Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a revolutionary before leaving his
native Russia, but it was in the Jura mountains of western
Switzerland, present-day home to Fourmilab, that he developed his
philosophy of anarchism. In his
Memoirs, he wrote,
“…when I came away from the mountains after a week's
stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I
was an anarchist.”
His 1887 pamphlet,
Anarchist
Communism, is one of the clearest expositions of
Kropotkin's view that anarchism cannot seek solely to do away
with government, but must also abolish property and privilege.
In Anarchist
Morality, published in 1897, he treats
morality as a characteristic of all living beings and argues that
anarchism, oft condemned as immoral, is in fact entirely consistent
with this innate morality.