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Wilde and Kropotkin: Individualism and Mutual Aid

excerpted from Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde

One minor episode—in fact, a non-occurrence—may say something about Oscar Wilde’s sympathies for and ties to the world of radical politics. In April 1889 Wilde responded to an invitation from May Morris, daughter of William Morris and a socialist organizer in her own right, regretfully declining her invitation to help organize a series of lectures by Peter Kropotkin on social evolution. “I am afraid I could not promise to attend any committee meetings, as I am very busy,” Wilde wrote, bringing to mind the quip often attributed to him that the problem with socialism is that it occupies too many of one’s evenings.[i] However, he continued, “If you think my name of any service pray make any use of it you like.” He goes on to explain that though the magazine he was editing, The Woman’s World, had already gone to press, he had taken the initiative in placing notices of Kropotkin’s talks in the Daily Telegraph and the Pall Mall Gazette, “as a means of explaining to people that the subject of the lectures was not to be ‘Anarchy with practical illustrations.’”[ii]

Wilde is being either ironic or coy. Evolutionary science, and especially the theory of “mutual aid” (whereby the advantages of cooperation are highlighted), was central to Kropotkin’s practical anarchism—and to Wilde’s.[iii] As Michael Helfand and Philip Smith document in their analysis of “The Evolutionary Turn” in Wilde’s criticism:

Like other radical Darwinists . . . Wilde believed that science gave a picture of human nature and its development very different from the dominant Victorian view of a basically selfish, competitive, and brutal creature who improved through a bloody intraspecies struggle for existence caused by an inevitable scarcity of human necessities. Radical Darwinists believed that individuals were naturally social and creative creatures who cooperated with their fellows to ensure the survival of the human species. In their opinion, the wasteful, inhumane, and brutally competitive “law of the jungle” which supposedly dominated human nature was encouraged by an artificially imposed social and economic system.[iv]

Wilde was unabashed in his admiration for Kropotkin, whom he described as “a man with the soul of that beautiful white Christ that seems coming out of Russia.”[v] A prince by birth and a scientist by inclination, Kropotkin became a revolutionary by conviction. After witnessing the suffering of the poor, he renounced his career, his position, his title, and much of his personal wealth to devote himself fully to the cause of anarchism, enduring prison and exile as a consequence.[vi] Wilde believed this one “of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience”[vii]

The sense of intellectual appreciation appears to have been mutual. Indeed, Kropotkin seems to have adopted the central ideas of “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (which he described as “that article that O. Wilde wrote on Anarchism—in which there are sentences worth being engraved, like verses from the Koran are engraved in Moslem lands.”)[viii] In the conclusion to his book Mutual Aid, after examining the role of cooperation in both animal and human societies and positing it as “a factor of evolution,” often decisive in the survival of a species, Kropotkin offers this important caveat:

There is, and always has been, the other current—the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.[ix]

Wilde had written, in “The Soul of Man,” “Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”[x] He put the same point more dramatically, and in language more nearly anticipating Kropotkin’s, in “The Critic as Artist”: “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions of morality, it is one with the higher ethics.”[xi]

In 1902, the same year that Mutual Aid was published in its book form, Kropotkin also wrote a long letter to Max Nettlau in which he contrasted the “petty and false” selfishness of elitists, economists, egoists, and Nietzscheans with what he called “true individualism”—defined as “the full development of the individuality.”[xii] Kropotkin’s biographers Woodcock and Avakumovic suggest Wilde’s essay as a likely source for this distinction and summarize the argument thus: “What Kropotkin clearly means is that real individualism, in the sense of an enrichment of personality, will only arise from a society where co-operation in the material factors of life has removed those causes of strife and oppression which in any other order relegate individualism to a privilege of the few who live at the expense of the toiling many.”[xiii]

By the same reasoning, Kropotkin also believed, like Wilde, that by ensuring a measure of material security, socialism would produce greater individuality and thus greater diversity, with beneficial implications for art and culture. He wrote, “As soon as [one’s] material wants are satisfied, other needs, which, generally speaking, may be described as of an artistic nature, will thrust themselves forward. These needs are of the greatest variety; they vary with each and every individual; and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied.”[xiv]

However, there were also profound differences between Kropotkin’s individualism and Wilde’s, as revealed by Kropotkin’s ambivalent response to Wilde’s confession letter, “De Profundis.” Though he “read it with the deepest sympathy” and found “passages and pages in it which are sublime,” Kropotkin worried that it evinced too much “‘Christian’ humility,” and he wrote in a letter, “I cannot help thinking, that it is this humility wh. brought O.W. to end so miserably after his release.”[xv] It seems at first an ironic charge against a man so commonly accused of egotism, and doubly ironic coming from a figure sometimes described as saintly.[xvi] But Kropotkin goes on, explaining: “Such a humility is life-destroying, a life-killing force, because it is too personal, too egotistic, while to live after a great suffering one ought to have an aim much higher and wider—and such an aim could only be mankind.”[xvii]

We see here, in this letter, both the likeness and also the difference between Wilde’s philosophy and Kropotkin’s. As much as Wilde may have taken from Kropotkin’s communism, and as much as Kropotkin seems to have learned from Wilde’s egoism, their views on each half of the anarchist ideal—individualism and socialism, freedom and equality, personal development and mutual aid, the unique and the common—were quite different. For Kropotkin, the great cause of humanity, and its struggle for freedom, was what gave individual life its purpose and its meaning, while for Wilde, the point of socialism was as an aid to individualism. Wilde hoped that beauty might supply the basis for a new society, a new civilization, both creative and free—a socialism in the service of individual development and expression, one that prizes the unique over the uniform, and an individualism that is not selfish and petty but expansive in its sympathies and egalitarian in its commitments.

[i] Oscar Wilde to May Morris [mid-April 1889], in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, 396.

[ii] Wilde to May Morris [mid-April 1889], 396. Emphasis in original.

[iii] The central text, of course, is Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann, 1902). The first of the articles that would eventually be collected into Mutual Aid appeared in the September 1890 issue of the Nineteenth Century, alongside the second part of Wilde’s dialogue “The Critic as Artist.” Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, edited by Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989), 236n164.

[iv] Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, “The Context of the Text,” in Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, 77, 81–22.

[v] Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis,” in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2003), 1038.

[vi] As a young nobleman, Kropotkin found himself wondering, “What right had I to these higher joys [of scientific investigation] when all round me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable one to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grow the wheat and had not bread for their children?” Quoted in George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 94.

[vii] Wilde, “De Profundis,” 1038.

[viii] Peter Kropotkin, “[Letter to Robert Ross], May 6, 1905,” in Robert Ross, Friend of Friends, ed. Margery Ross (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 112.

[ix] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann, 1902), 295.

[x] Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2003), 1186.

[xi] Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2003), 1121–22.

[xii] Peter [Kropotkin], “Letter to Nettlau (March 5, 1902),” Anarchy Archives, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/kropotkintonetllau3502.html.

[xiii] Woodcock and Avakumovic, Peter Kropotkin, 282, 281.

[xiv] Quoted in Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 322.

[xv] Kropotkin, “[Letter to Robert Ross], May 6, 1905,” 112.

[xvi] Shaw, for one, described Kropotkin as “amiable to the point of saintliness.” Quoted in Woodcock and Avakumovic, Peter Kropotkin, 225.

[xvii] Kropotkin then concludes: “But even these remarks will show you how highly I think of the book, as I see in it a human document of deep perception, a piece of inner human analysis, which reveals our nature so deeply that the book permits me to reason about its cries and moans as upon real life,—generalized by the force of genius.” Kropotkin, “[Letter to Robert Ross], May 6, 1905,” 113. Emphasis in original.