Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference Between Love, Sympathy, and Solidarity

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love.

Half a century after Whitman’s atomic theory of belonging and half a century before Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the meaning of solidarity in his visiona...