The Building Project: a novel about a workaday philosopher

Following a desire to "be someone useful", Kropotkin chose the difficult route of serving in a Cossack regiment in eastern Siberia. The administrator under whom Kropotkin served, General Boleslar Kazimirovich Kukel — was a liberal and a democrat who maintained personal connections to various Russian radical political figures exiled to Siberia. These included the writer M.

Mikhailov — , to whom Kukel sent Kropotkin to warn the exiled intellectual that Moscow police agents were on the scene to examine his ongoing political activities in confinement. In Kropotkin accepted a position in a geographical survey expedition, crossing North Manchuria from Transbaikalia to the Amur , and soon was attached to another expedition up the Sungari River into the heart of Manchuria.

The expeditions yielded valuable geographical results. The impossibility of obtaining any real administrative reforms in Siberia now induced Kropotkin to devote himself almost entirely to scientific exploration, in which he continued to be highly successful. Kropotkin continued his political reading, including works by such prominent liberal thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Alexander Herzen.

These readings, along with his experiences among peasants in Siberia, led him to declare himself an anarchist by In , Kropotkin resigned his commission in the army and returned to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Saint Petersburg Imperial University to study mathematics, becoming at the same time secretary to the geography section of the Russian Geographical Society.

In , Kropotkin explored the glacial deposits of Finland and Sweden for the Society. During this work, he was offered the secretaryship of the Society, but he had decided that it was his duty not to work at fresh discoveries but to aid in diffusing existing knowledge among the people at large. Accordingly, he refused the offer and returned to St. Petersburg, where he joined the revolutionary party. However, he found that he did not like IWA's style of socialism. Kropotkin worked to spread revolutionary propaganda among peasants and workers, and acted as a bridge between the Circle and the aristocracy.

Throughout this period, Kropotkin maintained his position within the Geographical Society in order to provide cover for his activities. In , Kropotkin was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for subversive political activity, as a result of his work with the Circle of Tchaikovsky.

Because of his aristocratic background, he received special privileges in prison, such as permission to continue his geographical work in his cell. He delivered his report on the subject of the Ice Age in , where he argued that it had taken place in not as distant a past as originally thought.

In , just before his trial, Kropotkin was moved to a low-security prison in St. Petersburg, from which he escaped with the help of his friends.

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On the night of the escape, Kropotkin and his friends celebrated by dining in one of the finest restaurants in St. Petersburg, assuming correctly that the police would not think to look for them there. After this, he boarded a boat, and headed to England. In , he moved to Paris, where he helped start the socialist movement. After a short stay at Thonon Savoy , he stayed in London for nearly a year.

While respecting "complete autonomy of local groups", the congress defined propaganda actions that all could follow and agreed that propaganda by the deed was the path to social revolution. Kropotkin returned to Thonon in late Soon he was arrested by the French government, tried at Lyon , and sentenced by a police-court magistrate under a special law passed on the fall of the Paris Commune to five years' imprisonment, on the ground that he had belonged to the IWA The French Chamber repeatedly agitated on his behalf, and he was released in Soon after Wilson and Kropotkin would split from the individualist anarchist Seymour and found the Freedom Press , an anarchist newspaper which continues to this day.

Kropotkin was a regular contributor while Wilson was integral to the administrative and financial running of the paper until she resigned its editorship in He settled near London, living at various times in Harrow , then Bromley , where his daughter and only child, Alexandra, was born on April 15, In , after the February Revolution , Kropotkin returned to Russia after 40 years of exile. His arrival was greeted by cheering crowds of tens of thousands of people. He was offered the ministry of education in the Provisional Government , which he promptly refused, feeling that working with them would be a violation of his anarchist principles.

His enthusiasm for the changes occurring in the Russian Empire expanded when Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. He had this to say about the October Revolution: And this struggle, which takes place worldwide, has to be supported by all means - all the rest is secondary. The party of the Bolsheviks was right to adopt the old, purely proletarian name of "Communist Party". Even if it does not achieve everything that it would like to, it will nevertheless enlighten the path of the civilised countries for at least a century.

Its ideas will slowly be adopted by the peoples in the same way as in the nineteenth century the world adopted the ideas of the Great French Revolution. That is the colossal achievement of the October Revolution. Even though he led a life on the margins of the revolutionary upheaval, Kropotkin became increasingly critical of the methods of the Bolshevik dictatorship, and went on to express these feelings in writing.

This effort was made in the same way as the extremely centralized and Jacobin endeavor of Babeuf. I owe it to you to say frankly that, according to my view, this effort to build a communist republic on the basis of a strongly centralized state communism under the iron law of party dictatorship is bound to end in failure.

We are learning to know in Russia how not to introduce communism, even with a people tired of the old regime and opposing no active resistance to the experiments of the new rulers.

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Kropotkin died of pneumonia on February 8, , in the city of Dmitrov , and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Thousands of people marched in his funeral procession, including, with Vladimir Lenin 's approval, [45] anarchists carrying banners with anti-Bolshevik slogans. In some versions of Peter Kropotkin [47] 's Conquest of Bread , the mini-biography states that this would be the last time that Kropotkin's supporters would be allowed to freely rally in public. Kropotkin pointed out what he considered to be the fallacies of the economic systems of feudalism and capitalism.

He believed they create poverty and artificial scarcity while promoting privilege.

Peter Kropotkin - Wikipedia

Instead, he proposed a more decentralized economic system based on mutual aid, mutual support , and voluntary cooperation , asserting that the tendencies for this kind of organization already exist, both in evolution and in human society. He disagreed with the Marxian critique of capitalism, including the labour theory of value , believing there was no necessary link between work performed and the prices of commodities.

His attacks on the institution of wage-labour were based more on the power employers exerted over employees — which he claimed was made possible by the state protecting private ownership of productive resources — than the extraction of surplus value from their labour. It's a fascinating entrepreneurship memoir told against a background of persistence and grit. For example, during Nike's first five years, Knight had to work full time at another job.

He also talks of how he repeatedly made high-risk decisions and was at the brink of losing everything multiple times. The book is a story of struggle, but more importantly, it's one of perseverance. Personally, as a bootstrapper who has taken a decade to slowly build my own company, this book has been a great source of inspiration and morale. I highly recommend this book to any entrepreneur. Instead of merely seeing technology as taking away jobs--which to some degree it is--the book reminds us that technology can also be extremely effective in empowering people to find their fit in the new economy.

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Successful companies and people start with the 'why' they do what they do.

Peter Kropotkin

With this mentality, we were able to grow our Big Frog franchise system, rooted in 'fun,' to over 70 locations, on track to add 18 to 20 this year. Simon is an anthropologist with a tremendous insight in the business aspect of how people think. During the past three years, we have applied and fine-tuned the concepts outlined in Traction. We are dramatically more connected as a team, both with our communications and with the realization of our goals.



The best part is, we are having so much fun as we embrace our mission of "serving amazing How can I protect myself and scale my business? Providing answers to those questions, E-Myth is a must-read for business owners, entrepreneurs, or anyone thinking of leaving a job to go out on their own. It hugely impacted both my life and businesses, causing me to literally change the way I operated my companies. A practical guide to understanding the roadblocks and pitfalls of an entrepreneur's journey, this book emphasizes how building a healthy business relies on scalable, repeatable processes. Upon learning this, I immediately began creating processes assuming that the employee was hired yesterday and then built systems to support and reinforce them.

E-Myth educated me on process and accountability. It was the catalyst for the journey that I am on now. Although published in , still today only a few organizations have become true experiential brands, despite many companies aspiring to be. The authors describe why many companies fail to achieve this, which outlines the core principles of the book. The book includes a number of examples that dive deep into the experience of entrepreneurs as they strive and struggle to achieve a deep and rich level of success. When you love what you do, work becomes enjoyable, but when you couple the work you love with team players It is important for Bishop's project, I think, that human welfare not typically be extremely fragmented -- just "one damned thing after another," as a certain view of history goes.

Otherwise it may be inapt to think of human welfare in terms of causal networks. This is not an objection, note, to Bishop's view, as I think the evidence he amasses pretty well rules out the extreme fragmentation hypothesis; indeed, perhaps the strong unity view sketched above will prove correct. The point of these reflections is to highlight both the attractions of his account and one of the points where it may be vulnerable, depending on how the empirical story plays out.

The second chapter lays out the methodology behind Bishop's view of well-being, the "inclusive approach" to the study of well-being. The inclusive approach arrives at a theory of well-being via inference to the best explanation, drawing on two sorts of data: That is, "we figure out what well-being is by identifying the item in the world that makes sense of the science of well-being and that makes most of our commonsense judgments about well-being true" Traditional philosophical methods, Bishop notes, get hung up on the diversity of people's intuitions, resulting in stalemate.

The inclusive approach is meant to move the debate forward by bringing empirical research into the mix, and Bishop's heavy reliance on such data to build his case is unusual. The thought is that, "by flooding the evidential base with scientific findings, the inclusive approach provides a robust fund of evidence that might favor certain commonsense judgments over others" Empirically-minded philosophers have sometimes -- though less often than is commonly supposed -- tended to be dismissive of commonsense intuitions.

But Bishop takes those intuitions seriously: Hence the name "inclusive" approach. While I note some concerns about the specifics of Bishop's version of the inclusive methodology below, the basic idea of this approach is highly appealing: The book seems to me a model of empirically-oriented philosophy. The inclusive approach and the network theory constitute two of the book's main foci. Chapters Three and Four explore the third: These chapters also develop the network theory in greater detail. Bishop observes that positive psychologists themselves have a hard time defining their field, and definitions are many and varied.

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The argument is that the network theory provides a unified explanation for what positive psychologists are studying, and Bishop surveys a wide range of results, for instance about friendship or creativity and well-being, to make his case. The claim that positive psychology studies PCNs is somewhat independent of the network theory of well-being, though they are mutually supporting. Some readers may be attracted to it even if they reject the network theory, or alternatively might endorse the network theory but not Bishop's view of positive psychology. The account of well-being returns to the fore in Chapter Five, which defends it against several competitors: Bishop's strategy is to "battle to a draw on common sense and win on the science.

The network theory explains our commonsense judgments well enough to not be disqualified and it is so superior to its competitors at explaining the scientific evidence that it carries the day" Bishop grants that the network theory has some counterintuitive implications -- but so too do all the alternatives, and it is not clearly in worse shape on this count than the other theories. Like the others, it can explain most of our intuitive judgments about well-being and is not wildly at variance with them. Hedonism, for instance, notoriously has intuitive difficulties like dealing with experience machine cases, but also errs on the empirical front by focusing narrowly on just one aspect of positive human functioning.

Positive psychology is not solely concerned with hedonic states. Chapter Six employs the network theory to address a number of difficulties in positive psychology, including uncertainty about the nature of happiness and puzzles about hedonic adaptation and set points, which have led some to doubt whether we can meaningfully promote happiness in policy and elsewhere.

The gist of the chapter is that the network theory offers resources to help address these issues. Chapter Seven, the last substantive one, rebuts objections to the network theory, including some putative counterexamples and questions about how far Bishop's view accounts for the normativity of well-being.

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I suspect that the most significant objections going forward will have to do with issues relating to normativity. One problem here is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of agreement about what normativity amounts to, making it hard to know what would constitute a successful rebuttal. Bishop canvasses several possible understandings of normativity and argues that either the normativity demand is unreasonable or at least overly controversial, or the network theory meets it. This is probably the best way to deal with such an elusive objection, but there will likely be residual questions about whether he has considered the right form of the normativity worry.

One kind of normativity concern has to do with how Bishop defends the network theory: And now the question arises: