VISIONS OF HISTORY: WAYS OF SEEING THE PAST. “Most of us without realising it have a unique vision of the past, a way of thinking about it that predisposes us to look at current events in a particular way. In general, we focus on power and its workings while overlooking other aspects of human existence such as voluntary exchange, cooperative interaction, innovation, and discovery.” Remember that the scribes who wrote the records generally worked for some king or other.

UPDATE: Reader John Walker emails:

One of my favourite Kropotkin quotes:

If you open a daily paper you find its pages are entirely devoted to Government transactions and to political jobbery. A Chinaman reading it would believe that in Europe nothing gets done save by order of some master. You find nothing in them about institutions that spring up, grow up, and develop without ministerial prescription. Nothing — or hardly nothing! Even when there is a heading — “Sundry Events” — it is because they are connected with the police. A family drama, an act of rebellion, will only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene.

Three hundred fifty million Europeans love or hate one another, work, or live on their incomes; but, apart from literature, theatre, or sport, their lives remain ignored by newspapers if Governments have not intervened in some way or another. It is even so with history. We know the least details of the life of a king or of a parliament; all good and bad speeches pronounced by the politicians have been preserved. “Speeches that have never had the least influence on the vote of a single member,” as an old parliamentarian said. Royal visits, good or bad humour of politicians, jokes or intrigues, are all carefully recorded for posterity. But we have the greatest difficulty to reconstitute a city of the Middle Ages, to understand the the mechanism of that immense commerce that was carried on between Hanseatic cities, or to know how the city of Rouen built its cathedral. If a scholar spends his life studying these questions, his works remain unknown, and parliamentary histories — that is to say, the defective ones, as they only treat one side of social life — multiply, are circulated, are taught in schools.

And we do not even perceive the prodigious work accomplished every day by spontaneous groups of men, which constitutes the chief work of our century.

– Peter Kropotkin, “The Conquest of Bread”, 1906

And it is only more true today.