Pëtr Alekseevič Kropotkin on economics: A sociological analysis of the relationship between ideas and power

Abstract

This paper revisits Pëtr Alekseevič Kropotkin’s critique of classical economics and argues that it may offer a valuable contribution to the sociological analysis of the relationship between ideas and domination. It analyzes this critique as a sociological account of how economic knowledge participates in the legitimation and reproduction of historically specific relations of domination under capitalism. Rather than treating economic categories as neutral descriptions of social reality, Kropotkin reads them as abstractions that tend to naturalize historically specific relations of exploitation and hierarchy. The article reconstructs three key themes of his critique, namely the division of labour, scarcity, and wages, and shows how they may clarify broader sociological questions concerning legitimation, ideology, and the political role of knowledge. Read in this way, Kropotkin appears not simply as an anarchist polemicist, but as a thinker whose work helps understand how economic ideas participate in the reproduction of social inequality and power.