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The Prince and the Christian
Peter Kropotkin was a prince in the Czarist regime, well-schooled and privileged, who became a soldier and later a geologist. His keen intellect made him an outstanding scientist; he made breakthrough discoveries in Asian geology, and contributions to the theory of evolution. However, in the area of political theory, he contributed little more than a polemic of agitation. He did repeat the critique of state that theorists from Burke to Bakunin had elucidated. Like other anarchists, he could savage the state, and the various futile attempts to limit the state.
America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. - Peter Kropotkin
Like other anti-statists, such as Jefferson before him and Albert Jay Nock after him, Kropotkin differentiated between "government" and "state."
The State idea means something quite different from the idea of government. It not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. It implies some new relationships between members of society which did not exist before the formation of the State. A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others.
This distinction, which at first sight might not be obvious, emerges especially when one studies the origins of the State. - Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role
Kropotkin's account of the origin of the state was basically the same as the conquest theories we've already covered. His revolutionary theory is also unoriginal - largely warmed-over Bakunite revolution-worship. His naive faith that the flow of rich people's blood will somehow, magically, make everything okay and lead to a stateless society of equality and material plenty was even more utopian than Bakunin. His belief that if the educated privileged would only intermingle with poor people, and "organize" the inferior masses in some vague unspecified way, then a free society would materialize, gives an impression of elitist altruism mixed with mysticism.
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