamphlet repeats in condensed form the information .and arguments to be found in Mutual Aid, and readers would do well .to supplement it by reading the larger work, if they have not already done so. '.'"(kwas•published by Penguin Books at 9d, and a few copies may still be available). But The State differs from Mutual Aid in that, while in the latter book Kropotkin set out deliberately to make a .completely dispassionate exposition of mutual aid as a scientific and social fact, without drawing any political conclusions or xnaking any declaration for anarchism, in The State he draws such conclusions from an examination of the evolution of human institutions and shows that anarchy, the· society without a state, is the only sociai form in complete accordance with the beneficial and life-giving principles of social co-operation. Thus, The State can in-a way be regarded as the fipal chapter of Mutual Aid. The State contains a description of the free societies, primitive and media:val, which existed before the development of centralised power (or which, in the case of certain primitive societies in Kropotkin's own day, even contrived to exist in a world for the most part do.,minatedby such centralised power), an analysis of the disintegration of these free societies under the impact of the rising power of the .State, and a warning of the social death. and the new dark age that lie at the end of the fatal evolution of the State-:-unlcss that evolution is broken beforehand by the_in~crventionof the forces of freedom. 'Either the State will be· destroyed and a new life will begin in thousands of centres, on the principle of an energetic initiative of the individual, of groups, and of free agreement, or else the State must crush the individual and local life, it must become the xnastcr of all the domains of human activity, must bring with it' its wars and 4 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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