The biological notion of social welfare was fed into an anarchist critique of the state and a theory for decentralized social arrangement. Anarchists attacked centralized authority for its inability to prevent social sickness and called for a people managed system of welfare to restore social health. Álvaro Girón explores how within the context of public health concerns, the idea of degeneration permeated Spanish anarchism around the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that Spanish anarchists ‘considered degeneration to be a fact, although establishing both a different diagnosis and treatment’. With the threat of degeneracy a seeming reality, anarchists searched for the causes of humanity’s biological decline in certain environments. Anarchist politics drew meaning from more generally felt European biomedical fears common to the fin-de-sičcle.
My work relates to this trend in the scholarship of anarchism. I demonstrate how the marriage of biomedical notions of public health and social decline to revolutionary politics came to characterize the political diagnoses and remedies of one of the European anarchist movement’s leading figures. I show how this combination was arranged on a total scale in Kropotkin’s thought, spanning numerous books and articles and informing discussions of diverse topics such as prisons and battlefields. For, as Girón points out, while Spanish anarchists looked to the environments of capitalism to explain the causes of sickness, Kropotkin also condemned the pathogenic environments of state power as sites of infection and pestilence. It is the nuances of Kropotkin’s absorption of ideas of health and disease that interest me. I locate these absorptions in various areas of his work: in his investigations into political situations in different national contexts; in his writings about individual bodies, societies, and species; in his historical studies; in his analysis of literary plots and characters; and in his imaginations of the past, present, and future. My study does project Kropotkin’s commonality with other anarchist thinkers and movements who incorporated contemporary scientific ideas into their political projects, but it also reveals the scope and peculiarity of his innovations, his unique playfulness and creativity with science.
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprin...Thesis%20-.pdf
Interesting read, YMMV
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