" With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom.

This work represents Murray Bookchin's riposte to the antihumanism, mysticism and antirationalism which are influencing many people's attitudes to environmental problems. Bookchin offers a critique of, among others, social Darwinists, deep ecologists, new agers, technophobes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard.

Robyn Eckersley claims erroneously that I believe humanity is currently equipped to take over the “helm” of natural evolution. In addition, she provides a misleading treatment of my discussion of the relationship of first nature and second nature. I argue that her positivistic methodology is inappropriate in dealing with my processual approach and that her Manichaean contrast between biocentrism and anthropocentrism virtually excludes any human intervention in the natural world. With regard to Warwick Fox’s treatment of my writings, I argue (...) that he deals with my views on society’s relationship to nature in a simplistic, narrowly deterministic, and ahistorical manner. I fault both of my deep ecology critics for little or no knowledge of my writings. I conclude with an outline of a dialectical naturalism that treats nature as an evolutionary process-not simply as a scenic view-and places human and sodal evolution in a graded relationship with natural evolution. I emphasize that society and humanity can no longer be separated from natural evolution and that the kind of society we achieve will either foster the development of first nature or damage the planet beyond repair. (shrink)

All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again--the shit about the "class line," the "role of the working class," the "trained cadres," the "vanguard party," and the "proletarian dictatorship." It's all back again, and in a more vulgarized form than ever. The Progressive Labor Party is not the only example, it is merely the worst. One smells the same shit in various offshoots of SDS, and in the Marxist and Socialist clubs on campuses, not to speak of (...) the Trotskyist groups, the International Socialist Clubs and the Youth Against War and Fascism. (shrink)

This collection of essays by one of the world's most respected ecologists calls for a critical social standpoint that transcends both 'biocentrism' and ...

The failure of socialism, particularly its Marxian variety, to provide a revolutionary alternative has been followed by a highly abstract form of socialist theory that stands sharply at odds with a practical revolutionary project. Its retreat from the factory to the academy—an astonishing phenomenon that cannot be justified by viewing “knowledge” as a technical force in society—has denied socialism the right to a decent burial by perpetuating it as a professional ideology. To the extent that the academy itself has become (...) increasingly disengaged from society, it has used socialist theory to indulge its worst habits. The remains of a once-insurgent movement have provided the intellectual nutrients for conceptual frameworks utterly alien to it—a level of discourse, a range of perceptions, a terminology, and a body of pretensions that mutually reinforce the reduction of ideology to socialism and of socialism to ideology. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

IT CAN BE ARGUED that there is no objective measurement of the influence of an individual’s thought upon collective social movements, especially in the case of direct democratic social movements for human emancipation from authority. This is certainly the case with Murray Bookchin, a revolutionary thinker who renounced Marxism to re-imagine anarchism and renounced anarchism to form his own political proposition of communalism and democratic confederalism. While it is impossible to measure the influence of Bookchin’s thought and (...) action on the current social-historical global timescape, it is also impossible to ignore it, visible as it is in the revolutionary democratic institution of Kurdish Rojava, and within contemporary ecological and social movements. When I embarked on an inquiry into the importance of Bookchin for Greek social movements, I understood that it was a task never to be completed. Τhe libertarian, anarchist editor Michalis Protopsaltis used to say, “It’s not the naked truth coming out of the well, it is just my opinion.”. (shrink)

Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other. Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also make valuable contributions to projects of (...) just social change. I identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social justice. (shrink)

Bookchin's social ecology explores the narrative of domination and hierarchy. He argues that today's environmental crisis reflects a link between the human domination of nature and the domination of human by human. Hierarchy, as the pivot of such domination, is viewed as a psychology which permeates and corrodes not only social life (as reflected in class, gender, ethnic and other relations), but nature as well. Bookchin, seeking to replace hierarchy with cooperation by devolving power and autonomy to the (...) individual in community, produces an eco?anarchism. Bookchin argues for the interpenetration of the human and the natural, seeing humans as ?nature rendered self?conscious?. Since evolution is viewed as a dialectic privileging participation, differentiation and spontaneity, community becomes both the means and ends of an ecological society. The critique in this paper explores the autonomy?community tension in Bookchin as well as the broad political implications of Bookchin's framework of social change. (shrink)

이 글은 북친이 사회생태론에서 제시하고 있는 자유 자연의 실현 가능성을 살펴보는 것이다. 자유 자연은 인간과 자연이 조화롭게 살아가는 이상적 생태사회를 지칭하며 이의 실천 지침이 코뮌주의다. 북친은 자연에 대한 자신만의 독특한 관점으로 생태문제와 사회문제를 하나의 틀 안에서 바라본다. 동식물이나 풍경을 일차 자연이라 정의하고 인간이 창조한 문화를 포함한 자연을 이차 자연이라고 정의한다. 북친은 생태 문제를 인간에 의한 인간 지배 문화가 인간의 자연 지배로 이어진 결과로 보는데, 일차 자연과 이차 자연 사이의갈등이 극복된 자유 자연이라는 이상적인 생태사회 도래를 전망하고 있다. 그런데 북친의자유 자연이 실현되기 (...) 위해서는 변증법적 자연주의라는 사회생태론의 논리체계가 타당해야 하고 실천 지침으로 제시하고 있는 코뮌주의가 현실 사회에서 실천 가능해야 한다. 북친의 자유 자연은 헤겔과 마르크스주의의 변증법적 논리구도를 응용하여 미래 이상사회 도래를 예언한 기계론적 사회발전관이다. 마르크스주의 정치실험 사례에서 알 수 있듯이 애초에 이상사회 도래를 예언하는 기계론적인 사회발전 법칙은 사물의 지속적인 변화의 속성을 전제로 하는 변증법적 논리구도와 양립될 수 없다. 또한 국가의 해체와 현재의 전 지구적 시장 구조 극복을 전제로 하는 코뮌주의 실현의 구체적 방법이 충분히 제시되지 못하고 있다. 그러나 북친의 자유 자연 구상은 긍정적인 의미가 크다. 생태문제를 사회문제와 하나의틀 안에서 바라보고 그 해법 또한 사회 구조의 변화에서 찾았는데 이는 녹색당의 출현 등 생태정치운동의 전 지구적 확산의 이념적 기초가 되었다. 특히 아나키즘과 마르크스주의라는가장 급진적인 사상의 영향을 받았음에도 불구하고 그 실현 방법론에서 온전히 비폭력적인실천 방침만을 제시하고 있는 점이다. 이는 북친의 생태철학이 사회체제 변혁이라는 급진성에도 불구하고 오늘날까지 지속적으로 전개 될 수 있는 중요한 시사점으로 봐야 할 것이다. (shrink)

I provide an exposition and critique of the ecological ethics of Murray Bookchin. First, I show how Bookchin draws on ecology and evolutionary biology to produce a mutually constraining cluster of ethical guidelines to underpin and justify his vision of a nonhierarchical, ecological society. I then critically examine Bookchin’s method of justification and the normative consequences that flow from his position. I argue that Bookchin’s enticing promise that his ecological ethics offers the widest realm of (...) freedom to all life forms is undermined by the way in which he distinguishes and privileges second nature over first nature. I conclude that Bookchin’s promise can only be delivered by a biocentric philosophy rather than by his own ecological ethics. (shrink)

Title: Lessons of the Spanish RevolutionPublisher: Freedom PressAuthor: Vernon RichardsTitle: The Anarchist CollectivesPublisher: Black Rose BooksAuthor: Sam Dolgoff Title: The Spanish Anarchists 1868-1936Publisher: HarperCollinsISBN: 0060906073Author: Murray Bookchin.

From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character ...

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

(Re)presentations of evil in media, philosophy and literature -- The dangerous ones : when evil was a woman -- Space/times of evil : political life and social worlds.

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

Increasingly, Western culture embraces confusion as a virtue and decries certainty as a sin. Those who are confused about sexuality and identity are viewed as heroes. Those who are confused about morality are progressive pioneers. Those who are confused about spirituality are praised as tolerant. Conversely, those who express certainty about any of these issues are seen as bigoted, oppressive, arrogant, or intolerant. This cultural phenomenon led the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary to name "post-truth" their word of the (...) year in 2016. How can Christians offer truth and clarity to a world that shuns both? By accurately describing the Culture of Confusion and how it has affected our society, author Abdu Murray seeks to awaken Westerners to the plight we find ourselves in. He also challenges Christians to consider how they have played a part in fostering the Culture of Confusion through bad arguments, unwise labeling, and emotional attacks. Ultimately, Saving Truth provides arguments from a Christian perspective for the foundations of truth and how those foundations apply to sexuality, identity, morality, and spirituality. For those enmeshed in the culture of confusion, the book offers a way to untangle oneself and find hope in the clarity that Christ offers. (shrink)

In _The Global and the Local: An Environmental Ethics Casebook_, Dale Murray presents fifty-one compelling case studies. By interweaving theoretical considerations into case studies, Murray illuminates a comprehensive range of the most pressing environmental issues facing our biosphere.

A challenging new work of cultural and political theory rethinks the concept of hegemony.

Provides a comprehensive overview and introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Propositions.

This volume assesses the ethical, quantitative, and qualitative questions posed by the current financing of biomedical research.

A qualitative analysis of societal silences, demonstrating how the unsaid directs social action and shapes individual and collective lives.