the early insights of Kropotkin in Mutual Aid find contemporary scientific validation. Kropotkin’s idea was that evolution, although partly consisting of both conflict and cooperation within and between species, was more fundamentally a result of cooperation and mutual aid. This insight can now be re-asserted as crucial for all aspects of human enterprise. As he wrote, “in the practice of mutual aid, which can be traced to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support—not mutual struggle—has had the leading part.”[11]