Karl Kessler

Kessler, a respected dean at St. Petersburg University, delivered a landmark address months before his death arguing that mutual support, not struggle, drives the progressive development of species. His ideas, published only in Russian, remained nearly unknown until Kropotkin seized upon them and built an entire theory of evolution and human society around them. He matters because he is the forgotten originator of the book's central thesis, the man whose insight Kropotkin credits as the first true understanding of mutual aid as a law of nature.