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The Essence of Morality offers a bold, coherent vision of ethics grounded in cooperation rather than coercion, an argument as provocative today as when Kropotkin first set pen to paper.
Left unfinished at his death, Peter Kropotkin’s two-volume work on ethics is a rejection of both divine command and the moral dictates of a ruling class. Kropotkin roots ethical life in something far older and more universal: the mutual aid practices that allow social species to survive.
Published here for the first time in English, this second volume deepens and sharpens his engagement with the major European moral theorists of his era, challenging their assumptions while advancing a constructive alternative. Drawing on evolutionary science, anthropology, and political insight, Kropotkin argues that our sense of justice and our capacity for reason do not stand apart from our animal nature but grow out of it.
2. Feeling and reason
3. Primitive Ethics
4. Justice
5. Locke, Cumberland, Shaftesbury
6. Spencer and Huxley
7. Chapter III. The notion of justice
8. The notion of Justice
9. Ethics
10. Necessity of a general ethical principle
11. Reaction against evolutionist Ethics
12. Ethics and Mutual Aid
13. Origin of moral motives and sense of duty (H. Spencer)
14. The double-faced Ethics of nowadays (H. Spencer)
15. Need of a general principle
16. Justice and morality
17. The purpose of a system of Ethics
18. The ethical need of the present day
19. Ethical lessons of nature (Spencer, Comte and Huxley) and Huxley)
20. Appendix A
21. Justice and morality (lecture)