P. Kropotkin

“ It is easy to understand why modern historians, nurtured as they are in the spirit of the Roman law, and accustomed to look to Roman law for the origin of every political institution, are incapable of understanding the spirit of the communalist movement of the twelfth century. This manly affirmation of the rights of the individual, who managed to constitute Society through the federation of individuals, villages, and towns, was an absolute negation of that centralising spirit of ancient Rome which penetrates all historical conceptions of present-day university teaching. ”

“ Peasants have only kept scraps of their common lands. This is the way in which the mutual assurance of lord, priest, soldier, and judge—the State—has behaved toward peasants in order to despoil them of their last guarantee against misery and economic servitude.
But while organising and sanctioning this plunder, could the State respect the institution of the commune as an organ of local life? Evidently not.
To allow citizens to constitute a federation among themselves in order to appropriate some functions of the State would have been a contradiction of principle. ”

“ The uprising of the twelfth century cannot even be attributed to any personality of mark, or to any central institution. It is a natural, anthropological phasis of human development; and, as such, it belongs to human evolution, like the tribe and the village-community periods, but to no nation in particular, to no special region of Europe, and it is the work of no special hero.
This is why university science, which is based upon Roman law, centralisation, and hero-worship, is absolutely incapable of understanding the substance of that movement, which came from beneath. ”

“ In the commune, the struggle was for the conquest and maintenance of the liberty of the individual, for the principle of federation, for the right to unite and act; whereas the wars of the States aimed to destroy these liberties, to subjugate the individual, to annihilate free agreement, to unite men in one and the same servitude before the king, the judge, the priest, and the State.
There lies all the difference. There are struggles and conflicts that kill, and there are those that launch humanity forwards. ”

“ There is, as you know, the German school that likes to confuse the State with Society. This confusion is to be met with even among the best German thinkers and many French ones, who cannot conceive of Society without State concentration. Yet to reason thus is entirely to ignore the progress made in the domain of history during the last thirty years; it is to ignore the fact that men have lived in societies during thousands of years before having known the State; it is to forget that for European nations the State is of recent origin—that it hardly dates from the sixteenth century ”

“ But under the influence of the Christian Church, always fond of authority, always zealous to impose its rule on the souls and especially on the arms of the faithful; and on the other hand, under the influence of Roman law, which already, since the twelfth century, invaded the courts of the powerful lords, the kings, and the popes, and soon became a favorite study in the universities,—under the influence of these two teachings, which agreed so well although they were enemies at the beginning, the minds of men grew depraved in proportion as priest and legist triumphed. ”

“ And we with our faculties blunted by State education rejoice at the sudden progress accomplished by agricultural syndicates, without blushing at the fact that this right of union of which peasants were deprived for centuries belonged to them without contention in the Middle Ages,—belonged to every man, free or serf. Slaves that we are, we believe it to be a "conquest of democracy"!
IX
"If you have any common interests in the city or the village, ask the Church and the State to look after them. But you are forbidden to combine in a direct way to settle matters for yourself!" ”

“ All the great discoveries which have made modern science,—the compass, the clock, the watch, printing, the maritime discoveries, gunpowder, the law of gravitation, the law of atmospheric pressure of which the steam-engine is but a development, the rudiments of chemistry, the scientific method already pointed out by Roger Bacon and practised in Italian universities,—where do all these come from, if not from the free cities which developed under the shelter of communal liberties? ”

“ History has not been an uninterrupted evolution. At different intervals evolution has been broken in a certain region, to begin again elsewhere. Egypt, Asia, the banks of the Mediterranean, Central Europe have in turn been the scene of historical developments. But, in every case, the first phase of the evolution has been the primitive tribe, passing on into a village commune, then into the free city, and finally dying out when it reaches the phase of the State.
In Egypt, civilization began by the primitive tribe. It reached the village community phasis, and later on the period of free cities ”

“ And if, putting aside antique empires, we study the origin and development of that young barbarian civilisation till the time when it gave birth to our modern States, we shall be able to grasp the essence of the State. We shall do it better than we should have done if we had launched ourselves into the study of the Roman Empire, of the empire of Alexander, or else of despotic Eastern monarchies. ”

“ State or divine, the conscience of each individual being his one and only law; the commune, absolute master of its destinies, retaking its lands from feudal lords, and refusing all personal or monetary service to the State; in fact. Communism and equality put into practice. Moreover, when Denck, one of the philosophers of the Anabaptist movement, was asked if he did not at least recognise the authority of the Bible, he answered that the only obligatory rule of conduct is the one that each individual finds, for himself, in the Bible. ”

“ The germ of princely or royal authority is already sown in these families; and the more I study the institutions of that time, the more I see that the knowledge of customary law did far more to constitute that authority than the power of the sword. Man allowed himself to be enslaved far more by his desire to "punish according to law" than by direct military conquest.
And gradually the first "concentration of powers," the first mutual insurance for domination—that of the judge and the military chief—grew up to the detriment of the village commune. A single man assumed these two functions. ”

“ Man did not create society; society is anterior to man.
We also know to-day—anthropology has clearly demonstrated it—that the starting point of humanity was not the family but the clan, the tribe. The paternal family such as we have it, or such as it is depicted in Hebrew tradition, appeared only very much later. Men lived tens of thousands of years in the stage of clan or tribe, and during that first stage—let us call it primitive or savage tribe, if you will—man already developed a whole series of institutions, habits, and customs, far anterior to the paternal family institutions. ”

“ We can conceive the spirit of research and invention that prevailed, the breath of liberty that inspired their works, the sentiment of fraternal solidarity that grew up in those guilds in which men of the same craft were united not only by the mercantile and technical side of a trade but also by bonds of sociability and fraternity. ”

“ In the course of the sixteenth century, modern barbarians come and destroy the whole civilization of the cities of the Middle Ages. These barbarians do not completely annihilate it; they cannot do so, but at least they check it in its progress for two or three centuries. They drive it in a new direction.
They fetter the individual, they take all his liberties away, they order him to forget the unions which formerly were based on free initiative and free agreement, and their aim is to level the whole of society in the same submission to the master. ”

“ As soon as the State felt itself strong enough, it destroyed the village commune, ruined the peasants committed to its mercy, and plundered the common lands.
Historians and economists paid by the State have taught us that the village commune, having become an obsolete form of land-ownership obstructing agricultural progress, was bound to disappear by the action of natural economic forces. Politicians and bourgeois economists do not tire of repeating this even nowadays, and there are revolutionists and socialists (those who pretend to be scientific) who recite this fable learned in school. ”

“ Organisms full of vigor, the communes evidently grew dissimilar in their evolution. Geographical position, the character of external commerce, the obstacles to be vanquished outside, gave every commune its own history. But for all, the principle was the same. Pskov in Russia and Brugge in Flanders, a Scotch borough of three hundred inhabitants and rich Venice with its islands, a borough in the North of France or in Poland and Florence the Beautiful represent the same amitas,—the same fellowship of village communes and of associated guilds, the same constitution in its general outline. ”

“ In those cities, under the shelter of their liberties acquired through the impulse of free agreement and free initiative, a whole new civilization grew up and attained such expansion that the like has not been seen since.
All modern industry comes to us from those cities. In three centuries, industries and arts developed there to such perfection that our century has been able to surpass them only in rapidity of production, but rarely in quality and very rarely in beauty of the produce. ”

“ He thus renounced imposing his judge on the commune, while giving himself importance before other feudal lords. But this was in nowise the rule: hundreds of communes lived without any other sanction than their own good pleasure, their ramparts, and their lances.
In a hundred years this movement spread, with striking unity, to the whole of Europe,—by imitation, observe well,—including Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Russia. ”

“ Never, in two or three centuries, had man undergone so profound a change or so extended his power over the forces of nature.
You may perhaps think of the progress of civilization in our own century, which is ceaselessly boasted of. But in each of its manifestations it is but the child of the civilization which grew up in the midst of free communes. ”

“ Happily, the "barbarian" spirit—Scandinavian, Saxon, Celt, German, Slav—that had led men during seven or eight centuries to seek for the satisfaction of their needs in individual initiative and in free agreement of fraternities and guilds, happily that spirit still lived in the villages and boroughs. The barbarians allowed themselves to be enslaved, they worked for a master; but their spirit of free action and free agreement was not yet corrupted. Their fraternities flourished more than ever, and the Crusades had but roused and developed them in the West. ”

“ The European of the twelfth century was essentially a federalist;—a man of free initiative, of free agreement, of unions freely consented to. He saw in the individual the starting point of all society. ”

“ This is why the communes—as long as they themselves did not strive to become States and to impose submission around them, so as to create "a vast body without color or life"—always grew up, always came out younger and stronger after every struggle; this is why they flourished at the sound of arms in the street, while two centuries later that same civilization was crumbling at the noise of wars brought about by States. ”

“ All religions, and even all arts and crafts, have begun, as you know, by "mysteries." Also, the brave, the bold, and the cunning man became the temporary leader during conflicts with other tribes or during migrations. But an alliance between the "law bearer," the military chief, and the witch-doctor did not exist, and there can be no more question of a State with these tribes than there is in a society of bees or ants or among our contemporaries the Patagonians or Esquimaux. ”

“ Henceforth, the village community, composed partly or entirely of separate families — all united, nevertheless, by the possession in common of the land—became the necessary bond of union for centuries to come. On the immense stretches of land in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, it still exists to-day. The barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire—Scandinavians, Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.—lived under this kind of organization. ”

“ Some like to wander about in quest of adventure, in the capacity of merchants. Some take to a craft, "an art," of some kind. And these merchants and artisans unite in "fraternities," even when they belong to different villages, tribes, and confederations. There must be union for mutual help in distant adventures or mutually to transmit the mysteries of the craft, and they unite. They swear brotherhood, and practice it—not in words only, but in deeds. ”

“ To refuse to help a member of your çof, even at the risk of losing all your belongings and your life, is an act of treason to the fraternity, and exposes the traitor to be treated as the murderer of a "brother."
What we find to-day among Kabyles, Mongols, Malays, etc., was the very essence of life of the so-called barbarians in Europe from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, even till the fifteenth. Under the name of guilds, friendships, universitates, etc., unions swarmed for mutual defence and for solidarily avenging offences against each member of the union ”

“ In taking these powerful barbarian destroyers of the Roman Empire as a starting point, we can retrace the evolution of all civilisation from its origin till it reaches the stage of the State.
II
Most of the philosophers of the last century had conceived very elementary notions about the origin of societies.
At the beginning, they said, men lived in small, isolated families, and perpetual war among these families represented the normal condition of existence. But one fine day, perceiving the drawbacks of these endless struggles, they decided to form a society. ”