Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Cooperation in a Transdisciplinary Context. With Pyotr Kropotkin and Other Interlocutors

Workshop 2024/2025 | Fellow Forum

Cooperation in a Transdisciplinary Context. With Pyotr Kropotkin and Other Interlocutors

05.–07. März 2025

Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a transformational figure across the “three cultures”
(Lepenies 1985). A famous natural scientist and one of the key contributors to the theory
of anarchism, he was a prolific writer, teacher and public speaker. Kropotkin’s legacy
stretches broadly. This has been recently acknowledged in a series of scholarly and artistic
commemorations of the centenary of his death, ranging from an international conference1
to an award-winning feature film2. Yet, many of his contributions remain poorly known,
understood, and appreciated, in particular in a cross-disciplinary context (Girón 2011). At
the same time, Kropotkin is still sometimes romanticized as a ‘visionary,’ a uniquely great
mind with a proportionally unique life. It seems, however, that it would be more beneficial
to examine his figure as a symptom of the shifting paradigms of knowledge in the late
19th century, a point of encounter between the history of science and the history of social
movements. The ambition of the workshop is to conduct a dialogue across disciplinary
boundaries in order to update what now seems to be a fragmented vision of Kropotkin's
work and its legacy. To do so, we will use the polymath’s figure as a starting and a focal
point of our interdisciplinary investigation, while inscribing his life and writings into
broader chronological and disciplinary contexts.