This is just a little trivia I picked up over the weekend.

Peter Kropotkin was, for a brief time, one of the more influential men of philosophy in Europe. A Russian—technically, a prince, though he repudiated the title, descended from the Rurik dynasty—who had gone to live in England, he wrote extensively about his vision of anarchist communism, differing from Karl Marx in that while the latter wanted to harness the state (at least for a while), Kropotkin felt that the state should be immediately abolished, in favor of voluntary associations. Although in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kropotkin’s ideas lost out to Marx’s, he did go back to Russia, where he was—somewhat begrudgingly—tolerated until his death in 1921.

Kropotkin had a daughter, Alexandra. After her father’s death, she came to the US, where she lived the rest of her life, writing various articles and books, and trading on the Russian title her father had given up. Near the end of her life, in the 1964 US presidential election she supported—Barry Goldwater.