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ERCC Conference Inventing the Human
Conference 2023: 'Inventing the Human' - University of Melbourne & Online
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Keynote 5: Amanda Jo Goldstein, 'Ulterior to Man ...'

Keynote

Keynote

9:30 am

01 December 2023

Arts West, Forum Theatre

Session Programme

From the Romantic period to the present day, evolutionary biology has exerted a powerful hold over what the nature in “human nature” is authorized to be. Returning to the nineteenth-century crucible of Darwinism and its discontents, this talk will focus on an improbable strand in that debate. I turn to Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist classic Mutual Aid (1902), which turns out to be a work of alt-Darwinian evolutionary biology that centers the social lives of human and non-human others of “Man.” Seeking to save Darwin from the Social Darwinists, Kropotkin – an internationally-respected biogeographer exiled to London for his revolutionary activities – reveals how the dogma of biological individualism in the modern Anglophone study of nature renders the reality of uncoerced cooperation a “Utopian” illusion in both natural and social realms. In Kropotkin’s alternative view, evolutionary nature evinces the capacity for forms of organized flourishing without domination, and anarchist tactics like “direct action” and “mutual aid” are capacities that derive from and are shared with plant and animal life. To think through the implications of this view, I trace Kropotkin’s uptake by African American liberation sociologist Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933), whose astonishing works of speculative fiction bend Kropotkin’s sense of “co-operation” to unforeseen ends.