The Anarchist Hare

Writes Simon Carnell . . .


Naturalists such as Ernst Haeckel were quick to explore the reactionary political implications of [Charles] Darwin's major work. The anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, in his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), set out to contest conceptions of a perpetual, selfish and bloody war between and with species by giving a thoroughgoing account of their co-operations. When he reaches the hare, he is forced to concede the fact that it is relatively asocial, is "not even endowed with intense parental feelings," and displays a marked antipathy towards its closet relative, the rabbit. Undeterred, however, it is at that point in his text that Kropotkin introduces the idea of the "pleasures" animals in general derive from playing together, asserting in particular that "our common hares . . . cannot live without coming together for play." To back this up he quotes a contemporary hare expert who testifies to the fact that they are such "passionate players" they have even been known to take an approaching fox for a playmate. What happens next to the hare is passed over in silence, in this almost subliminal reference to a pre-Fall or Golden Age. Kropotkin concludes with an ingenious explanation of the antipathy between hares and rabbits. Hares are "passionate, eminently individualist"; rabbits "placid, quiet and submissive": "their tempers are too widely different not to be an obstacle to friendship." Far from contradicting the general political argument with which he frames his natural history, then, the hare turns out, like Kropotkin, to be nothing less than a committed anarchist – with a natural scorn for the bourgeois conformism of the rabbit with its "family life . . . entirely built upon the image of the old patriarchal family."

– Simon Carnell
Hare
pp 17-19

See also the previous posts:
Unhoused
Buck
A Roaming Life
Antipathy
Much in Common


Image: Photographer unknown.