Originally Posted by SMadsen

WOI, before responding to anything else, I'd like to address this part because I fear it might have resulted in a misunderstanding.

I'm absolutely not saying that neither Bakunin nor Kropotkin hold their ideas to any high regard of egoism. Past the paragraph you quoted, I specifically referred to the dualism created by their mere recognition of egoism.

In "Ethics: Origin and Development", Kropotkin asserts that ethics "aims at the development of social habits and the weakening of the narrowly personal habits". He further claims in the same text, that "there can be no pure altruism without an admixture of personal pleasure - and consequently, without egoism". I'm reading this as a dualism in which there is a mutual reinforcement between the social and personal pleasures. Which in turn, by his arguments of evolution, particularly in "Mutual Aid", reinforces the social habits that contributes to the mutualism in the first place.

Add to this, of course, his observations of "two aspects of animal life" in the very beginning of "Mutual Aid" and I interpret it as Kropotkin is recognizing the situation where lack of social development will inadvertently attribute survival to the egoistic struggle that he found among less social creatures in Siberia, whereas social development will introduce the mutualism he also observed in abundance. Again, a dualism where the 'egoistic beast' and the 'social beast' merge by the principle of Mutual Aid and its necessary ethical foundation.

I admit that it may give the wrong impression to have omitted the part of the social beast in that quote but, 1. it wasn't needed in that particular context, and 2., I reckoned it was "selbstverständlich" - especially when I referred to the 'human dualism' later in the post.

Now, having made my contribution to clear up any potential misunderstanding caused by my bad authoring skills, you can dissect it and blow it to smitherines. At least it now represents my best capability to give the fullest version of what I meant. Which simply was that, unlike Rosseau's rather romantic illustration of the basically 'good human', egoism is at least recognized by Kropotkin.