7 The Legacy of Reclus: Liberty, Equality, Geography
8 The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society
10 Anarchy
11 The Extended Family
12 Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal
13 On Vegetarianism
14 The History of Cities
15 The Modern State
16 Culture and Property
17 Progress
[1] Perhaps by chance, Nature’s gaze seems to be focused in the direction of New Orleans, the location at which the translation and the commentary for this work happened to have taken place.
[2] Quoted in Ariel Salleh, ed. Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 302.
[3] Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity” in Ecology and Society 14, no. 2, at www.ecologyandsociety.org . For a more concise statement of the findings of the Stockholm Resilience Center, see Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity” in Nature 461 (September 2009): 472–75.
[5] Joël Cornuault, Elisée Reclus et les Fleurs Sauvages (Bergerac: Librairie La Brèche, 2005); Crestian Lamaison, Elisée Reclus, l’Orthésien qui écrivait la Terre (Orthez: Cité du Livre, 2005); Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg, ed., Elisée Reclus. Natura e educazione (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007); and Ronald Creagh et al., eds., Elisée Reclus, Paul Vidal de la Blache, la géographie, la cité et le monde, hier et aujourd’hui, autour de 1905 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009).
[6] Jean-Didier Vincent, Elisée Reclus. Géographe, anarchiste, écologiste (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2010); Florence Deprest, Elisée Reclus et l’Algérie colonisée (Paris: Belin, 2012); Ronald Creagh, Elisée Reclus et les États-Unis (Paris: Editions Noir et Rouge, 2013); and Didier Jung, Elisée Reclus (Paris: Pardès, 2013).
[7] Philippe Pelletier, Géographie & anarchie. Reclus. Kropotkin. Metchnikoff. (Paris: Editions du Monde libertaire, 2013) and Elisée Reclus, géographie et anarchie (Paris: Editions du Monde libertaire, 2009).
[8] Federico Ferretti, Il mondo senza la mappa: Elisée Reclus e i Geografi Anarchici (Milan: Zero in Condotta, 2007), and Anarchici ed editori. Reti scientifiche, editoria e lotte culturali attorno alla Nuova Geografia Universale di Elisée Reclus (1876–1894) (Milan: Zero in Condotta, 2011).
[9] Elisée Reclus, Un nom confisqué: Elisée Reclus et sa vision des Amériques, ed. by Ernesto Machler-Tobar (Paris: Editions INDIGO et Coté femmes, 2007); Elisée Reclus, Projet de Globe au 100.000e, ed. by Nikola Jankovic (Paris: Editions B2, 2011); Elisée Reclus, Lettres de prison et d’exil, ed. by Federico Ferretti (Lardy: A la Frontière, 2012); Elisée Reclus, Ecrits sociaux, ed. by Alexandre Chollier and Federico Ferretti (Geneva: Editions Héros-limite, 2012); Elisée and Elie Reclus, L’homme des bois, études sur les populations indiennes d’Amérique du Nord, ed. by Alexandre Chollier and Federico Ferretti (Geneva: Editions Héros-limite, 2012).
[10] For information on the Portuguese volumes and other publications, see Federico Ferretti’s useful survey of recent works in “La redécouverte d’Elisée Reclus: à propos d’ouvrages récents” in Echogéo 21 (2012), at echogeo.revues.org.
[11]Elisée Reclus. La passion du monde, directed by Nicolas Eprendre and produced by Antoine Martin (Rouen, 2012).
[12] See Elisée Reclus, A Voyage to New Orleans: Anarchist Impressions of the Old South, ed. and trans. John P. Clark and Camille Martin; revised and expanded edition (Enfield, N.H.: Glad Day Books, 2004).
[13] Paul Reclus, “A Few Recollections on the Brothers Elie and Elisée Reclus,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 5.
[14] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 1:i.
[15] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94), 1:3.
[16] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:114–15.
[18] Reclus’ concept of dynamic equilibrium is closer to the model of nature as a “discordant harmony” than to the simplistic idea of a “balance of nature.”
[20] In this he prefigures contemporary efforts, such as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s account of the “Earth Story” within the larger “Universe Story.” See The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992).
[21] Reclus thus contributes to the overcoming of tendencies in Western social thought toward, on the one hand, an abstract universalism that dissolves particularity and singularity, and, on the other, a reactive and exaggerated anti-universalism that denies universality and even particularity in its cult of singularity. For an extended defense of the universal particular, see John P. Clark, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[22] Letter to M. Roth (no specific date, 1904) in Correspondance, 3:285–86. Reclus paraphrases 1 John 4:20, “For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”
[23]Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus (Paris: Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964), 17. It should be obvious that by “communism” Paul Reclus does not mean anything related to state socialism but rather a system in which the good of the community is placed above individual self-interest and obedience to conscience and principle is placed above conformity to abstract laws and regulations.
[28] Ibid., 170. While the conservatism of this environment should be noted, one should not forget the strong tendency toward radicalism that was inherent in this milieu. For example, it is significant that the great libertarian theorist of the sixteenth century, Etienne de la Boétie, came out of the same Huguenot culture of southwestern France. De la Boétie, the author of the enduring anti-authoritarian classic The Discourse ofVoluntary Servitude, was born in Sarlat in the Dordogne, the same region as Reclus. See Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975).
[29] “Développement de la liberté dans le monde,” 1851 manuscript first published in Le libertaire (1925), quoted in Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus (Paris: Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964), 50.
[34] For Godwin’s views on “the right of private judgment,” see John P. Clark, The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 136–47.
[35] Elisée states that “Elie and his friends” were alone in the end (Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 175), while Paul Reclus maintains that Elisée was in fact the only friend who remained (ibid., 23).
[36] For the details of Reclus’ stay in Louisiana, see Gary S. Dunbar, “Elisée Reclus in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 23 (1982): 341–52. The article includes much fascinating material, as for example an account of Reclus’ bout with yellow fever in the context of the great epidemic of 1853 (345–46).
[37] See Elisée Reclus, A Voyage to New Orleans, ed. and trans. John P. Clark and Camille Martin (Enfield, N.H.: Glad Day Books, 2004), 51–52. While working on that book, the editors took a tour of a plantation near Félicité (which still stands but is a private home not open to visitors). We discovered that the official tour goes to great lengths to extoll the grandeur of the Old South but gives no hint that a system of organized brutality ever existed there. The tour guide, a young woman dressed in antebellum garb, noted that “the slave who carried the baked pies from the kitchen outbuilding to the main house had to whistle constantly as he walked—to assure that he didn’t taste the pie!” The crowd of tourists found this anecdote quite amusing, having no trouble identifying themselves with the clever planters rather than the hapless servants.
[39] Ibid. Reclus’ comment is reminiscent of a famous statement by another great figure in the history of anarchist thought who was also an uncompromising opponent of slavery, Henry David Thoreau. In discussing his refusal to pay taxes to support a state that enforced slavery, Thoreau explained as follows: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.” Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 636.
[40] Letter to Elie Reclus (undated) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 1:91.
[42] W.L.G. Joerg notes that Reclus’ voyage north may have taken him to Chicago and even as far northeast as Niagara Falls. He bases this view on research on Reclus’ life by the great historian of anarchism Max Nettlau. See Joerg, “The Geography of North America: A History of Its Regional Exposition,” Geographical Review 26 (1936): 648.
[43] Elisée Reclus, Voyage à la Sierra-Nevada de Saint-Marthe: Paysage de la nature tropicale (Paris: Hachette, 1861).
[45] Peter Kropotkin, “Elisée Reclus,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 63.
[46] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (January 1, 1882) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 2:238. Marie Fleming cites Elie’s observation that when Elisée was in his sixties he not only taught but also attended courses at the New University, always eager to learn from others. The Geography of Freedom (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1988), 178.
[47] Jean Grave, “Elisée Reclus” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Ishill, 39. This is no small tribute to someone who was generally considered the most renowned geographer and one of the two or three most important anarchist theorists of his time.
[48] Elisée Reclus, La Terre: description des phénomènes de la vie du globe, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1868–69); vol. 1 translated by B.B. Woodward and edited by Henry Woodward under the title The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871), and vol. 2 translated by B.B. Woodward and edited by Henry Woodward under the title The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life: being the second series of a descriptive history of the phenomena of the life of the globe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873).
[49] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’un ruisseau (Paris: Hachette, 1869).
[50] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (Paris: Hetzel, 1880), translated by Bertha Lilly and John Lilly under the title The History of a Mountain (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881).
[51] Michael Bakunin, La Polémique avec Mazzini: Ecrits et Matériaux, part 1 of Michel Bakunin et L’Italie 1875–82, Oeuvres Complètes de Bakunin, ed. Arthur Lehning (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1973), 1:245.
[52] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, 19 vols., trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94); originally published as Nouvelle géographie universelle, 19 vols., ed. Ernest George Ravenstein (Paris: Hachette, 1876–94). Herein, the authors refer to this work as the New Universal Geography, as in the French title, to preserve Reclus’ conception of the work.
[53] Patrick Geddes, “A Great Geographer: Elisée Reclus” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, 155.
[54] Gary S. Dunbar, Elisée Reclus: Historian of Nature (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), 95. See also Gary S. Dunbar, The History of Geography (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Gary S. Dunbar, 1996), especially chapters 3, 6, 11, 17, 18, and 26.
[55] For extensive details on the uproar within the university after the invitation to Reclus was withdrawn, see Hem Day, ed., Elisée Reclus en Belgique: sa vie, son activité (Paris and Brussels: Pensée et Action, 1956). Among the documents reprinted in this work are the minutes of the students’ organizations, which reported that a general assembly of the university’s students voted to support Reclus, with only two dissenting votes (32).
[56] Letter to Jean Grave (October 6, 1894) in Correspondance (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1925), 3:172.
[57] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants, 19:vi.
[58] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6 vols. (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8).
[60] Letter to Clara Mesnil (March 25, 1905) in Correspondance, 3:314.
[61] While the emphasis in the present discussion is on the relevance of Reclus’ social geography to ecological thought and social theory, the considerable importance of his contribution in other areas, including physical geography and geology, should not be overlooked. Among Reclus’ achievements is his early advocacy of the theory of continental drift and his defense of the view that this phenomenon is compatible with uniformitarian explanation. As early as 1868, in The Earth, he proposed that the planet is many times older than most contemporary theory indicated and that the continents formed a single landmass as recently as the Jurassic period. In 1979, an intriguing discussion of Reclus’ geological significance appeared in the journal Geology. In his article “Elisée Reclus: Neglected Geologic Pioneer and First Continental Drift Advocate,” James O. Berkland concludes that Reclus “was a peer of the geologic greats of the nineteenth century such as Darwin and Lyell,” and that while his name “has faded to near obscurity,” he “should be recognized in the history of plate tectonic theory as one of its foremost pioneers and perhaps, as its founder.” See Geology 7 (1979): 192. In a “Comment” on this article Myrl E. Beck, Jr., suggests that Reclus’ lapse into “obscurity” may have had more to do with his anarchist philosophy than with the merits of his scientific theories. See Geology 7 (1979): 418. In his “Reply,” Berkland agrees and laments “the slow literary descent of Reclus to the status of a quasi-nonperson [sic]” as a case of “book-burning through neglect.” In his concluding statement, Berkland surprisingly admits that “had [he] possessed full knowledge of just how ‘revolutionary’ Reclus really was, it is probable that [he] would not have invested the time and effort to give him well-deserved credit for his geologic accomplishments.” See ibid. As geographer Gary Dunbar correctly notes, Berkland’s claims are rather exaggerated. Reclus cannot be considered a “pioneer” or “founder” of continental drift theory, since others proposed the theory long before he discussed it. But while its possibility was mentioned before his time, Alfred Wegener published the first major theory of the phenomenon in 1912, and it did not receive general acceptance until the 1960s; see A. Hallam, “Alfred Wegener and the Hypothesis of Continental Drift,” Scientific American
232, no. 2 (February 1975): 88–97. Reclus’ support for continental drift thus predates its classic formulation by almost half a century and its firm establishment by almost a century. The fact that one of the foremost geographers of that era defended it at this early date was thus a significant step in the history of continental drift theory. I am grateful to Gary Dunbar and to geologist Anatol Dolgoff for their contrasting but highly enlightening views on this topic.
[62] “Social ecology,” in the sense used here, is an ecological philosophy based on a dialectical (but nontotalizing) view of reality. It interprets all natural and social phenomena as mutually determining parts of larger wholes and as being in a process of development and unfolding. Any whole is seen as a complex, developing unity-in-diversity that can be understood to the degree that its elements, their relationships, and the history of its development are understood. A consistent social ecology must, in view of its radically dialectical quality, reject any kind of reification of phenomena or concepts, any dualistic divisions within any sphere of reality, or any process of totalization that transforms dynamic wholes into closed systems (whether natural, social, or intellectual). These principles are applied to the evolution of humanity and the entire course of human history, in relation to natural history and the evolution of life on earth. A social ecology is, however, more than an ecological philosophy; it is also a social practice that aims at creating a free, cooperative, ecological society in which not only the human quest to conquer nature but also all forms of domination within society are overcome.
[63] Reclus’ connection with contemporary social ecology has not been widely recognized. A notable exception is Peter Marshall’s chapter on “Elisée Reclus: The Geographer of Liberty” in his monumental work Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), 339–44. Marshall concludes that Reclus “had a profound ecological sensibility,” and that he was “a forerunner of modern social ecology” (344).
[64] Béatrice Giblin, “Reclus: un écologiste avant l’heure?” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 110. Giblin edited and wrote the introduction for a book of selections entitled L’Homme et la Terre—morceaux choisis (Paris: Maspero, 1982). The entire issue of Hérodote containing her article is devoted to studies of Reclus’ work, with a strong emphasis on the ecological implications of his social geography. Joël Cornuault, in his excellent and highly perceptive little book Elisée Reclus, géographe et poète (Eglise-Neuve d’Issac, France: Fédérop, 1995) also recognizes Reclus as “one of the first ecologists” and points out that although Reclus does not use the word “ecology,” he showed his ecological tendencies by “commenting favorably on the works of George P. Marsh as early as 1864” (73). Cornuault shows very convincingly that Reclus’ books
History of a Brook and History of a Mountain are crucial to understanding his ecological sensibility and his work as a natural historian. Contemporary ecological thought has devoted little attention to the connection between geography and ecology. An exception is Thomas Berry, one of the best-known contemporary ecological thinkers, who devotes an entire chapter in one of his works to “Ecological Geography.” He states that “geography provides a comprehensive context for understanding the functioning of the Earth in its larger structure,” that it is “useful in appreciating the integral functioning of the various regions into which the planet is divided,” and that it “provides the context for ecological thinking.” The Great Work: Our Way to the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 86.
[65] The School of Living is a radically decentralist, back-to-the-land movement based on ideas developed by Borsodi and his associates in the 1920s and early 1930s. The first experimental community was begun in 1934, and various communities and educational centers have existed ever since as part of this important grassroots movement. According to Loomis, one of the founders, the School of Living advocates a “Green Revolution” (a term used since 1940) based on such principles as “family homesteads, organic agriculture” and “activities in small communities,” in addition to “freeing the land of price and speculation, cooperative credit, a stable exchange medium” and “replacing government with voluntary action.” Mildred J. Loomis, Alternative Americas (New York: Universe Books, 1982), 73.
[66] The significance of Goodman’s ideas for late twentieth-century ecological thought has not been adequately appreciated. One might think in this connection of his many decentralist social and political essays, which were widely influential in the 1960s, but the philosophical basis of his contribution is found above all in his relatively early work Gestalt Therapy (New York: Dell, 1951), which is one of the most sophisticated theoretical works in modern anarchist thought. One of the few commentators to grasp the importance of Goodman’s psychological writings and what we might call their ecological import is Taylor Stoehr. See the introduction to his Goodman collection NatureHeals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979), xix–xxiv. Bookchin published a series of articles between 1965 and 1970 that made an early and important contribution to the development of contemporary ecological social thought. The essays “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” and “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” presented a radically libertarian and communitarian interpretation of ecological thinking; “Towards a Liberatory Technology” argued for the need for the development of ecological technologies; and “The Forms of Freedom” was an outline of a submerged “history of freedom” that might help inspire an alternative to the mass society of commodity consumption. These essays and others were collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Palo Alto, Caliph.: Ramparts Press, 1971) and have had a significant influence on subsequent radical ecological thought.
[67] “L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même.” Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 1:1. It is instructive to compare Reclus’ more ecological and dialectical concept to Marx’s more environmentalist and residually dualistic conception of nature as “man’s inorganic body.” While the two thinkers were contemporaries (Reclus being only twelve years younger than Marx), Reclus was much more successful in transcending the spirit of the age by applying a dialectical analysis to the relationship between humanity and nature. For a discussion of Marx’s philosophy of nature and his failure to develop fully the dialectical view of nature that is in fact implicit in his own thought, see John P. Clark, “Marx’s Inorganic Body,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 243–58. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett criticize this interpretation of Marx in “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature,” Organization and Environment 13 (2000): 403–25. I revise my assessment of Marx and reply to Foster and Burkett in “Marx’s Natures: A Response to Foster and Burkett” Organization and Environment 14 (2001): 451–62.
[68] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 434.
[69] Reclus’ comprehensive, critically holistic perspective relates him to intellectual traditions beyond those that are emphasized in the present discussion. Joël Cornuault points out that Reclus’ encyclopedic approach places him in the broader humanistic tradition of scholarship that preceded the extreme scientific specialization we have known since his time. He also mentions as an antecedent the Renaissance humanism of Pico della Mirandola, a reference that is perhaps surprising, but not at all inappropriate, in view of Reclus’ often-eloquent affirmation of the beauty and goodness of humanity and nature. Cornuault also relates Reclus’ holistic dimension to certain scientific views that were developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including the idea of “terrestrial unity” of Vidal de la Bache and the “principle of connection” of Brunhes. See Joël Cornuault, “‘L’imagination écologique’ d’Elisée Reclus: notes sur un livre de John P. Clark,” Les cahiers Elisée Reclus 4 (1997): 2. It must always be kept in mind that the holistic dimension in Reclus has nothing to do with the positing of closed totalities, but rather concerns developing unity-in-diversity within open and relative wholes.
[70] Yves Lacoste, “Editorial,” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 4–5.
[71] Yves Lacoste, “Géographicité et géopolitique: Elisée Reclus” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 14. While Reclus never had the stature in the United States that he did in France, there has been a similar process of “forgetting” in mainstream American geography. For example, if one examines The Geographical Review from its beginning in 1916 to the present, one finds three references to Reclus in the 1920s, three in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, and then a long silence. A modest growth of interest in Reclus among American geographers during the 1970s also parallels the situation in France and is evidenced by articles dealing with his work in the radical geography journal Antipode, as well as by the publication of geographer Gary Dunbar’s biography Elisée Reclus: Historian of Nature (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).
[72] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 210.
[78] In Reclus’ time, just as today, some views overemphasized unity and the whole and others overemphasized diversity and individual phenomena. In the past century, the organicist tradition stemming from Hegel tended toward extreme holism and social authoritarianism, while the individualist tradition arising out of classical liberalism fostered social atomism and anomic individualism. An authentically dialectical position, which might be considered a form of radical left Hegelianism, avoids both of these dangers, and interprets the whole as a dynamic, self-transcending unity-in-diversity. This is the perspective of a truly dialectical social ecology.
[79] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 434.
[82] Ibid. Reclus’ holistic dimension may be compared to a similar strain in the thought of his friend and colleague Peter Kropotkin. The latter contends, for example, that geography should present a view of society and nature that will “combine in one vivid picture all separate elements of this knowledge” and “represent it as an harmonious whole, all parts of which are consequences of a few general principles and are held together by their mutual relations.” Antipode 10, no. 3–1 (1978): 11.
[83] Thérèse Dejongh, “The Brothers Reclus at the New University,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus:In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 237.
[84] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 262, 259.
[85] Edward Rothen, “Elisée Reclus’ Optimism,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, 145.
[89] This distinction was basic to Aristotle’s ethics, and was important both for Hegel and for Marx’s critique of Hegel on the issue of transformative praxis and the problematic of “the end of prehistory.” The terms appear frequently in the literature of political ecology, including, for example in the writings of James O’Connor and other contributors to Capitalism Nature Socialism, the most important English-language journal of political ecology. Bookchin has made the concepts more central to his thought; however, he presents no detailed theoretical discussion of the relationship between the two realms. In his essay “Thinking Ecologically,” he states that by “second nature” he means “humanity’s development of a uniquely human culture, a wide variety of institutionalized human communities, an effective human technics, a richly symbolic language, and a carefully managed source of nutriment.” See The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 162. He describes “first nature” as the larger natural world from which second nature is “derived” and states that “the real question ... is how second nature is derived from first nature” (163). He also posits a third natural realm, which he calls “free nature”; however, it is not an existent sphere but rather a possibility in a future ecological society that would constitute “a nature that could reach the level of conceptual thought” (182).
[95] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 435.
[96] One of the many similarities between the social geography of Reclus and that of Kropotkin lies in the strongly bioregional flavor of each. Myrna Breitbart points out that the latter “believed that it was necessary to reestablish a sense of community and love of place. Rootedness in a particular environment would foster greater human interaction and a more intimate relationship with one’s surroundings.” Myrna Breitbart, “Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Geographer,” in Geography, Ideology and Social Concern, ed. David Stoddart (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 140.
[98] See Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York and London: Hafner, 1949), chapters 14–17.
[99] Ellsworth Huntington argues that there is “a close adjustment between life and its inorganic environment” and that factors such as “soil, climate, relief,” and “position in respect to bodies of water” all “combine to form a harmonious whole” in affecting human society; The Human Habitat (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927), 16–17. It turns out that for Huntington this “harmonious whole” dictates racial hierarchy, since “racial differences” in areas such as “inherent mental capacity” are caused by the various natural factors, especially climate. See “Climate and the Evolution of Civilization,” in
The Evolution of the Earth and Its Inhabitants (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918), 148. Elsewhere he seeks to defend his racialist conclusions by arguing (or more accurately, speculating) that climate has had an enormous influence on inheritance through its effects on “migration, racial mixture, and natural selection,” and perhaps even “mutations.” See Civilization and Climate (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1915), 3.
[105] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 110.
[106] Thomas Berry, “The Viable Human,” in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 3rd ed., Michael Zimmerman et al., eds. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001), 178.
[107] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 110.
[108] Ibid. The issue of the central role of ecological crisis in societal decline and collapse is a crucial one in world history that has been generally neglected by historians until recently. For a general overview see Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World:The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
[110] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 526.
[111] Ibid. In his view, “when man forms some loftier ideal as regards his action on the earth, he always perfectly succeeds in improving its surface, although he allows the scenery to retain its natural beauty” (527).
[112] Elisée Reclus, “On Vegetarianism,” in this volume, 161.
[113] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 527.
[114] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 110.
[116] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne, 221.
[117] See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996). For an overview of Charbonneau’s work, see John P. Clark, “Bernard Charbonneau: Regionalism and the Politics of Experience,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 51 (2002): 41–48. For a very useful comparison of these two bioregional thinkers, see Daniel Cérézuelle, “Wendell Berry et Bernard Charbonneau, critiques de l’industrialization de l’agriculture,” in Encyclopédie de l’Agora, January 29, 2003, at agora.qc.ca.
[118] For example, George Sessions claims that social ecologists “have yet to demonstrate an appreciation of, and commitment to, the crucial ecological importance of wilderness and biodiversity protection.” See “Wilderness: Back to Basics,” interview by JoAnn McAllister, in The Trumpeter 11 (Spring 1994): 66. Yet a dialectical position that sees humanity as “the self-consciousness of the earth,” interprets history as the movement toward the realization of a “free nature,” and conceives of the earth in dialectical terms as a unity-in-diversity is uniquely capable of dealing theoretically with these important issues. Steve Chase has presented a very circumspect analysis of the neglect of wilderness issues by Bookchin and many other social ecologists, and of the need for attention to these issues from a social ecological perspective. See “Whither the Radical Ecology Movement?” in Defending the Earth: A Dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Steve Chase, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
[119] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 529.
[121] This raises an important issue not only for Reclus, but also for social ecology. While humanity can and ought to make a unique contribution to the emergence of greater freedom and creativity in nature, this contribution cannot presumably be limited a priori to the attainment of its own nondominating self-realization and to creative interaction with the natural milieu in a way that respects the integrity of nature. At this point in the history of the earth, one of the central ecological questions is the way in which human beings can reorganize society so that its impact on large areas of the earth can be reduced and finally minimized. A stronger conception of “nondomination” is needed: one that recognizes the need for the earth to have a sphere of ecological freedom and evolutionary creativity guided neither by human self-interest nor by human rationality.
[122] Elisée Reclus, “The Progress of Mankind” in Contemporary Review 70 (July–December 1896): 782.
[123] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 526.
[128] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne, 134.
[129] Julius Haast, Ferdinand von Hochstetter, and Oscar Peschel, Ausland (February 19, 1876), quoted in Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 519.
[132] A century later, there are still right-wing “cornucopian” pro-natalist ideologists, but reactionary thought has generally shifted to an anti-natalist, population-control position. For an extensive critique of Garrett Hardin, perhaps the most famous and influential exponent of such a perspective, see John P. Clark, “The Tragedy of Common Sense; Part One: The Power of Myth” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 21:3 (2010): 35–54; and “The Tragedy of Common Sense; Part Two: From Ideology to Historical Reality” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 21:4 (2010): 34–49.
[141] Ibid., 160. Reclus’ arguments constitute an eloquent defense of the humane treatment of animals, but they are far from conclusive as a proof of the moral necessity of unconditional vegetarianism. He presents an excellent case for the immorality of systems of food production that inflict continual suffering on animals and callously ignore the moral relevance of the attainment of goods by these beings and their selfrealization. His critique is therefore quite pertinent to much of today’s meat industry, with its factory farming and mechanized mass production. On the other hand, he does not demonstrate that no possible form of animal husbandry or hunting can be carried out in a humane manner. It is interesting that Reclus never subjects traditional hunting societies to the scathing criticism he directs toward the modern meat industry. Unfortunately, he fails to explore the possibility of morally relevant differences between the two systems.
[142] Letter to Richard Heath (no specific date, 1884) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 2:325.
[143] Elisée Reclus, “The Extended Family,” in this volume, 136–37.
[144] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (December. 8, 1903) in Correspondance (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1925), 3:267.
[145] Letter to an unknown recipient, ibid., 3:323.
[146] See Carol Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” in Women and Moral Theory, eds. Kay Kittay and Diana Meyers (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), 19–33. According to Gilligan, “all human relationships, public and private, can be characterized both in terms of equality and in terms of attachment, and ... both inequality and detachment constitute grounds for moral concern. Since everyone is vulnerable to both oppression and abandonment, two moral visions—one of justice and one of care—recur in human experience” (20). This important essay develops further the ethical implications of her groundbreaking work, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
[147] By comparison, utopian thinkers such as Blake, Fourier, and Morris sometimes appear much more an-archic, in the sense of being capable of questioning every arche—every “unquestionable” principle and every “historically necessary” form of domination.
[148] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 218.
[149] Elisée Reclus, Evolution and Revolution (London: W. Reeves, n.d.), 16. This brief pamphlet has been reprinted numerous times in many languages over the past century, and translations of it have unfortunately been the main source of knowledge of Reclus’ political ideas for non-Francophone readers. While its old-fashioned rhetorical qualities perhaps once made it compelling, it lacks serious social analysis and conveys little of Reclus’ enduring significance.
[150] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 216.
[151] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 440.
[153] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 5:302. This statement and some of those cited previously are reminiscent of Marx’s view that “where Nature is too lavish, she ‘keeps him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.’ She does not impose upon him any necessity to develop himself.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:513.
[155] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 188.
[156] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 216.
[157] Elisée Reclus, “The Progress of Mankind,” in The Contemporary Review 70 (July–Dec. 1896): 766. There are still enthusiastic admirers of the Aeta culture. For example, in 1998 the organization fPcN (friends of Peoples close to Nature) produced the short film Save the Savages, which it describes as “a story about the last free Savages in the Philippines.” The film extols the virtues of the Aeta’s traditional cooperative way of life and depicts its near destruction by logging and mining activities.
[158] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 214.
[175] There are striking convergences on certain points between Reclus’ thought and Buddhism in particular. For example, in his History of a Brook, he states in terms reminiscent of the Buddhist teaching of anatta that “much like a flowing river, we change at every moment; our life renews itself from minute to minute, and if we believe that we remain the same, this is nothing more than an illusion of the mind.” Histoire d’un Ruisseau (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 204. The parallel with Heraclitus, the founder of Western dialectic, is also evident.
[176] Letter to Paul Gsell, also published in La Revue (December 1, 1905), in Correspondance, 3:324. Reclus also at times recognizes that such an outlook is not what is popularly meant by the term “religion.” See his letter to an unknown recipient (undated), ibid., 3:322–23.
[177] Letter to M. Roth (no specific date, 1904), ibid., 3:286.
[185] Ibid. Reclus’ concept can be compared in some ways with the early Marx’s idea of labor as the conscious self-creative activity of humanity and the expression of its “species-being.”
[188] Indeed, an authentic holism, which must be a dialectical holism, is always a holism/ anti-holism. Developing phenomena always have both a holistic and an anti-holistic moment. Radically dialectical social theory in particular stresses the fact that in a dialectical development there is always a supplement, a remainder, a surplus, that which cannot be reduced to an element of any supposed “synthesis.”
[192] Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 3. While Ritter’s introduction of this concept is very helpful, he unfortunately makes no reference to Reclus and other relevant figures but concentrates almost exclusively on the thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. In fact, several of these thinkers had a very limited conception of the meaning of “communal individuality,” and none of them contributed as much to developing such an idea as did Reclus.
[193] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 435.
[194] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 225.
[197] Elisée Reclus, The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe, trans. B.B. Woodward (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871), 567.
[203] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94), 19:iv.
[204] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:384–85.
[205] Elisée Reclus, “Nouvelle proposition pour la suppression de l’ère chrétienne,” in Quelques écrits (Paris and Brussels: Pensée et Action, 1956), 31.
[206] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 221.
[210] Yves Lacoste, review of Espace et pouvoir, by Paul Claval, and Pour une géographie du pouvoir, by Claude Raffestin, in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 157.
[211] H. Roorda van Eysinga, “Avant tout anarchiste,” in Hem Day, Elisée Reclus (1830–1905): Savant et Anarchiste (Paris and Brussels: Cahiers Pensée et Action, 1956),, quoted in Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom: The Odyssey of Elisée Reclus (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1988), 20. It is quite appropriate that after Reclus’ death his friend Jules Verne used Reclus as the model for an anarchist hero in one of his novels, Les naufragés du “Jonathan” (The Survivors of the Jonathan). Peter Costello, in his biography Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), notes that the hero is “a philosophical anarchist and atheist called the Kaw-Djer, the Benefactor, by the natives,” who after a shipwreck becomes the leader of the remote Hoste Island off the coast of South America and “finds himself having to organize a society, which he detests doing” (210). After solving numerous problems, he finally gives up power “and sets off to the even more remote island of Cape Horn, to live on the lighthouse which he has built there, to prevent further wrecks” (ibid.). Costello remarks that the character of the Benefactor seems to be based on Reclus, who had indeed tried to bring utopian anarchism to South America. Interestingly, between Hoste Island and Cape Horn Island lies L’Hermite Island, which, according to Costello, is named after an “anarchist explorer.” Should this implausible story be true, the name of explorer in question would apparently mean “hermit” (l’ermite in French) and would be curiously reminiscent of an anarchist explorer whose name means “recluse.”
[212] Paul Reclus, “Biographie d’Elisée Reclus,” in Les Frères Elie et Elisée Reclus (Paris: Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964), 51.
[216] See John P. Clark, “What Is Anarchism?” in The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and Power (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1984), 117–40.
[217] Letter to M. Felix, professor at the New University of Brussels (February 1896) in Correspondance (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1925), 3:194.
[219] The concept of “ordered anarchy” later became well known for its use in connection with various African stateless societies. See, for example, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, “The Nuer of the Southern Sudan,” in African Political Systems, ed. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 296.
[220] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist,” Contemporary Review 45 (January–June 1884): 628. Although this phrase is often attributed to Marx, the formulation goes far back in the history of communitarian thought and was popularized by the so-called utopian socialists, especially Saint-Simon and his followers. It becomes very important for the communist anarchists, for whom an immediate movement toward distribution according to need is a central point of contention with both Marxists and “collectivist” anarchists. Reclus’ own ethical communism was almost instinctual, going back to early religious influences that later conditioned his political and philosophical outlook. He expresses this outlook well in one of his letters: “Having received everything from others, I want to give everything back to them.” Letter to an unknown recipient (undated) in Correspondance (Paris: Schleicher Frères, 1911), 3:323.
[231] Reclus’ shortcomings in this area are typical of revolutionaries of his era, and especially of those anarchists who looked to an uprising of workers and peasants as the source of coming social transformation. Bakunin is a much more extreme case of this uncritical approach, which had disastrous effects on the historical anarchist movement. See John P. Clark, “The Noble Lies of Power: Bakunin and the Critique of Ideology,” in
Rights, Justice, and Community, ed. Creighton Peden and John K. Roth (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 25–34, for an analysis of this strain in Bakunin’s thought. I conclude there that his “unrealistic faith in revolutionary vanguards led him to overestimate the ‘instinctual’ revolutionary potential of the masses in the most extreme, and often dangerous manner. While there are many examples of his exaggerated hopes for various national groups, classes, and social strata, perhaps the most striking is his idealization of the bandits. His claims for the revolutionary role of brigands is based on no analysis of their actual place in society. The question of the nature of their consciousness, values, and character structures is ignored, as is the problem of how they might adapt to a cooperative order” (32–33).
[232] Letter to Richard Heath (February 18, 1883) in Correspondance, 2:279.
[233] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (April 1, 1889), ibid., 2:447.
[234] Letter to Richard Heath (June 2, 1903), ibid., 3:258.
[235] Letter to Lilly Zibelin-Wilmerding (June 7, 1892), ibid., 3:118.
[237] Letter to editors of Semper Avanti, an Italian journal (June 28, 1892), ibid., 3:120–21.
[238] A more critical anarchist view would see the anarchist terrorists as the early vanguard of the society of the spectacle who helped found a tradition of “Left Spectacularism.” They were impatient with the slow evolutionary work of social and natural regeneration, which, as Reclus pointed out, is the necessary precondition for any later qualitative revolutionary change of a liberatory nature. Instead, they adopted the tactic of the dramatic gesture, which was to catalyze in some magical way vast processes of social transformation. Left Spectacularism, though only rarely taking on a terroristic form, became the bane of the New Left of the 1960s.
[239] From a letter (August 1889) found in the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris, quoted in Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 151.
[240] Letter to Richard Heath (no date) in Correspondance, 2:414–15. I am reminded of a contrasting anarchist view expressed by the libertarian writer and activist Karl Hess. In a conversation in the early 1970s, he described discussions of the problem of theft in the poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where he lived at the time. Some, he said, defended theft on the part of community members (even from the community’s cooperative store) on the grounds that “stealing is the privilege of the poor.” He argued against this view on the grounds that the consequences of theft are destructive for the community and that in reality “stealing is the privilege of the rich.”
[242] Letter to Jean Grave (Nov. 29, 1891), ibid., 3:97.
[243] Text attached to letter to Jean Grave, ibid.
[244] In one of his letters, Reclus touches on this problem in relation to individual acts of propaganda of the deed. However, he does not attempt there to offer a solution. See letter to Semper Avanti (June 28, 1892), ibid., 3:121.
[245] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: Extracts from a lecture delivered at South Place Institute, London on Monday, July 29th, 1895,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 350.
[246] On this subject, he agrees with Kropotkin, who saw the two greatest periods of advancement in human history to be those of the Greek polis and the medieval free cities. See Peter Kropotkin, “The State: Its Historic Role,” in Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. Martin A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 233. It should be observed that Reclus was in some ways inadequately critical in his assessment of the polis. Although the existence of such institutions as slavery and patriarchy do not negate the achievements of Greek democracy, it would be naïve to idealize that system and to neglect the ways in which the political realm was dialectically shaped by its interaction with other elements of the social whole. In a social system founded on hierarchy, domination, and exploitation, all institutions reflect the fundamental distribution of power, however mystified the effects of that power may be. After almost a century much the same uncritical approach to the polis appears in Bookchin’s assessment of Greek democracy. For an analysis of this problem, see John P. Clark, “Beyond the limits of the city: A communitarian anarchist critique of libertarian municipalism,” in The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), especially “The Social and the Political,” 261–64.
[247] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 2:321.
[249] Ibid., 3:519. Reclus also praises the Icelanders for maintaining “the principle of land to the peasants” in a rather equitable manner over a period of many centuries (515).
[250] Ibid., 3:519. In referring to “all the inhabitants,” Reclus conspicuously fails to mention the exclusion of women from these processes.
[252] Peter Kropotkin makes similar points but presents a much more detailed discussion in Mutual Aid, in which he devotes two chapters to the medieval communes, cities, and guilds. See chapters 5 and 6, “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City,” in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Porter Sargent, n.d.), 153–222.
[262] In view of his interest in municipal institutions, it is surprising that Reclus did not place more emphasis on the importance of the emergence of direct democracy in the Parisian sections during the Revolution. The classic anarchist interpretation of this chapter in the history of radical democracy appears in Kropotkin’s history of the Revolution. See chapter 24, “The ‘Districts’ and the ‘Sections’ of Paris,” and chapter 25, “The Sections of Paris under the New Municipal Law,” in The Great French Revolution (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 180–94.
[264] Ibid., 5:248. From this passage and other discussions it is clear that Reclus’ municipalist ideas differ considerably from Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” and proposals of some other social ecologists that anarchists seek offices in existing municipalities. He would find the idea of anarchists exercising political power within municipalities that are organized undemocratically and that are part of centralized nation-states to be contrary to his revolutionary position regarding social change. He would apply his criticisms of cooperatives and intentional communities to such reformist efforts (perhaps in even stronger terms), and would not be sympathetic to the argument that such electoral activity could help create a revolutionary situation in the future.
[272] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 148–49.
[273] Elisée Reclus, “Preface” to La civilization et les grands fleuves historiques, by Léon Metchnikoff (Paris: Hachette, 1889), quoted in Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way toSocialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 150.
[274] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist,” 637.
[275] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 154.
[282] Letter to Reclus’ sister Louise (no specific date, 1859), ibid., 1:206.
[283] Letter to Clara Koettlitz (April 12, 1895), ibid., 3:182.
[284] Reclus and Kropotkin are similar in using communitarian and organicist terminology extensively in describing social phenomena. However, Kropotkin’s depiction of the future society is sometimes more strongly organicist. For example, he states that “a new form of society is germinating” and that this society “will not be crystallized into certain unchangeable forms, but will continually modify its aspect, because it will be a living, evolving organism.” See Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Dover, 1971), 398–99. Furthermore, although both thinkers saw the need for the organic growth of a new society in free and loving personal relationships, Kropotkin was more optimistic than was Reclus about the organic development of cooperative institutions alongside the dominant authoritarian ones. See his two chapters on “Mutual Aid Among Ourselves,” in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 223–92. In Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Kropotkin criticizes socialist papers that “often have the tendency to become mere annals of complaints about existing conditions,” while what is needed is “a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions” (418). He concludes, in a statement that might well be pondered by advocates of social change in our own day, that “it is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions” (ibid.).
[285] Reclus is not mentioned, for example, in Joel Spring’s A Primer of Libertarian Education (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975). In fact, one can review much of the extensive literature on libertarian, progressive, “open,” and “free” education without finding any reference to his ideas.
[291] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), 255. Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 223.
[321] Béatrice Giblin, “Elisée Reclus et les colonizations,” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 57. Reclus does not seem to consider the possibility that under certain conditions the multiplication and growth of “colonies of population” might eventually amount to imperialism and even cultural genocide.
[326] The point, of course, is that Reclus anticipated Wittfogel’s famous application of the concept of Oriental Despotism to the Soviet State. See Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964).
[327] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 199.
[328] Ibid. Reclus does not use the terms, but he would certainly see such dangers in reformist calls for “social democracy” or “social welfare” policies.
[354] Elisée Reclus, To My Brother the Peasant, in this volume, 118.
[355]Michel Bakunin et les Conflits dans l’Internationale 1872, Bakunin: Oeuvres Complète, ed. Arthur Lehning (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1975), 3:204.
[375] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:254. This theme has now become commonplace in social ecological thought. Bookchin discusses it in general terms, following Mumford, who analyzed it at much greater length and with considerably more richness of detail in his account of domestication. See Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, Caliph.: Cheshire Books, 1982), 52–54 and 57–61, and Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), esp. chapter 7, “Garden, Home, and Mother,” 142–62.
[391] In a letter of 1897, he comments that “I have often spent the night in the woods or on beaches; often I have been satisfied with bread and water, and if official morality had not threatened me with imprisonment, I would not have been afraid to live in complete nudity.” Letter to the editor of La Vie Naturelle (February 6, 1897) in Correspondance, 3:197.
[395] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:486–87.
[396] Letter to Henri Roorda van Eysinga (March 16, 1891) in Correspondance, 3:90.
[397] See Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2001); and Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
[403] Is it coincidental that the area of the land mass closest to the center of the image is east-central Africa? This was, of course, the place of origin of the human race.
[404] Some of the most incisive analysis along these lines has been done by Joel Kovel. For his account of how racism is related to certain transhistorical aspects of human nature and to other historically situated social institutions, see White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). A brilliant analysis of the interaction between capitalism, the state, and patriarchy in the formation of subjectivity in a society of domination is found in The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). He presents an analysis of the quest to transcend egoic selfhood and its relation to politics in History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), and finally, in The Enemy of Nature (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007) he demonstrates how the global capitalist system constitutes the ultimate obstacle to the flourishing of humanity and nature.
[405] Jules Marcou (1824–98) was a French geologist who did extensive study of the Jura Mountains and North America. He produced geological maps of the United States, the British provinces of North America, and the world, and cofounded the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
[406] Characters in The Leatherstocking Tales, a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper.
[407] The alcabala was a general sales tax established in Spain in the Middle Ages. Over the centuries, it increased from 5 percent to as much as 20 percent. It was at times perhaps the largest single source of revenue for the crown but was notoriously unpopular and is thought to have had a detrimental effect on industry and trade.
[408] Count Rumford (1753–1814), born Benjamin Thompson in Massachusetts, was a scientist, inventor, nutritionist, and social reformer who, because of British sympathies, left for Great Britain in 1776. Rumford is primarily known for his work on the nature of heat, for his improvements to fireplaces, and for playing a large role in founding the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1800.
[409] The anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) is usually credited with popularizing the term and first associating it with a large-scale social movement.
[410] In Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book 1, Chapter 57), Rabelais says of the inhabitants of the Abbey of Thélème that “their lives were governed not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own volition and free will [vouloir et franc arbitre].” François Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel (Paris: G. Jeune, 1957), 1:142.
[411] One of the best known of these philosophical and literary utopias is La Citta del Sole:Dialogo Poetico / The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639).
[412] In July of 1830, Lafayette, recently named commandant of the National Guard, greeted the Duke of Orléans, the new king, with the words, “Here is the best of republics!” Despite these rousing words, Lafayette soon became disillusioned with the new regime and resigned his post.
[413] The French working class fought for the Republic in the revolution of 1848, only to have its interests ignored by the new bourgeois regime, which nevertheless thanked the workers for their three months of misery on its behalf. The regime crushed a workers’ rebellion in June of that year.
[414] Hugo’s words are from “A Juvénal” in Les Châtiments, Œuvres Complètes de Victor Hugo, vol. 4 (Paris: Hetzel-Quantin, 1882), 4:344.
[415] The term “hierarchy” derives specifically from the Greek hieratikos, or “rule of the high priest,” and ultimately from hier, “sacred,” and archia, rule.
[416] Timur Lenk, Tartar conqueror of southern and western Asia, who ruled Samarkand from 1369 to 1405.
[417] Reclus refers to Descartes’ strategy of methodological skepticism in which one begins by doubting everything, after which knowledge can be reconstituted “scientifically” and with certitude, founded on “clear and distinct” ideas.
[418] Reclus says, “le peuple choisi des Musantes.”
[419] John Huss (1369?–1415) was a Bohemian religious reformer and martyr.
[420] Giuseppe Ferrari (1812–76) was an Italian philosopher, historian, and political activist. He wrote The Philosophy of Revolution (1851) and The History of Revolution (1858).
[421] The Icarians were followers of the French utopian socialist Etienne Cabet (1788–1856), who was influenced by the British utopian Robert Owen. Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840) inspired a large movement to create Icarian communities. A disastrous attempt was made to create a vast colony on the Red River in Texas in 1848. Later communities were established in Nauvoo, Illinois, and Corning, Iowa, with remnants surviving until 1898.
[422] Local name for several birds of the family Cracidae, found in Guiana. They are also called curassows.
[423] The Agami Heron, Agamia agami, is sometimes considered the most beautiful of all New World herons. Its range is in tropical lowlands from southeast Mexico south on the Pacific slope to Ecuador and on the Atlantic slope to northern Bolivia and Amazonian Brazil. It is noted for its reclusive nature and relatively inaccessible habitat. See Emmet Reid Blake, Manual of Neotropical Birds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
[424] Member of an Amerindian group of Quechua speakers, primarily in the Andean region of South America.
[425] The Fazokl or Fazogli is a region in the eastern Sudan, near the border with Ethiopia. It is located in the foothills of the Abyssinian plateau and is crossed by the Blue Nile. The region was inhabited primarily by the Shangalla tribes, with later Funj and Arab immigration.
[426] Reclus cites “Letters from Egypt.” He is referring to Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Peninsula of Sinai, trans. Lenora and Joanna B. Horner (London, 1853) by Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–84), a German philologist and Egyptologist.
[427] Any of several jumping rodents of the family Dipodidae, with long hind legs and a large tail.
[428] Tribal people of the Tupian family of Central South America, including Brazilian Amazonia.
[431] The Sindh is a region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. It is now one of the four provinces of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
[433] A wild sheep of the mountainous regions of Corsica and Sardinia.
[434] Reclus says “other cetaceans”; however, the walrus is a pinnaped, not a cetacean.
[435] Extinct large, long-horned wild oxen of the German forests.
[436] Paul Pellisson-Fontanier (1624–93) was a French attorney and writer who was imprisoned in the Bastille.
[437] Reclus says “l’homme policé.” The French thus has a connotation of being “policed” or supervised.
[438] Reclus’ meaning here is not entirely clear. At the time he was writing, Poland no longer existed as a sovereign state, having been partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The largest segment, of which Warsaw was the metropolis, consisted of the “Kingdom of Poland,” which suffered under Russian domination. Presumably, “the order of Warsaw” means the autocratic imposition of order, as that through which the czarist regime suppressed seething nationalism, revolutionary movements, and student unrest in Poland.
[439] Reclus is apparently referring to the illusory quality of freedom of speech and contract in a situation of vastly unequal power. In his time, the workers’ alleged “free and voluntary agreement” to the conditions of labor when they accepted employment was used as a justification for strikebreaking and the destruction of labor organizations. Their “freedom” thus becomes a precondition for their misery and oppression.
[440] Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) was a German socialist leader. He is noted for his reformist views, particularly the idea that the working class could gain control of the state by means of universal suffrage and then transform the economy into a system of workers’ cooperatives. He was a major opponent of Marx in the socialist movement and was the object of extensive criticism in Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”
[441] François Guizot (1787–1874) was a French statesman and historian.
[442] Reclus was referring to a notorious event that had recently occurred in Paris. “On May 4, 1897, during peak shopping hours, a fire spread with astounding rapidity through the Bazar de la Charité, turning it into a huge inferno in which 117 people perished. In the midst of the panic that broke out at the beginning of the disaster, a number of lives were saved through acts of bravery. On the other hand, several people from high society who were there presented a sad spectacle.” Roger Gonot, Elisée Reclus: Prophète de l’Idéal Anarchique (Pau, France: Editions Covedi, 1996), 73.
[443] Juan Sebastian del Cano, the first circumnavigator of the earth. He sailed with Magellan, and after the latter’s death, navigated the Victoria back to Spain, completing the circumnavigation in 1522.
[444] The Vendôme Column was constructed to honor Napoléon I and his imperial army. The statue of the emperor atop the Column was removed during the Restoration but replaced by Louis-Philippe. Napoléon III later replaced this statue with a more imperial depiction of the emperor in a toga, which outraged republicans and radicals. After the Paris Commune was declared, it was decided to destroy the column. On April 12, 1871, Félix Pyat proposed demolition, stating that the column “was a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a prominent insult to the conquered by their conquerors, a perpetual insult to one of the three great principles of the French Republic, fraternity.” The column was destroyed on April 16. See Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 300–303.
[445] Reclus refers to “les conventions scélérates,” by which he means les lois scélérates, which consisted of repressive “emergency regulations” passed in 1894 and 1895 against the anarchists.
[446] Term used to refer to large meatpacking centers of the United States. It was first widely used to refer to Cincinnati and later to Chicago.
[447] The La Plata Basin was a center of the saladero industry. Saladeros were slaughterhouses that bought cattle to produce jerked beef that was salted and dried in the sun.
[449] Reclus refers to the retaliation by European forces against the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising against European imperialism in China in 1900. In June of that year, the conflict led to the killing of scores of Europeans in Beijing, including the German ambassador. In response, European troops went on a rampage, looting the city, slaughtering suspected Boxers and beheading prisoners in public.
[450] Reclus says “le lapin de garenne et le lapin de gouttière,” literally, “the wild rabbit and the gutter rabbit.” The latter refers ironically to the alley cat, “le chat de gouttière,” which was used for food by the poor.
[451] Reclus’ argument seems a bit confused here because he does not make it clear that he is describing processes at the phylogenetic rather than the ontogenetic level. It is certainly not always the case that the egg, fruit, or seed are produced when the organism that produces them no longer exits; however, on the level of the life of the species they represent biologically the fulfillment of the organism’s reproductive role (though this generalization still ignores the function of care that is sometimes required in the case of the egg).
[453] John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.), 28–29.
[454] Auguste Barbier (1805–82) was a satirical poet and writer, and a member of the French Academy. His poem “La cuve” is a rant against the evils and horrors of urban life. See Auguste Barbier, “La cuve,” in Iambes et poèmes (Paris: P. Mascagna, 1840), 91–92.
[455] See Victor Hugo, “A l’Arc de Triomphe” (Les voix intérieures), Œuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), 1:936–48.
[456] A term applied to immigrants from northern France who settled in the Dropt Valley and around Monségur after the Hundred Years’ War. During the nineteenth century many gavaches came down from the mountains to work as “estivandiers,” or seasonal workers, in wheat-producing areas.
[457] Labonne, Annuaire du Club alpin, 1886. [Reclus’ note]
[458] Ingolfur Arnarsson was the first settler of Iceland. After being banished from Norway he set sail for Iceland. He brought along the posts from the high seat, or throne, of his home in Norway. On sighting land, he threw the pillars into the sea and asked the gods to wash them ashore at the appropriate spot for a settlement. He lost sight of the pillars and built a farm on the southeast coast. The posts were finally located along the coast to the west, and the settlement was moved to a spot that was given the Norse name “Reykjavik,” or “Bay of Smoke,” after the geothermal steam that rose there.
[459] China was traditionally called “the Middle Kingdom” or “the Middle Flower” because of its supposed location at the center of the earth’s surface.
[461] Later Stalingrad (1925–61), and now Volgograd.
[462] J. G. Kohl, Die geographische Lage der Hauptstädte Europas. [Reclus’ note]
[463] Gomme, Village Communities, 48, 51; Green, The Making of England, 118. [Reclus’ note]
[464] This ancient city, now called Tell el-Farama, was one of Egypt’s most important ports.
[465] Cartagena de Indias is a seaport on the northern coast of Colombia. Portobello, a minor port on the eastern coast of Panama, was once a major center of the Spanish colonial empire. Reclus correctly notes that Portobello declined relative to Cartagena, but it was not because the former was directly displaced by the latter. It declined primarily because the Spanish treasure fleet system, which made it a center of exchange of silver from Peru and goods from Europe, had become obsolete by the eighteenth century. Cartagena’s fortunes were affected to a much smaller degree.
[467] Reclus overstates his point by using these particular examples. Cheyenne became a boomtown after the Union Pacific Railroad moved into Wyoming but experienced a severe decline when rail service was extended to Colorado, and Denver in particular. Carson City also experienced a boom when the Comstock Lode silver deposits were discovered but lapsed into two decades of depression when the mines were exhausted. This was followed, however, by a new period of boom with the discovery of additional gold, silver, and copper deposits in the area. Much of the history of Western boom towns is outlined in Duane A. Smith’s Rocky Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, 1859–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992). See also Russell R. Elliot’s History of Nevada (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973).
[468] V-shaped works, usually projecting from a fortified line.
[469] Mile End Road and Whitechapel are in London’s East End, noted in the nineteenth century for its poverty, crime, and industrial blight, in addition to its vibrant ethnic neighborhoods and radical politics.
[470] Ch. Dufour, Bulletin de la Soc. Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, juin–sept. 1895, 145. [Reclus’ note]
[472] The Garden City was an idea popularized by the town planner Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) and applied in several communities in England. The Garden City was designed to express such values as human scale, efficiency, beauty, and social cooperation. With a park and public buildings at the center, a green belt at the circumference, and extensive public space, the community was to combine the best features of urban and rural life. Howard’s ideas are best known from his book Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F.J. Osborn (London: Faber and Faber, 1946). This work was first published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.
[473] The name given to certain East Slavic tribes who settled in northeastern Germany during the late first millennium C.e. The name comes from the Old Slavic po, meaning “on the banks of” and “Laba,” the Slavic name for the Elba.
[474] Dr. Tetzner, Globus, April 7, 1900. [Reclus’ note]
[475] Lawrence Corthell, Revue Scientifique, June 27, 1896, 815. [Reclus’ note]
[476] Chr. Sandler, Volks-Karten, 1. [Reclus’ note]
[477] Edmond Demolins, Les Français d’aujourd’hui, 106, 107. [Reclus’ note]
[478] J. Denain-Darrays, Questions diplomatiques et coloniales, Feb. 1, 1903. [Reclus’ note]
[479] Reclus refers to Crete’s civil war of 1897 between the Greeks and Muslims. Six major European powers (Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia), in addition to Greece and Turkey, became involved in the conflict and ultimately imposed a peace agreement in conformity with their will.
[480] Saint-Yves d’Alvaydra, La mission des Juifs, 41. [Reclus’ note]
[481] Reclus is punning on taillable, which refers both to taxing and to cutting.
[483] Reclus cites “Herbert Spencer, Introduction to Social Science, ch. V, 87.” There is, however, no such title. He is apparently referring to chapter 5 of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961; reprint of the 1880 edition). There, Spencer comments that “agencies established to get remedies for crying evils, are liable to become agencies maintained and worked in a considerable degree, and sometimes chiefly, for the benefit of those who reap income from them” (75).
[484] Louis Vignon, La France en Algérie. [Reclus’ note]
[485] Paul Gille, Société nouvelle, March 1988. [Reclus’ note]
[486] Briot, Etudes sur l’économie alpestre. [Reclus’ note]
[487] Hiram was king of Tire and a contemporary of David and Solomon. According to tradition, Hiram was “Grand Master of all Masons,” and participated in the construction of Solomon’s Temple. For this reason, he has been an important figure in the legendary history of Freemasonry.
[489] Arthur Young, an English agronomist, traveled through France on the eve of the French Revolution.
[490] Gibbon, in the original, states: “We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue of the human race.” Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London and New York: Everyman’s Library, 1910), 3:519.
[491] Havelock Ellis, The Nineteenth Century. [Reclus’ note]
[492] “Die Historie bekommt einen eigenthümlichen Reiz,” Weltgeschichte, Neunter Theil, II, 4, 5, 6, etc. [Reclus’ note]
[493] Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), perhaps the most famous German historian, is known as a founder of the modern objective school of historical study, which focused on the rigorous examination of primary sources. His social views were conservative and nationalistic.
[494] M. Guyau, Morale d’Epicure, 153 et seq. [Reclus’ note] Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–88) was French philosopher, poet, translator, and educator, known for his writings on ethics, esthetics, religion, and various philosophical topics. He gained many admirers, including Nietzsche, before his early death.
[497] Elie Metchnikoff. Etudes sur la nature humaine. [Reclus’ note]
[498] Semper, Die Philippinen und ihre Bewohner; F. Blumentritt, Versuch einer Ethnographie derPhilippinen; Ergänzungsheft zu den Pet. Mit., No. 67. [Reclus’ note]
[499] Reclus refers to the Philippine war for independence from the United States. The revolt began in February 1899 and lasted for almost three years. During the war, large segments of the population were slaughtered in some provinces, and entire populations of some towns were wiped out by battle and disease. This war has been systematically ignored by mainstream historians. See Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 305–15.
[500] Alphonse Pinard, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, Dec. 1873. [Reclus’ note]
[502] Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orangutan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature (New York: Harper and Brother, 1885), 598.
[503] Islands of Asia west of New Guinea, north of Australia, south of the South China Sea; these include Indonesia, Melanesia, and often the Philippines.
[504]Unter den Kannibalen auf Borneo. [Reclus’ note]
[508] A former kingdom including Naples (with lower Italy) and Sicily; it united with the kingdom of Italy in 1861.
[509] Reclus refers to several figures of his time who were associated with revolution. The first is the well-known English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). In 1823, Byron sailed to Greece to devote his energies and resources to the cause of Greek independence from Turkey. Lajos Kossuth (1802–94) was the leader of the Hungarian movement for independence from Austria and the end of serfdom. He was president of the short-lived Hungarian Republic in 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) was an Italian revolutionary and nationalist leader. He was major figure in Italian unification and a popular hero. Alexander Herzen (1812–70) was a Russian revolutionary, journalist, and writer. He saw the Russian peasant communes as the precursor of future socialism.
[510] The “Hundred Doors” refers to the “doors” of the numerous tombs in the Theban Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
[511] See Chapter VI, Book 1. [Reclus’ note] Reclus refers to L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 1:321–54.
[512] Reclus has in mind the United States and its famous doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” According to this theory, the American state was preordained by God and history to extend its dominion westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
[513] Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 1:189.
[1] Perhaps by chance, Nature’s gaze seems to be focused in the direction of New Orleans, the location at which the translation and the commentary for this work happened to have taken place.
[2] Quoted in Ariel Salleh, ed. Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 302.
[3] Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity” in Ecology and Society 14, no. 2, at www.ecologyandsociety.org . For a more concise statement of the findings of the Stockholm Resilience Center, see Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity” in Nature 461 (September 2009): 472–75.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Joël Cornuault, Elisée Reclus et les Fleurs Sauvages (Bergerac: Librairie La Brèche, 2005); Crestian Lamaison, Elisée Reclus, l’Orthésien qui écrivait la Terre (Orthez: Cité du Livre, 2005); Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg, ed., Elisée Reclus. Natura e educazione (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007); and Ronald Creagh et al., eds., Elisée Reclus, Paul Vidal de la Blache, la géographie, la cité et le monde, hier et aujourd’hui, autour de 1905 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009).
[6] Jean-Didier Vincent, Elisée Reclus. Géographe, anarchiste, écologiste (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2010); Florence Deprest, Elisée Reclus et l’Algérie colonisée (Paris: Belin, 2012); Ronald Creagh, Elisée Reclus et les États-Unis (Paris: Editions Noir et Rouge, 2013); and Didier Jung, Elisée Reclus (Paris: Pardès, 2013).
[7] Philippe Pelletier, Géographie & anarchie. Reclus. Kropotkin. Metchnikoff. (Paris: Editions du Monde libertaire, 2013) and Elisée Reclus, géographie et anarchie (Paris: Editions du Monde libertaire, 2009).
[8] Federico Ferretti, Il mondo senza la mappa: Elisée Reclus e i Geografi Anarchici (Milan: Zero in Condotta, 2007), and Anarchici ed editori. Reti scientifiche, editoria e lotte culturali attorno alla Nuova Geografia Universale di Elisée Reclus (1876–1894) (Milan: Zero in Condotta, 2011).
[9] Elisée Reclus, Un nom confisqué: Elisée Reclus et sa vision des Amériques, ed. by Ernesto Machler-Tobar (Paris: Editions INDIGO et Coté femmes, 2007); Elisée Reclus, Projet de Globe au 100.000e, ed. by Nikola Jankovic (Paris: Editions B2, 2011); Elisée Reclus, Lettres de prison et d’exil, ed. by Federico Ferretti (Lardy: A la Frontière, 2012); Elisée Reclus, Ecrits sociaux, ed. by Alexandre Chollier and Federico Ferretti (Geneva: Editions Héros-limite, 2012); Elisée and Elie Reclus, L’homme des bois, études sur les populations indiennes d’Amérique du Nord, ed. by Alexandre Chollier and Federico Ferretti (Geneva: Editions Héros-limite, 2012).
[10] For information on the Portuguese volumes and other publications, see Federico Ferretti’s useful survey of recent works in “La redécouverte d’Elisée Reclus: à propos d’ouvrages récents” in Echogéo 21 (2012), at echogeo.revues.org.
[11] Elisée Reclus. La passion du monde, directed by Nicolas Eprendre and produced by Antoine Martin (Rouen, 2012).
[12] See Elisée Reclus, A Voyage to New Orleans: Anarchist Impressions of the Old South, ed. and trans. John P. Clark and Camille Martin; revised and expanded edition (Enfield, N.H.: Glad Day Books, 2004).
[13] Paul Reclus, “A Few Recollections on the Brothers Elie and Elisée Reclus,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 5.
[14] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 1:i.
[15] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94), 1:3.
[16] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:114–15.
[17] Ibid., 1:iv.
[18] Reclus’ concept of dynamic equilibrium is closer to the model of nature as a “discordant harmony” than to the simplistic idea of a “balance of nature.”
[19] Ibid., 1:iii–iv.
[20] In this he prefigures contemporary efforts, such as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry’s account of the “Earth Story” within the larger “Universe Story.” See The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992).
[21] Reclus thus contributes to the overcoming of tendencies in Western social thought toward, on the one hand, an abstract universalism that dissolves particularity and singularity, and, on the other, a reactive and exaggerated anti-universalism that denies universality and even particularity in its cult of singularity. For an extended defense of the universal particular, see John P. Clark, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[22] Letter to M. Roth (no specific date, 1904) in Correspondance, 3:285–86. Reclus paraphrases 1 John 4:20, “For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”
[23] Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus (Paris: Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964), 17. It should be obvious that by “communism” Paul Reclus does not mean anything related to state socialism but rather a system in which the good of the community is placed above individual self-interest and obedience to conscience and principle is placed above conformity to abstract laws and regulations.
[24] Ibid., 159.
[25] Ibid., 162.
[26] Ibid., 17.
[27] Ibid., 167.
[28] Ibid., 170. While the conservatism of this environment should be noted, one should not forget the strong tendency toward radicalism that was inherent in this milieu. For example, it is significant that the great libertarian theorist of the sixteenth century, Etienne de la Boétie, came out of the same Huguenot culture of southwestern France. De la Boétie, the author of the enduring anti-authoritarian classic The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, was born in Sarlat in the Dordogne, the same region as Reclus. See Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975).
[29] “Développement de la liberté dans le monde,” 1851 manuscript first published in Le libertaire (1925), quoted in Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus (Paris: Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964), 50.
[30] Ibid., 50.
[31] Ibid., 53.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid., 53–54.
[34] For Godwin’s views on “the right of private judgment,” see John P. Clark, The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 136–47.
[35] Elisée states that “Elie and his friends” were alone in the end (Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 175), while Paul Reclus maintains that Elisée was in fact the only friend who remained (ibid., 23).
[36] For the details of Reclus’ stay in Louisiana, see Gary S. Dunbar, “Elisée Reclus in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 23 (1982): 341–52. The article includes much fascinating material, as for example an account of Reclus’ bout with yellow fever in the context of the great epidemic of 1853 (345–46).
[37] See Elisée Reclus, A Voyage to New Orleans, ed. and trans. John P. Clark and Camille Martin (Enfield, N.H.: Glad Day Books, 2004), 51–52. While working on that book, the editors took a tour of a plantation near Félicité (which still stands but is a private home not open to visitors). We discovered that the official tour goes to great lengths to extoll the grandeur of the Old South but gives no hint that a system of organized brutality ever existed there. The tour guide, a young woman dressed in antebellum garb, noted that “the slave who carried the baked pies from the kitchen outbuilding to the main house had to whistle constantly as he walked—to assure that he didn’t taste the pie!” The crowd of tourists found this anecdote quite amusing, having no trouble identifying themselves with the clever planters rather than the hapless servants.
[38] Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 31.
[39] Ibid. Reclus’ comment is reminiscent of a famous statement by another great figure in the history of anarchist thought who was also an uncompromising opponent of slavery, Henry David Thoreau. In discussing his refusal to pay taxes to support a state that enforced slavery, Thoreau explained as follows: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.” Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 636.
[40] Letter to Elie Reclus (undated) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 1:91.
[41] Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 39.
[42] W.L.G. Joerg notes that Reclus’ voyage north may have taken him to Chicago and even as far northeast as Niagara Falls. He bases this view on research on Reclus’ life by the great historian of anarchism Max Nettlau. See Joerg, “The Geography of North America: A History of Its Regional Exposition,” Geographical Review 26 (1936): 648.
[43] Elisée Reclus, Voyage à la Sierra-Nevada de Saint-Marthe: Paysage de la nature tropicale (Paris: Hachette, 1861).
[44] Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 43.
[45] Peter Kropotkin, “Elisée Reclus,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 63.
[46] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (January 1, 1882) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 2:238. Marie Fleming cites Elie’s observation that when Elisée was in his sixties he not only taught but also attended courses at the New University, always eager to learn from others. The Geography of Freedom (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1988), 178.
[47] Jean Grave, “Elisée Reclus” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Ishill, 39. This is no small tribute to someone who was generally considered the most renowned geographer and one of the two or three most important anarchist theorists of his time.
[48] Elisée Reclus, La Terre: description des phénomènes de la vie du globe, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1868–69); vol. 1 translated by B.B. Woodward and edited by Henry Woodward under the title The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871), and vol. 2 translated by B.B. Woodward and edited by Henry Woodward under the title The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life: being the second series of a descriptive history of the phenomena of the life of the globe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873).
[49] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’un ruisseau (Paris: Hachette, 1869).
[50] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (Paris: Hetzel, 1880), translated by Bertha Lilly and John Lilly under the title The History of a Mountain (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881).
[51] Michael Bakunin, La Polémique avec Mazzini: Ecrits et Matériaux, part 1 of Michel Bakunin et L’Italie 1875–82, Oeuvres Complètes de Bakunin, ed. Arthur Lehning (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1973), 1:245.
[52] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, 19 vols., trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94); originally published as Nouvelle géographie universelle, 19 vols., ed. Ernest George Ravenstein (Paris: Hachette, 1876–94). Herein, the authors refer to this work as the New Universal Geography, as in the French title, to preserve Reclus’ conception of the work.
[53] Patrick Geddes, “A Great Geographer: Elisée Reclus” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, 155.
[54] Gary S. Dunbar, Elisée Reclus: Historian of Nature (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), 95. See also Gary S. Dunbar, The History of Geography (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Gary S. Dunbar, 1996), especially chapters 3, 6, 11, 17, 18, and 26.
[55] For extensive details on the uproar within the university after the invitation to Reclus was withdrawn, see Hem Day, ed., Elisée Reclus en Belgique: sa vie, son activité (Paris and Brussels: Pensée et Action, 1956). Among the documents reprinted in this work are the minutes of the students’ organizations, which reported that a general assembly of the university’s students voted to support Reclus, with only two dissenting votes (32).
[56] Letter to Jean Grave (October 6, 1894) in Correspondance (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1925), 3:172.
[57] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants, 19:vi.
[58] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6 vols. (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8).
[59] Les frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 89.
[60] Letter to Clara Mesnil (March 25, 1905) in Correspondance, 3:314.
[61] While the emphasis in the present discussion is on the relevance of Reclus’ social geography to ecological thought and social theory, the considerable importance of his contribution in other areas, including physical geography and geology, should not be overlooked. Among Reclus’ achievements is his early advocacy of the theory of continental drift and his defense of the view that this phenomenon is compatible with uniformitarian explanation. As early as 1868, in The Earth, he proposed that the planet is many times older than most contemporary theory indicated and that the continents formed a single landmass as recently as the Jurassic period. In 1979, an intriguing discussion of Reclus’ geological significance appeared in the journal Geology. In his article “Elisée Reclus: Neglected Geologic Pioneer and First Continental Drift Advocate,” James O. Berkland concludes that Reclus “was a peer of the geologic greats of the nineteenth century such as Darwin and Lyell,” and that while his name “has faded to near obscurity,” he “should be recognized in the history of plate tectonic theory as one of its foremost pioneers and perhaps, as its founder.” See Geology 7 (1979): 192. In a “Comment” on this article Myrl E. Beck, Jr., suggests that Reclus’ lapse into “obscurity” may have had more to do with his anarchist philosophy than with the merits of his scientific theories. See Geology 7 (1979): 418. In his “Reply,” Berkland agrees and laments “the slow literary descent of Reclus to the status of a quasi-nonperson [sic]” as a case of “book-burning through neglect.” In his concluding statement, Berkland surprisingly admits that “had [he] possessed full knowledge of just how ‘revolutionary’ Reclus really was, it is probable that [he] would not have invested the time and effort to give him well-deserved credit for his geologic accomplishments.” See ibid. As geographer Gary Dunbar correctly notes, Berkland’s claims are rather exaggerated. Reclus cannot be considered a “pioneer” or “founder” of continental drift theory, since others proposed the theory long before he discussed it. But while its possibility was mentioned before his time, Alfred Wegener published the first major theory of the phenomenon in 1912, and it did not receive general acceptance until the 1960s; see A. Hallam, “Alfred Wegener and the Hypothesis of Continental Drift,” Scientific American 232, no. 2 (February 1975): 88–97. Reclus’ support for continental drift thus predates its classic formulation by almost half a century and its firm establishment by almost a century. The fact that one of the foremost geographers of that era defended it at this early date was thus a significant step in the history of continental drift theory. I am grateful to Gary Dunbar and to geologist Anatol Dolgoff for their contrasting but highly enlightening views on this topic.
[62] “Social ecology,” in the sense used here, is an ecological philosophy based on a dialectical (but nontotalizing) view of reality. It interprets all natural and social phenomena as mutually determining parts of larger wholes and as being in a process of development and unfolding. Any whole is seen as a complex, developing unity-in-diversity that can be understood to the degree that its elements, their relationships, and the history of its development are understood. A consistent social ecology must, in view of its radically dialectical quality, reject any kind of reification of phenomena or concepts, any dualistic divisions within any sphere of reality, or any process of totalization that transforms dynamic wholes into closed systems (whether natural, social, or intellectual). These principles are applied to the evolution of humanity and the entire course of human history, in relation to natural history and the evolution of life on earth. A social ecology is, however, more than an ecological philosophy; it is also a social practice that aims at creating a free, cooperative, ecological society in which not only the human quest to conquer nature but also all forms of domination within society are overcome.
[63] Reclus’ connection with contemporary social ecology has not been widely recognized. A notable exception is Peter Marshall’s chapter on “Elisée Reclus: The Geographer of Liberty” in his monumental work Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), 339–44. Marshall concludes that Reclus “had a profound ecological sensibility,” and that he was “a forerunner of modern social ecology” (344).
[64] Béatrice Giblin, “Reclus: un écologiste avant l’heure?” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 110. Giblin edited and wrote the introduction for a book of selections entitled L’Homme et la Terre—morceaux choisis (Paris: Maspero, 1982). The entire issue of Hérodote containing her article is devoted to studies of Reclus’ work, with a strong emphasis on the ecological implications of his social geography. Joël Cornuault, in his excellent and highly perceptive little book Elisée Reclus, géographe et poète (Eglise-Neuve d’Issac, France: Fédérop, 1995) also recognizes Reclus as “one of the first ecologists” and points out that although Reclus does not use the word “ecology,” he showed his ecological tendencies by “commenting favorably on the works of George P. Marsh as early as 1864” (73). Cornuault shows very convincingly that Reclus’ books History of a Brook and History of a Mountain are crucial to understanding his ecological sensibility and his work as a natural historian. Contemporary ecological thought has devoted little attention to the connection between geography and ecology. An exception is Thomas Berry, one of the best-known contemporary ecological thinkers, who devotes an entire chapter in one of his works to “Ecological Geography.” He states that “geography provides a comprehensive context for understanding the functioning of the Earth in its larger structure,” that it is “useful in appreciating the integral functioning of the various regions into which the planet is divided,” and that it “provides the context for ecological thinking.” The Great Work: Our Way to the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 86.
[65] The School of Living is a radically decentralist, back-to-the-land movement based on ideas developed by Borsodi and his associates in the 1920s and early 1930s. The first experimental community was begun in 1934, and various communities and educational centers have existed ever since as part of this important grassroots movement. According to Loomis, one of the founders, the School of Living advocates a “Green Revolution” (a term used since 1940) based on such principles as “family homesteads, organic agriculture” and “activities in small communities,” in addition to “freeing the land of price and speculation, cooperative credit, a stable exchange medium” and “replacing government with voluntary action.” Mildred J. Loomis, Alternative Americas (New York: Universe Books, 1982), 73.
[66] The significance of Goodman’s ideas for late twentieth-century ecological thought has not been adequately appreciated. One might think in this connection of his many decentralist social and political essays, which were widely influential in the 1960s, but the philosophical basis of his contribution is found above all in his relatively early work Gestalt Therapy (New York: Dell, 1951), which is one of the most sophisticated theoretical works in modern anarchist thought. One of the few commentators to grasp the importance of Goodman’s psychological writings and what we might call their ecological import is Taylor Stoehr. See the introduction to his Goodman collection Nature Heals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979), xix–xxiv. Bookchin published a series of articles between 1965 and 1970 that made an early and important contribution to the development of contemporary ecological social thought. The essays “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” and “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” presented a radically libertarian and communitarian interpretation of ecological thinking; “Towards a Liberatory Technology” argued for the need for the development of ecological technologies; and “The Forms of Freedom” was an outline of a submerged “history of freedom” that might help inspire an alternative to the mass society of commodity consumption. These essays and others were collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Palo Alto, Caliph.: Ramparts Press, 1971) and have had a significant influence on subsequent radical ecological thought.
[67] “L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même.” Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 1:1. It is instructive to compare Reclus’ more ecological and dialectical concept to Marx’s more environmentalist and residually dualistic conception of nature as “man’s inorganic body.” While the two thinkers were contemporaries (Reclus being only twelve years younger than Marx), Reclus was much more successful in transcending the spirit of the age by applying a dialectical analysis to the relationship between humanity and nature. For a discussion of Marx’s philosophy of nature and his failure to develop fully the dialectical view of nature that is in fact implicit in his own thought, see John P. Clark, “Marx’s Inorganic Body,” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 243–58. John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett criticize this interpretation of Marx in “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature,” Organization and Environment 13 (2000): 403–25. I revise my assessment of Marx and reply to Foster and Burkett in “Marx’s Natures: A Response to Foster and Burkett” Organization and Environment 14 (2001): 451–62.
[68] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 434.
[69] Reclus’ comprehensive, critically holistic perspective relates him to intellectual traditions beyond those that are emphasized in the present discussion. Joël Cornuault points out that Reclus’ encyclopedic approach places him in the broader humanistic tradition of scholarship that preceded the extreme scientific specialization we have known since his time. He also mentions as an antecedent the Renaissance humanism of Pico della Mirandola, a reference that is perhaps surprising, but not at all inappropriate, in view of Reclus’ often-eloquent affirmation of the beauty and goodness of humanity and nature. Cornuault also relates Reclus’ holistic dimension to certain scientific views that were developing in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including the idea of “terrestrial unity” of Vidal de la Bache and the “principle of connection” of Brunhes. See Joël Cornuault, “‘L’imagination écologique’ d’Elisée Reclus: notes sur un livre de John P. Clark,” Les cahiers Elisée Reclus 4 (1997): 2. It must always be kept in mind that the holistic dimension in Reclus has nothing to do with the positing of closed totalities, but rather concerns developing unity-in-diversity within open and relative wholes.
[70] Yves Lacoste, “Editorial,” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 4–5.
[71] Yves Lacoste, “Géographicité et géopolitique: Elisée Reclus” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 14. While Reclus never had the stature in the United States that he did in France, there has been a similar process of “forgetting” in mainstream American geography. For example, if one examines The Geographical Review from its beginning in 1916 to the present, one finds three references to Reclus in the 1920s, three in the 1930s, two in the 1940s, and then a long silence. A modest growth of interest in Reclus among American geographers during the 1970s also parallels the situation in France and is evidenced by articles dealing with his work in the radical geography journal Antipode, as well as by the publication of geographer Gary Dunbar’s biography Elisée Reclus: Historian of Nature (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).
[72] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 210.
[73] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:14.
[74] Ibid., 1:272.
[75] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 210.
[76] Ibid., 223.
[77] Ibid.
[78] In Reclus’ time, just as today, some views overemphasized unity and the whole and others overemphasized diversity and individual phenomena. In the past century, the organicist tradition stemming from Hegel tended toward extreme holism and social authoritarianism, while the individualist tradition arising out of classical liberalism fostered social atomism and anomic individualism. An authentically dialectical position, which might be considered a form of radical left Hegelianism, avoids both of these dangers, and interprets the whole as a dynamic, self-transcending unity-in-diversity. This is the perspective of a truly dialectical social ecology.
[79] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 434.
[80] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:254.
[81] Ibid., 6:255.
[82] Ibid. Reclus’ holistic dimension may be compared to a similar strain in the thought of his friend and colleague Peter Kropotkin. The latter contends, for example, that geography should present a view of society and nature that will “combine in one vivid picture all separate elements of this knowledge” and “represent it as an harmonious whole, all parts of which are consequences of a few general principles and are held together by their mutual relations.” Antipode 10, no. 3–1 (1978): 11.
[83] Thérèse Dejongh, “The Brothers Reclus at the New University,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 237.
[84] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 262, 259.
[85] Edward Rothen, “Elisée Reclus’ Optimism,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, 145.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’un ruisseau (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 137.
[89] This distinction was basic to Aristotle’s ethics, and was important both for Hegel and for Marx’s critique of Hegel on the issue of transformative praxis and the problematic of “the end of prehistory.” The terms appear frequently in the literature of political ecology, including, for example in the writings of James O’Connor and other contributors to Capitalism Nature Socialism, the most important English-language journal of political ecology. Bookchin has made the concepts more central to his thought; however, he presents no detailed theoretical discussion of the relationship between the two realms. In his essay “Thinking Ecologically,” he states that by “second nature” he means “humanity’s development of a uniquely human culture, a wide variety of institutionalized human communities, an effective human technics, a richly symbolic language, and a carefully managed source of nutriment.” See The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 162. He describes “first nature” as the larger natural world from which second nature is “derived” and states that “the real question ... is how second nature is derived from first nature” (163). He also posits a third natural realm, which he calls “free nature”; however, it is not an existent sphere but rather a possibility in a future ecological society that would constitute “a nature that could reach the level of conceptual thought” (182).
[90] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:42.
[91] Ibid.
[92] Ibid., 1:117.
[93] Ibid.
[94] Ibid., 1:119.
[95] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 435.
[96] One of the many similarities between the social geography of Reclus and that of Kropotkin lies in the strongly bioregional flavor of each. Myrna Breitbart points out that the latter “believed that it was necessary to reestablish a sense of community and love of place. Rootedness in a particular environment would foster greater human interaction and a more intimate relationship with one’s surroundings.” Myrna Breitbart, “Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Geographer,” in Geography, Ideology and Social Concern, ed. David Stoddart (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 140.
[97] Ibid.
[98] See Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York and London: Hafner, 1949), chapters 14–17.
[99] Ellsworth Huntington argues that there is “a close adjustment between life and its inorganic environment” and that factors such as “soil, climate, relief,” and “position in respect to bodies of water” all “combine to form a harmonious whole” in affecting human society; The Human Habitat (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1927), 16–17. It turns out that for Huntington this “harmonious whole” dictates racial hierarchy, since “racial differences” in areas such as “inherent mental capacity” are caused by the various natural factors, especially climate. See “Climate and the Evolution of Civilization,” in The Evolution of the Earth and Its Inhabitants (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918), 148. Elsewhere he seeks to defend his racialist conclusions by arguing (or more accurately, speculating) that climate has had an enormous influence on inheritance through its effects on “migration, racial mixture, and natural selection,” and perhaps even “mutations.” See Civilization and Climate (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1915), 3.
[100] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 2:91.
[101] Ibid.
[102] Ibid.
[103] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94), 1:38.
[104] Ibid.
[105] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 110.
[106] Thomas Berry, “The Viable Human,” in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 3rd ed., Michael Zimmerman et al., eds. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001), 178.
[107] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 110.
[108] Ibid. The issue of the central role of ecological crisis in societal decline and collapse is a crucial one in world history that has been generally neglected by historians until recently. For a general overview see Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
[109] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 224–25.
[110] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 526.
[111] Ibid. In his view, “when man forms some loftier ideal as regards his action on the earth, he always perfectly succeeds in improving its surface, although he allows the scenery to retain its natural beauty” (527).
[112] Elisée Reclus, “On Vegetarianism,” in this volume, 161.
[113] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 527.
[114] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 110.
[115] Ibid.
[116] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne, 221.
[117] See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996). For an overview of Charbonneau’s work, see John P. Clark, “Bernard Charbonneau: Regionalism and the Politics of Experience,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 51 (2002): 41–48. For a very useful comparison of these two bioregional thinkers, see Daniel Cérézuelle, “Wendell Berry et Bernard Charbonneau, critiques de l’industrialization de l’agriculture,” in Encyclopédie de l’Agora, January 29, 2003, at agora.qc.ca.
[118] For example, George Sessions claims that social ecologists “have yet to demonstrate an appreciation of, and commitment to, the crucial ecological importance of wilderness and biodiversity protection.” See “Wilderness: Back to Basics,” interview by JoAnn McAllister, in The Trumpeter 11 (Spring 1994): 66. Yet a dialectical position that sees humanity as “the self-consciousness of the earth,” interprets history as the movement toward the realization of a “free nature,” and conceives of the earth in dialectical terms as a unity-in-diversity is uniquely capable of dealing theoretically with these important issues. Steve Chase has presented a very circumspect analysis of the neglect of wilderness issues by Bookchin and many other social ecologists, and of the need for attention to these issues from a social ecological perspective. See “Whither the Radical Ecology Movement?” in Defending the Earth: A Dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Steve Chase, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
[119] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 529.
[120] Ibid.
[121] This raises an important issue not only for Reclus, but also for social ecology. While humanity can and ought to make a unique contribution to the emergence of greater freedom and creativity in nature, this contribution cannot presumably be limited a priori to the attainment of its own nondominating self-realization and to creative interaction with the natural milieu in a way that respects the integrity of nature. At this point in the history of the earth, one of the central ecological questions is the way in which human beings can reorganize society so that its impact on large areas of the earth can be reduced and finally minimized. A stronger conception of “nondomination” is needed: one that recognizes the need for the earth to have a sphere of ecological freedom and evolutionary creativity guided neither by human self-interest nor by human rationality.
[122] Elisée Reclus, “The Progress of Mankind” in Contemporary Review 70 (July–December 1896): 782.
[123] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 526.
[124] Ibid.
[125] Ibid. The same idea is stated in “Progress,” in this volume, 231.
[126] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 517–18.
[127] Ibid., 518.
[128] Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne, 134.
[129] Julius Haast, Ferdinand von Hochstetter, and Oscar Peschel, Ausland (February 19, 1876), quoted in Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 519.
[130] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:300.
[131] Ibid.
[132] A century later, there are still right-wing “cornucopian” pro-natalist ideologists, but reactionary thought has generally shifted to an anti-natalist, population-control position. For an extensive critique of Garrett Hardin, perhaps the most famous and influential exponent of such a perspective, see John P. Clark, “The Tragedy of Common Sense; Part One: The Power of Myth” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 21:3 (2010): 35–54; and “The Tragedy of Common Sense; Part Two: From Ideology to Historical Reality” in Capitalism Nature Socialism 21:4 (2010): 34–49.
[133] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:332.
[134] Ibid.
[135] Ibid., 5:415.
[136] Ibid., 5:416.
[137] Ibid., 5:418.
[138] Elisée Reclus, “On Vegetarianism,” in this volume, 157.
[139] Ibid., 157–58.
[140] Ibid., 158.
[141] Ibid., 160. Reclus’ arguments constitute an eloquent defense of the humane treatment of animals, but they are far from conclusive as a proof of the moral necessity of unconditional vegetarianism. He presents an excellent case for the immorality of systems of food production that inflict continual suffering on animals and callously ignore the moral relevance of the attainment of goods by these beings and their selfrealization. His critique is therefore quite pertinent to much of today’s meat industry, with its factory farming and mechanized mass production. On the other hand, he does not demonstrate that no possible form of animal husbandry or hunting can be carried out in a humane manner. It is interesting that Reclus never subjects traditional hunting societies to the scathing criticism he directs toward the modern meat industry. Unfortunately, he fails to explore the possibility of morally relevant differences between the two systems.
[142] Letter to Richard Heath (no specific date, 1884) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 2:325.
[143] Elisée Reclus, “The Extended Family,” in this volume, 136–37.
[144] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (December. 8, 1903) in Correspondance (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1925), 3:267.
[145] Letter to an unknown recipient, ibid., 3:323.
[146] See Carol Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” in Women and Moral Theory, eds. Kay Kittay and Diana Meyers (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), 19–33. According to Gilligan, “all human relationships, public and private, can be characterized both in terms of equality and in terms of attachment, and ... both inequality and detachment constitute grounds for moral concern. Since everyone is vulnerable to both oppression and abandonment, two moral visions—one of justice and one of care—recur in human experience” (20). This important essay develops further the ethical implications of her groundbreaking work, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
[147] By comparison, utopian thinkers such as Blake, Fourier, and Morris sometimes appear much more an-archic, in the sense of being capable of questioning every arche—every “unquestionable” principle and every “historically necessary” form of domination.
[148] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 218.
[149] Elisée Reclus, Evolution and Revolution (London: W. Reeves, n.d.), 16. This brief pamphlet has been reprinted numerous times in many languages over the past century, and translations of it have unfortunately been the main source of knowledge of Reclus’ political ideas for non-Francophone readers. While its old-fashioned rhetorical qualities perhaps once made it compelling, it lacks serious social analysis and conveys little of Reclus’ enduring significance.
[150] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 216.
[151] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 440.
[152] Ibid., 443–44.
[153] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 5:302. This statement and some of those cited previously are reminiscent of Marx’s view that “where Nature is too lavish, she ‘keeps him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.’ She does not impose upon him any necessity to develop himself.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:513.
[154] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:302.
[155] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 188.
[156] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 216.
[157] Elisée Reclus, “The Progress of Mankind,” in The Contemporary Review 70 (July–Dec. 1896): 766. There are still enthusiastic admirers of the Aeta culture. For example, in 1998 the organization fPcN (friends of Peoples close to Nature) produced the short film Save the Savages, which it describes as “a story about the last free Savages in the Philippines.” The film extols the virtues of the Aeta’s traditional cooperative way of life and depicts its near destruction by logging and mining activities.
[158] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 214.
[159] Ibid., 216.
[160] Letter to the editors of Huelga General, an anarchist journal in Spain (December 4, 1901) in Correspondance, 3:238–40.
[161] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 111.
[162] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 218.
[163] Ibid.
[164] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 2:102.
[165] Ibid.
[166] Ibid., 2:103.
[167] Ibid.
[168] Ibid.
[169] Ibid., 2:104.
[170] Ibid., 3:178.
[171] Ibid., 3:182–84. A very similar process, he says, was used later by Constantine to “kill” Christianity (182).
[172] Ibid., 3:211–12.
[173] Ibid.
[174] Ibid., 3:212.
[175] There are striking convergences on certain points between Reclus’ thought and Buddhism in particular. For example, in his History of a Brook, he states in terms reminiscent of the Buddhist teaching of anatta that “much like a flowing river, we change at every moment; our life renews itself from minute to minute, and if we believe that we remain the same, this is nothing more than an illusion of the mind.” Histoire d’un Ruisseau (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 204. The parallel with Heraclitus, the founder of Western dialectic, is also evident.
[176] Letter to Paul Gsell, also published in La Revue (December 1, 1905), in Correspondance, 3:324. Reclus also at times recognizes that such an outlook is not what is popularly meant by the term “religion.” See his letter to an unknown recipient (undated), ibid., 3:322–23.
[177] Letter to M. Roth (no specific date, 1904), ibid., 3:286.
[178] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 3:388.
[179] Ibid., 3:387.
[180] Elisée Reclus, “Préface à la Conquête du pain de Pierre Kropotkin,” kropot.free.
[181] Elisée Reclus, Evolution and Revolution, 14.
[182] Elisée Reclus, “The Progress of Mankind,” 762.
[183] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 211.
[184] Ibid., 232.
[185] Ibid. Reclus’ concept can be compared in some ways with the early Marx’s idea of labor as the conscious self-creative activity of humanity and the expression of its “species-being.”
[186] Ibid., 233.
[187] Ibid.
[188] Indeed, an authentic holism, which must be a dialectical holism, is always a holism/ anti-holism. Developing phenomena always have both a holistic and an anti-holistic moment. Radically dialectical social theory in particular stresses the fact that in a dialectical development there is always a supplement, a remainder, a surplus, that which cannot be reduced to an element of any supposed “synthesis.”
[189] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:iii.
[190] Ibid.
[191] Ibid.
[192] Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 3. While Ritter’s introduction of this concept is very helpful, he unfortunately makes no reference to Reclus and other relevant figures but concentrates almost exclusively on the thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. In fact, several of these thinkers had a very limited conception of the meaning of “communal individuality,” and none of them contributed as much to developing such an idea as did Reclus.
[193] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 435.
[194] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 225.
[195] Ibid., 231.
[196] Ibid.
[197] Elisée Reclus, The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the Globe, trans. B.B. Woodward (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871), 567.
[198] Ibid.
[199] Ibid.
[200] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist,” Contemporary Review 45 (January–June 1884): 640.
[201] Elisée Reclus, “Progress of Mankind,” 75.
[202] Ibid.
[203] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, trans. Augustus Henry Keane (London: H. Virtue, 1876–94), 19:iv.
[204] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:384–85.
[205] Elisée Reclus, “Nouvelle proposition pour la suppression de l’ère chrétienne,” in Quelques écrits (Paris and Brussels: Pensée et Action, 1956), 31.
[206] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 221.
[207] Ibid., 223.
[208] Ibid.
[209] Ibid.
[210] Yves Lacoste, review of Espace et pouvoir, by Paul Claval, and Pour une géographie du pouvoir, by Claude Raffestin, in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 157.
[211] H. Roorda van Eysinga, “Avant tout anarchiste,” in Hem Day, Elisée Reclus (1830–1905): Savant et Anarchiste (Paris and Brussels: Cahiers Pensée et Action, 1956),, quoted in Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom: The Odyssey of Elisée Reclus (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1988), 20. It is quite appropriate that after Reclus’ death his friend Jules Verne used Reclus as the model for an anarchist hero in one of his novels, Les naufragés du “Jonathan” (The Survivors of the Jonathan). Peter Costello, in his biography Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), notes that the hero is “a philosophical anarchist and atheist called the Kaw-Djer, the Benefactor, by the natives,” who after a shipwreck becomes the leader of the remote Hoste Island off the coast of South America and “finds himself having to organize a society, which he detests doing” (210). After solving numerous problems, he finally gives up power “and sets off to the even more remote island of Cape Horn, to live on the lighthouse which he has built there, to prevent further wrecks” (ibid.). Costello remarks that the character of the Benefactor seems to be based on Reclus, who had indeed tried to bring utopian anarchism to South America. Interestingly, between Hoste Island and Cape Horn Island lies L’Hermite Island, which, according to Costello, is named after an “anarchist explorer.” Should this implausible story be true, the name of explorer in question would apparently mean “hermit” (l’ermite in French) and would be curiously reminiscent of an anarchist explorer whose name means “recluse.”
[212] Paul Reclus, “Biographie d’Elisée Reclus,” in Les Frères Elie et Elisée Reclus (Paris: Les Amis d’Elisée Reclus, 1964), 51.
[213] Ibid.
[214] Elisée Reclus, “Préface à la Conquête du pain de Pierre Kropotkin,” kropot.free.
[215] Ibid.
[216] See John P. Clark, “What Is Anarchism?” in The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and Power (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1984), 117–40.
[217] Letter to M. Felix, professor at the New University of Brussels (February 1896) in Correspondance (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1925), 3:194.
[218] Ibid.
[219] The concept of “ordered anarchy” later became well known for its use in connection with various African stateless societies. See, for example, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, “The Nuer of the Southern Sudan,” in African Political Systems, ed. M. Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 296.
[220] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist,” Contemporary Review 45 (January–June 1884): 628. Although this phrase is often attributed to Marx, the formulation goes far back in the history of communitarian thought and was popularized by the so-called utopian socialists, especially Saint-Simon and his followers. It becomes very important for the communist anarchists, for whom an immediate movement toward distribution according to need is a central point of contention with both Marxists and “collectivist” anarchists. Reclus’ own ethical communism was almost instinctual, going back to early religious influences that later conditioned his political and philosophical outlook. He expresses this outlook well in one of his letters: “Having received everything from others, I want to give everything back to them.” Letter to an unknown recipient (undated) in Correspondance (Paris: Schleicher Frères, 1911), 3:323.
[221] Ibid., 1:285.
[222] Paul Reclus quotes from the stenographic record of the Congress of the League for Peace and Freedom in Les Frères Elie et Elisée Reclus, 56.
[223] Letter to Elie Reclus (no date) in Correspondance, 1:285.
[224] Letter to Georges Renard (June 2, 1888), ibid., 2:441–42.
[225] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 138.
[226] Ibid., 140.
[227] Ibid., 141.
[228] Ibid.
[229] Ibid., 150.
[230] Ibid., 152.
[231] Reclus’ shortcomings in this area are typical of revolutionaries of his era, and especially of those anarchists who looked to an uprising of workers and peasants as the source of coming social transformation. Bakunin is a much more extreme case of this uncritical approach, which had disastrous effects on the historical anarchist movement. See John P. Clark, “The Noble Lies of Power: Bakunin and the Critique of Ideology,” in Rights, Justice, and Community, ed. Creighton Peden and John K. Roth (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 25–34, for an analysis of this strain in Bakunin’s thought. I conclude there that his “unrealistic faith in revolutionary vanguards led him to overestimate the ‘instinctual’ revolutionary potential of the masses in the most extreme, and often dangerous manner. While there are many examples of his exaggerated hopes for various national groups, classes, and social strata, perhaps the most striking is his idealization of the bandits. His claims for the revolutionary role of brigands is based on no analysis of their actual place in society. The question of the nature of their consciousness, values, and character structures is ignored, as is the problem of how they might adapt to a cooperative order” (32–33).
[232] Letter to Richard Heath (February 18, 1883) in Correspondance, 2:279.
[233] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (April 1, 1889), ibid., 2:447.
[234] Letter to Richard Heath (June 2, 1903), ibid., 3:258.
[235] Letter to Lilly Zibelin-Wilmerding (June 7, 1892), ibid., 3:118.
[236] Ibid.
[237] Letter to editors of Semper Avanti, an Italian journal (June 28, 1892), ibid., 3:120–21.
[238] A more critical anarchist view would see the anarchist terrorists as the early vanguard of the society of the spectacle who helped found a tradition of “Left Spectacularism.” They were impatient with the slow evolutionary work of social and natural regeneration, which, as Reclus pointed out, is the necessary precondition for any later qualitative revolutionary change of a liberatory nature. Instead, they adopted the tactic of the dramatic gesture, which was to catalyze in some magical way vast processes of social transformation. Left Spectacularism, though only rarely taking on a terroristic form, became the bane of the New Left of the 1960s.
[239] From a letter (August 1889) found in the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris, quoted in Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, 151.
[240] Letter to Richard Heath (no date) in Correspondance, 2:414–15. I am reminded of a contrasting anarchist view expressed by the libertarian writer and activist Karl Hess. In a conversation in the early 1970s, he described discussions of the problem of theft in the poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where he lived at the time. Some, he said, defended theft on the part of community members (even from the community’s cooperative store) on the grounds that “stealing is the privilege of the poor.” He argued against this view on the grounds that the consequences of theft are destructive for the community and that in reality “stealing is the privilege of the rich.”
[241] Ibid.
[242] Letter to Jean Grave (Nov. 29, 1891), ibid., 3:97.
[243] Text attached to letter to Jean Grave, ibid.
[244] In one of his letters, Reclus touches on this problem in relation to individual acts of propaganda of the deed. However, he does not attempt there to offer a solution. See letter to Semper Avanti (June 28, 1892), ibid., 3:121.
[245] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: Extracts from a lecture delivered at South Place Institute, London on Monday, July 29th, 1895,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 350.
[246] On this subject, he agrees with Kropotkin, who saw the two greatest periods of advancement in human history to be those of the Greek polis and the medieval free cities. See Peter Kropotkin, “The State: Its Historic Role,” in Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. Martin A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 233. It should be observed that Reclus was in some ways inadequately critical in his assessment of the polis. Although the existence of such institutions as slavery and patriarchy do not negate the achievements of Greek democracy, it would be naïve to idealize that system and to neglect the ways in which the political realm was dialectically shaped by its interaction with other elements of the social whole. In a social system founded on hierarchy, domination, and exploitation, all institutions reflect the fundamental distribution of power, however mystified the effects of that power may be. After almost a century much the same uncritical approach to the polis appears in Bookchin’s assessment of Greek democracy. For an analysis of this problem, see John P. Clark, “Beyond the limits of the city: A communitarian anarchist critique of libertarian municipalism,” in The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), especially “The Social and the Political,” 261–64.
[247] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 2:321.
[248] Ibid., 2:335
[249] Ibid., 3:519. Reclus also praises the Icelanders for maintaining “the principle of land to the peasants” in a rather equitable manner over a period of many centuries (515).
[250] Ibid., 3:519. In referring to “all the inhabitants,” Reclus conspicuously fails to mention the exclusion of women from these processes.
[251] Ibid.
[252] Peter Kropotkin makes similar points but presents a much more detailed discussion in Mutual Aid, in which he devotes two chapters to the medieval communes, cities, and guilds. See chapters 5 and 6, “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City,” in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Porter Sargent, n.d.), 153–222.
[253] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 4:18.
[254] Ibid., 4:18–19.
[255] Ibid., 4:272.
[256] Ibid., 4:14.
[257] Ibid., 4:16.
[258] Ibid.
[259] Elisée Reclus, “Culture and Property,” in this volume, 203.
[260] Ibid.
[261] Ibid., 203–4.
[262] In view of his interest in municipal institutions, it is surprising that Reclus did not place more emphasis on the importance of the emergence of direct democracy in the Parisian sections during the Revolution. The classic anarchist interpretation of this chapter in the history of radical democracy appears in Kropotkin’s history of the Revolution. See chapter 24, “The ‘Districts’ and the ‘Sections’ of Paris,” and chapter 25, “The Sections of Paris under the New Municipal Law,” in The Great French Revolution (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 180–94.
[263] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:28.
[264] Ibid., 5:248. From this passage and other discussions it is clear that Reclus’ municipalist ideas differ considerably from Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” and proposals of some other social ecologists that anarchists seek offices in existing municipalities. He would find the idea of anarchists exercising political power within municipalities that are organized undemocratically and that are part of centralized nation-states to be contrary to his revolutionary position regarding social change. He would apply his criticisms of cooperatives and intentional communities to such reformist efforts (perhaps in even stronger terms), and would not be sympathetic to the argument that such electoral activity could help create a revolutionary situation in the future.
[265] Ibid.
[266] Elisée Reclus, “The Evolution of Cities,” in this volume, 173.
[267] Ibid.
[268] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:37–76.
[269] Elisée Reclus, “The History of Cities,” in this volume, 180.
[270] Ibid., 182.
[271] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:145.
[272] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 148–49.
[273] Elisée Reclus, “Preface” to La civilization et les grands fleuves historiques, by Léon Metchnikoff (Paris: Hachette, 1889), quoted in Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 150.
[274] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist,” 637.
[275] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 154.
[276] Ibid.
[277] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:140.
[278] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 153.
[279] Ibid.
[280] Letter to Richard Heath (November 12, 1902) in Correspondance, 3:250–51.
[281] Ibid., 3:258–59.
[282] Letter to Reclus’ sister Louise (no specific date, 1859), ibid., 1:206.
[283] Letter to Clara Koettlitz (April 12, 1895), ibid., 3:182.
[284] Reclus and Kropotkin are similar in using communitarian and organicist terminology extensively in describing social phenomena. However, Kropotkin’s depiction of the future society is sometimes more strongly organicist. For example, he states that “a new form of society is germinating” and that this society “will not be crystallized into certain unchangeable forms, but will continually modify its aspect, because it will be a living, evolving organism.” See Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Dover, 1971), 398–99. Furthermore, although both thinkers saw the need for the organic growth of a new society in free and loving personal relationships, Kropotkin was more optimistic than was Reclus about the organic development of cooperative institutions alongside the dominant authoritarian ones. See his two chapters on “Mutual Aid Among Ourselves,” in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 223–92. In Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Kropotkin criticizes socialist papers that “often have the tendency to become mere annals of complaints about existing conditions,” while what is needed is “a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions” (418). He concludes, in a statement that might well be pondered by advocates of social change in our own day, that “it is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions” (ibid.).
[285] Reclus is not mentioned, for example, in Joel Spring’s A Primer of Libertarian Education (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975). In fact, one can review much of the extensive literature on libertarian, progressive, “open,” and “free” education without finding any reference to his ideas.
[286] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:439.
[287] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 529.
[288] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:134.
[289] Elisée Reclus, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, 529.
[290] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:439.
[291] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), 255. Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 223.
[292] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:439.
[293] Letter to Henri Roorda van Eysinga (November 4, 1897) in Correspondance, 3:203.
[294] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:440.
[295] Ibid.
[296] Letter to Mlle. de Gérando (October 8, 1881) in Correspondance, 2:235.
[297] Ibid.
[298] Elisée Reclus, L’Evolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique (Paris: P.V. Stock, 1898), 231.
[299] Elisée Reclus, “Anarchy: By an Anarchist,” in Contemporary Review 45 (January–June 1884): 630–31.
[300] Ibid.
[301] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 193–94.
[302] Ibid.
[303] Ibid.
[304] Ibid.
[305] Ibid.
[306] Ibid.
[307] Ibid., 194.
[308] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 147.
[309] Ibid., 146.
[310] Ibid., 146–47.
[311] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 192.
[312] Ibid.
[313] Ibid., 196.
[314] Ibid.
[315] Ibid., 197.
[316] Ibid., 198
[317] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 5:304.
[318] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 190.
[319] Ibid.
[320] Ibid.
[321] Béatrice Giblin, “Elisée Reclus et les colonizations,” in Elisée Reclus: Un géographe libertaire, ed. Yves Lacoste, Hérodote 22 (1981): 57. Reclus does not seem to consider the possibility that under certain conditions the multiplication and growth of “colonies of population” might eventually amount to imperialism and even cultural genocide.
[322] Ibid., 67.
[323] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 5:118.
[324] Ibid., 5:219.
[325] Ibid., L’Homme et la Terre, 5:485.
[326] The point, of course, is that Reclus anticipated Wittfogel’s famous application of the concept of Oriental Despotism to the Soviet State. See Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964).
[327] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 199.
[328] Ibid. Reclus does not use the terms, but he would certainly see such dangers in reformist calls for “social democracy” or “social welfare” policies.
[329] Ibid., 200.
[330] Ibid.
[331] Ibid.
[332] Ibid.
[333] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:258.
[334] Ibid., 6:256.
[335] Ibid.
[336] Elisée Reclus, “Culture and Property,” in this volume, 205.
[337] Ibid.
[338] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:80.
[339] Elisée Reclus, A Voyage to New Orleans, ed. and trans. John P. Clark and Camille Martin (Enfield, N.H.: Glad Day Books, 2004), 58.
[340] Ibid.
[341] Ibid.
[342] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:257.
[343] Ibid.
[344] Ibid.
[345] Ibid., 5:287.
[346] Ibid.
[347] Ibid.
[348] Elisée Reclus, “Progress,” in this volume, 228.
[349] Elisée Reclus, “The Feeling for Nature in Modern Society,” in this volume, 108–9.
[350] Elisée Reclus, To My Brother the Peasant, in this volume, 117.
[351] Elisée Reclus, “Quelques mots sur la propriété,” in Almanach du Peuple pour 1873 (St Imier: Le Locle, 1873), 133.
[352] Elisée Reclus, To My Brother the Peasant, in this volume, 117.
[353] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:326.
[354] Elisée Reclus, To My Brother the Peasant, in this volume, 118.
[355] Michel Bakunin et les Conflits dans l’Internationale 1872, Bakunin: Oeuvres Complète, ed. Arthur Lehning (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1975), 3:204.
[356] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:429.
[357] Ibid., 6:430.
[358] Ibid.
[359] Ibid., 6:324.
[360] Ibid.
[361] Ibid.
[362] Ibid.
[363] Elisée Reclus, A Voyage to New Orleans, 50.
[364] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:106.
[365] Ibid., 6:107.
[366] Ibid.
[367] Ibid., 6:108.
[368] Peter Kropotkin, “Elisée Reclus,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1927), 60.
[369] Letter to Mlle. Clara Koettlitz (April 12, 1895) in Correspondance (Paris: Librairie Schleicher Frères, 1911), 3:183.
[370] Letter to Lilly Zibelin-Wilmerding (September, 1896?), ibid., 3:196.
[371] Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in this volume, 144.
[372] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 188–89.
[373] Ibid., 189.
[374] Ibid., 188.
[375] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:254. This theme has now become commonplace in social ecological thought. Bookchin discusses it in general terms, following Mumford, who analyzed it at much greater length and with considerably more richness of detail in his account of domestication. See Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, Caliph.: Cheshire Books, 1982), 52–54 and 57–61, and Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), esp. chapter 7, “Garden, Home, and Mother,” 142–62.
[376] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 1:255.
[377] Ibid., 1:258.
[378] Ibid.
[379] Ibid.
[380] Ibid.
[381] Ibid., 1:270.
[382] Elisée Reclus, “The Modern State,” in this volume, 195.
[383] Ibid.
[384] Ibid.
[385] Ibid.
[386] Ibid.
[387] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:439.
[388] Ibid.
[389] Ibid., 6:492.
[390] Ibid.
[391] In a letter of 1897, he comments that “I have often spent the night in the woods or on beaches; often I have been satisfied with bread and water, and if official morality had not threatened me with imprisonment, I would not have been afraid to live in complete nudity.” Letter to the editor of La Vie Naturelle (February 6, 1897) in Correspondance, 3:197.
[392] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:489.
[393] Letter to Henri Roorda van Eysinga (March 16, 1891) in Correspondance, 3:90.
[394] Ibid.
[395] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:486–87.
[396] Letter to Henri Roorda van Eysinga (March 16, 1891) in Correspondance, 3:90.
[397] See Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2001); and Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
[398] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:488.
[399] Letter to Henri Roorda van Eysinga (March 16, 1891) in Correspondance, 3:91.
[400] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:489.
[401] Letter to an unknown recipient (July 18, 1892) in Correspondance, 3:122.
[402] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6:418.
[403] Is it coincidental that the area of the land mass closest to the center of the image is east-central Africa? This was, of course, the place of origin of the human race.
[404] Some of the most incisive analysis along these lines has been done by Joel Kovel. For his account of how racism is related to certain transhistorical aspects of human nature and to other historically situated social institutions, see White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). A brilliant analysis of the interaction between capitalism, the state, and patriarchy in the formation of subjectivity in a society of domination is found in The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). He presents an analysis of the quest to transcend egoic selfhood and its relation to politics in History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), and finally, in The Enemy of Nature (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007) he demonstrates how the global capitalist system constitutes the ultimate obstacle to the flourishing of humanity and nature.
[405] Jules Marcou (1824–98) was a French geologist who did extensive study of the Jura Mountains and North America. He produced geological maps of the United States, the British provinces of North America, and the world, and cofounded the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
[406] Characters in The Leatherstocking Tales, a series of historical novels by James Fenimore Cooper.
[407] The alcabala was a general sales tax established in Spain in the Middle Ages. Over the centuries, it increased from 5 percent to as much as 20 percent. It was at times perhaps the largest single source of revenue for the crown but was notoriously unpopular and is thought to have had a detrimental effect on industry and trade.
[408] Count Rumford (1753–1814), born Benjamin Thompson in Massachusetts, was a scientist, inventor, nutritionist, and social reformer who, because of British sympathies, left for Great Britain in 1776. Rumford is primarily known for his work on the nature of heat, for his improvements to fireplaces, and for playing a large role in founding the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1800.
[409] The anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) is usually credited with popularizing the term and first associating it with a large-scale social movement.
[410] In Gargantua and Pantagruel (Book 1, Chapter 57), Rabelais says of the inhabitants of the Abbey of Thélème that “their lives were governed not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own volition and free will [vouloir et franc arbitre].” François Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel (Paris: G. Jeune, 1957), 1:142.
[411] One of the best known of these philosophical and literary utopias is La Citta del Sole: Dialogo Poetico / The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639).
[412] In July of 1830, Lafayette, recently named commandant of the National Guard, greeted the Duke of Orléans, the new king, with the words, “Here is the best of republics!” Despite these rousing words, Lafayette soon became disillusioned with the new regime and resigned his post.
[413] The French working class fought for the Republic in the revolution of 1848, only to have its interests ignored by the new bourgeois regime, which nevertheless thanked the workers for their three months of misery on its behalf. The regime crushed a workers’ rebellion in June of that year.
[414] Hugo’s words are from “A Juvénal” in Les Châtiments, Œuvres Complètes de Victor Hugo, vol. 4 (Paris: Hetzel-Quantin, 1882), 4:344.
[415] The term “hierarchy” derives specifically from the Greek hieratikos, or “rule of the high priest,” and ultimately from hier, “sacred,” and archia, rule.
[416] Timur Lenk, Tartar conqueror of southern and western Asia, who ruled Samarkand from 1369 to 1405.
[417] Reclus refers to Descartes’ strategy of methodological skepticism in which one begins by doubting everything, after which knowledge can be reconstituted “scientifically” and with certitude, founded on “clear and distinct” ideas.
[418] Reclus says, “le peuple choisi des Musantes.”
[419] John Huss (1369?–1415) was a Bohemian religious reformer and martyr.
[420] Giuseppe Ferrari (1812–76) was an Italian philosopher, historian, and political activist. He wrote The Philosophy of Revolution (1851) and The History of Revolution (1858).
[421] The Icarians were followers of the French utopian socialist Etienne Cabet (1788–1856), who was influenced by the British utopian Robert Owen. Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840) inspired a large movement to create Icarian communities. A disastrous attempt was made to create a vast colony on the Red River in Texas in 1848. Later communities were established in Nauvoo, Illinois, and Corning, Iowa, with remnants surviving until 1898.
[422] Local name for several birds of the family Cracidae, found in Guiana. They are also called curassows.
[423] The Agami Heron, Agamia agami, is sometimes considered the most beautiful of all New World herons. Its range is in tropical lowlands from southeast Mexico south on the Pacific slope to Ecuador and on the Atlantic slope to northern Bolivia and Amazonian Brazil. It is noted for its reclusive nature and relatively inaccessible habitat. See Emmet Reid Blake, Manual of Neotropical Birds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
[424] Member of an Amerindian group of Quechua speakers, primarily in the Andean region of South America.
[425] The Fazokl or Fazogli is a region in the eastern Sudan, near the border with Ethiopia. It is located in the foothills of the Abyssinian plateau and is crossed by the Blue Nile. The region was inhabited primarily by the Shangalla tribes, with later Funj and Arab immigration.
[426] Reclus cites “Letters from Egypt.” He is referring to Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Peninsula of Sinai, trans. Lenora and Joanna B. Horner (London, 1853) by Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–84), a German philologist and Egyptologist.
[427] Any of several jumping rodents of the family Dipodidae, with long hind legs and a large tail.
[428] Tribal people of the Tupian family of Central South America, including Brazilian Amazonia.
[429] A pastoral people of Sudan.
[430] A state of northeast India.
[431] The Sindh is a region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. It is now one of the four provinces of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
[432] 2575–2150 B.C.e.
[433] A wild sheep of the mountainous regions of Corsica and Sardinia.
[434] Reclus says “other cetaceans”; however, the walrus is a pinnaped, not a cetacean.
[435] Extinct large, long-horned wild oxen of the German forests.
[436] Paul Pellisson-Fontanier (1624–93) was a French attorney and writer who was imprisoned in the Bastille.
[437] Reclus says “l’homme policé.” The French thus has a connotation of being “policed” or supervised.
[438] Reclus’ meaning here is not entirely clear. At the time he was writing, Poland no longer existed as a sovereign state, having been partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The largest segment, of which Warsaw was the metropolis, consisted of the “Kingdom of Poland,” which suffered under Russian domination. Presumably, “the order of Warsaw” means the autocratic imposition of order, as that through which the czarist regime suppressed seething nationalism, revolutionary movements, and student unrest in Poland.
[439] Reclus is apparently referring to the illusory quality of freedom of speech and contract in a situation of vastly unequal power. In his time, the workers’ alleged “free and voluntary agreement” to the conditions of labor when they accepted employment was used as a justification for strikebreaking and the destruction of labor organizations. Their “freedom” thus becomes a precondition for their misery and oppression.
[440] Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) was a German socialist leader. He is noted for his reformist views, particularly the idea that the working class could gain control of the state by means of universal suffrage and then transform the economy into a system of workers’ cooperatives. He was a major opponent of Marx in the socialist movement and was the object of extensive criticism in Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”
[441] François Guizot (1787–1874) was a French statesman and historian.
[442] Reclus was referring to a notorious event that had recently occurred in Paris. “On May 4, 1897, during peak shopping hours, a fire spread with astounding rapidity through the Bazar de la Charité, turning it into a huge inferno in which 117 people perished. In the midst of the panic that broke out at the beginning of the disaster, a number of lives were saved through acts of bravery. On the other hand, several people from high society who were there presented a sad spectacle.” Roger Gonot, Elisée Reclus: Prophète de l’Idéal Anarchique (Pau, France: Editions Covedi, 1996), 73.
[443] Juan Sebastian del Cano, the first circumnavigator of the earth. He sailed with Magellan, and after the latter’s death, navigated the Victoria back to Spain, completing the circumnavigation in 1522.
[444] The Vendôme Column was constructed to honor Napoléon I and his imperial army. The statue of the emperor atop the Column was removed during the Restoration but replaced by Louis-Philippe. Napoléon III later replaced this statue with a more imperial depiction of the emperor in a toga, which outraged republicans and radicals. After the Paris Commune was declared, it was decided to destroy the column. On April 12, 1871, Félix Pyat proposed demolition, stating that the column “was a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a prominent insult to the conquered by their conquerors, a perpetual insult to one of the three great principles of the French Republic, fraternity.” The column was destroyed on April 16. See Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), 300–303.
[445] Reclus refers to “les conventions scélérates,” by which he means les lois scélérates, which consisted of repressive “emergency regulations” passed in 1894 and 1895 against the anarchists.
[446] Term used to refer to large meatpacking centers of the United States. It was first widely used to refer to Cincinnati and later to Chicago.
[447] The La Plata Basin was a center of the saladero industry. Saladeros were slaughterhouses that bought cattle to produce jerked beef that was salted and dried in the sun.
[448] See page 258, note 12.
[449] Reclus refers to the retaliation by European forces against the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising against European imperialism in China in 1900. In June of that year, the conflict led to the killing of scores of Europeans in Beijing, including the German ambassador. In response, European troops went on a rampage, looting the city, slaughtering suspected Boxers and beheading prisoners in public.
[450] Reclus says “le lapin de garenne et le lapin de gouttière,” literally, “the wild rabbit and the gutter rabbit.” The latter refers ironically to the alley cat, “le chat de gouttière,” which was used for food by the poor.
[451] Reclus’ argument seems a bit confused here because he does not make it clear that he is describing processes at the phylogenetic rather than the ontogenetic level. It is certainly not always the case that the egg, fruit, or seed are produced when the organism that produces them no longer exits; however, on the level of the life of the species they represent biologically the fulfillment of the organism’s reproductive role (though this generalization still ignores the function of care that is sometimes required in the case of the egg).
[452] “All living things come from the egg.”
[453] John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.), 28–29.
[454] Auguste Barbier (1805–82) was a satirical poet and writer, and a member of the French Academy. His poem “La cuve” is a rant against the evils and horrors of urban life. See Auguste Barbier, “La cuve,” in Iambes et poèmes (Paris: P. Mascagna, 1840), 91–92.
[455] See Victor Hugo, “A l’Arc de Triomphe” (Les voix intérieures), Œuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), 1:936–48.
[456] A term applied to immigrants from northern France who settled in the Dropt Valley and around Monségur after the Hundred Years’ War. During the nineteenth century many gavaches came down from the mountains to work as “estivandiers,” or seasonal workers, in wheat-producing areas.
[457] Labonne, Annuaire du Club alpin, 1886. [Reclus’ note]
[458] Ingolfur Arnarsson was the first settler of Iceland. After being banished from Norway he set sail for Iceland. He brought along the posts from the high seat, or throne, of his home in Norway. On sighting land, he threw the pillars into the sea and asked the gods to wash them ashore at the appropriate spot for a settlement. He lost sight of the pillars and built a farm on the southeast coast. The posts were finally located along the coast to the west, and the settlement was moved to a spot that was given the Norse name “Reykjavik,” or “Bay of Smoke,” after the geothermal steam that rose there.
[459] China was traditionally called “the Middle Kingdom” or “the Middle Flower” because of its supposed location at the center of the earth’s surface.
[460] Gobert, le Gerotype. [Reclus’ note]
[461] Later Stalingrad (1925–61), and now Volgograd.
[462] J. G. Kohl, Die geographische Lage der Hauptstädte Europas. [Reclus’ note]
[463] Gomme, Village Communities, 48, 51; Green, The Making of England, 118. [Reclus’ note]
[464] This ancient city, now called Tell el-Farama, was one of Egypt’s most important ports.
[465] Cartagena de Indias is a seaport on the northern coast of Colombia. Portobello, a minor port on the eastern coast of Panama, was once a major center of the Spanish colonial empire. Reclus correctly notes that Portobello declined relative to Cartagena, but it was not because the former was directly displaced by the latter. It declined primarily because the Spanish treasure fleet system, which made it a center of exchange of silver from Peru and goods from Europe, had become obsolete by the eighteenth century. Cartagena’s fortunes were affected to a much smaller degree.
[466] The port of Athens.
[467] Reclus overstates his point by using these particular examples. Cheyenne became a boomtown after the Union Pacific Railroad moved into Wyoming but experienced a severe decline when rail service was extended to Colorado, and Denver in particular. Carson City also experienced a boom when the Comstock Lode silver deposits were discovered but lapsed into two decades of depression when the mines were exhausted. This was followed, however, by a new period of boom with the discovery of additional gold, silver, and copper deposits in the area. Much of the history of Western boom towns is outlined in Duane A. Smith’s Rocky Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, 1859–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992). See also Russell R. Elliot’s History of Nevada (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973).
[468] V-shaped works, usually projecting from a fortified line.
[469] Mile End Road and Whitechapel are in London’s East End, noted in the nineteenth century for its poverty, crime, and industrial blight, in addition to its vibrant ethnic neighborhoods and radical politics.
[470] Ch. Dufour, Bulletin de la Soc. Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles, juin–sept. 1895, 145. [Reclus’ note]
[471] Emile Vandervelde, L’Exode rural. [Reclus’ note]
[472] The Garden City was an idea popularized by the town planner Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) and applied in several communities in England. The Garden City was designed to express such values as human scale, efficiency, beauty, and social cooperation. With a park and public buildings at the center, a green belt at the circumference, and extensive public space, the community was to combine the best features of urban and rural life. Howard’s ideas are best known from his book Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F.J. Osborn (London: Faber and Faber, 1946). This work was first published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.
[473] The name given to certain East Slavic tribes who settled in northeastern Germany during the late first millennium C.e. The name comes from the Old Slavic po, meaning “on the banks of” and “Laba,” the Slavic name for the Elba.
[474] Dr. Tetzner, Globus, April 7, 1900. [Reclus’ note]
[475] Lawrence Corthell, Revue Scientifique, June 27, 1896, 815. [Reclus’ note]
[476] Chr. Sandler, Volks-Karten, 1. [Reclus’ note]
[477] Edmond Demolins, Les Français d’aujourd’hui, 106, 107. [Reclus’ note]
[478] J. Denain-Darrays, Questions diplomatiques et coloniales, Feb. 1, 1903. [Reclus’ note]
[479] Reclus refers to Crete’s civil war of 1897 between the Greeks and Muslims. Six major European powers (Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Russia), in addition to Greece and Turkey, became involved in the conflict and ultimately imposed a peace agreement in conformity with their will.
[480] Saint-Yves d’Alvaydra, La mission des Juifs, 41. [Reclus’ note]
[481] Reclus is punning on taillable, which refers both to taxing and to cutting.
[482] Gustave Geoffroy, L’Enfermé, 51. [Reclus’ note]
[483] Reclus cites “Herbert Spencer, Introduction to Social Science, ch. V, 87.” There is, however, no such title. He is apparently referring to chapter 5 of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961; reprint of the 1880 edition). There, Spencer comments that “agencies established to get remedies for crying evils, are liable to become agencies maintained and worked in a considerable degree, and sometimes chiefly, for the benefit of those who reap income from them” (75).
[484] Louis Vignon, La France en Algérie. [Reclus’ note]
[485] Paul Gille, Société nouvelle, March 1988. [Reclus’ note]
[486] Briot, Etudes sur l’économie alpestre. [Reclus’ note]
[487] Hiram was king of Tire and a contemporary of David and Solomon. According to tradition, Hiram was “Grand Master of all Masons,” and participated in the construction of Solomon’s Temple. For this reason, he has been an important figure in the legendary history of Freemasonry.
[488] Large estate.
[489] Arthur Young, an English agronomist, traveled through France on the eve of the French Revolution.
[490] Gibbon, in the original, states: “We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue of the human race.” Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London and New York: Everyman’s Library, 1910), 3:519.
[491] Havelock Ellis, The Nineteenth Century. [Reclus’ note]
[492] “Die Historie bekommt einen eigenthümlichen Reiz,” Weltgeschichte, Neunter Theil, II, 4, 5, 6, etc. [Reclus’ note]
[493] Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), perhaps the most famous German historian, is known as a founder of the modern objective school of historical study, which focused on the rigorous examination of primary sources. His social views were conservative and nationalistic.
[494] M. Guyau, Morale d’Epicure, 153 et seq. [Reclus’ note] Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–88) was French philosopher, poet, translator, and educator, known for his writings on ethics, esthetics, religion, and various philosophical topics. He gained many admirers, including Nietzsche, before his early death.
[495] Genesis I:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31. [Reclus’ note]
[496] Guyau, Morale d’Epicure, 157. [Reclus’ note]
[497] Elie Metchnikoff. Etudes sur la nature humaine. [Reclus’ note]
[498] Semper, Die Philippinen und ihre Bewohner; F. Blumentritt, Versuch einer Ethnographie der Philippinen; Ergänzungsheft zu den Pet. Mit., No. 67. [Reclus’ note]
[499] Reclus refers to the Philippine war for independence from the United States. The revolt began in February 1899 and lasted for almost three years. During the war, large segments of the population were slaughtered in some provinces, and entire populations of some towns were wiped out by battle and disease. This war has been systematically ignored by mainstream historians. See Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 305–15.
[500] Alphonse Pinard, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, Dec. 1873. [Reclus’ note]
[501] A. Bastian, Rechtszustände. [Reclus’ note]
[502] Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orangutan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature (New York: Harper and Brother, 1885), 598.
[503] Islands of Asia west of New Guinea, north of Australia, south of the South China Sea; these include Indonesia, Melanesia, and often the Philippines.
[504] Unter den Kannibalen auf Borneo. [Reclus’ note]
[505] Guillaume de Greef, Sociologie générale élémentaire, leçon XI, 39. [Reclus’ note]
[506] De Baer, Herbert Spencer, etc. [Reclus’ note]
[507] H. Drummond, Ascent of Man. [Reclus’ note]
[508] A former kingdom including Naples (with lower Italy) and Sicily; it united with the kingdom of Italy in 1861.
[509] Reclus refers to several figures of his time who were associated with revolution. The first is the well-known English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). In 1823, Byron sailed to Greece to devote his energies and resources to the cause of Greek independence from Turkey. Lajos Kossuth (1802–94) was the leader of the Hungarian movement for independence from Austria and the end of serfdom. He was president of the short-lived Hungarian Republic in 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) was an Italian revolutionary and nationalist leader. He was major figure in Italian unification and a popular hero. Alexander Herzen (1812–70) was a Russian revolutionary, journalist, and writer. He saw the Russian peasant communes as the precursor of future socialism.
[510] The “Hundred Doors” refers to the “doors” of the numerous tombs in the Theban Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
[511] See Chapter VI, Book 1. [Reclus’ note] Reclus refers to L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–8), 1:321–54.
[512] Reclus has in mind the United States and its famous doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” According to this theory, the American state was preordained by God and history to extend its dominion westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
[513] Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 1:189.
[514] Ibid., 1:190.
[515] Ibid., 1:189.
[516] Ibid.
[517] Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread. [Reclus’ note]
[518] H. Taine, Philosophie de l’art dans les Pays-Bas. [Reclus’ note]
[519] Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 80. [Reclus’ note]
[520] Elie Metchnikoff. [Reclus’ note]
[521] Drummond, Ascent of Man, 101, 103. [Reclus’ note]
[522] Anna Forbes, Insulinde: Experiences of a Naturalist’s Wife in the Eastern Archipelago. [Reclus’ note]
[523] “Misoneistes” are defined as “haters of innovation and change.”