Q & A

Question and answer session with presenters Pauli Heikkilä, Oren Tikkanen, and Lynn Laitala.

An Anarchist Foreign Minister?: The Ideological Background of Rudolf Holsti

Former Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rudolf Holsti, ended his professional career as a professor at Stanford University. In spring 1941, he encountered a news article on Alexandra Kropotkina and was encouraged to send her a letter. In this letter, Holsti revealed his admiration for her father, "anarchist prince" Pjotr Kropotkin. Holsti’s letter to Alexandra Kropotkina further related that as foreign minister he had even sent food from the Finnish embassy in Moscow to Kropotkin while he was being held in custody by the Soviet authorities. The notion of an anarchist foreign minister is profoundly paradoxical, but the aim of my research is to find Kropotkin’s influences in Holsti's work and publications. Before entering politics, Holsti defended his thesis for PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1913 with a rather anarchist theme, “The Relation of War to the Origin of the State.” My paper and presentation will attempt to answer: how are Kropotkin's ideas present in Holsti's academic work? In addition, Holsti and Kropotkin are case studies who guide my interests in the co-relation between the scientific revolution and social thinking in the 19th century.