" 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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 ...

This paper investigates a contemporary flowering of flânerie similar to that which Walter Benjamin analyzed in the first decades of the Parisian arcades. The flâneur has resurrected in a new space of the recent past as the computer hacker of digital culture. There is, however, a significant difference between the two figures’ ways of relating to the world that gives the hacker an important socio-political agency – with which Benjamin tried, unsuccessfully, to imbue in the flâneur.

Many people have an aptitude for religious experience and spirituality but don't know how to develop this or take it further. Modern societies offer little assistance, and traditional religions are overly preoccupied with their own organizational survival. Minding the Self: Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality offers suggestions for individual spiritual development in our modern and post-modern times. Here, Murray Stein argues that C.G. Jung and depth psychology provide guidance and the foundation for a new kind of modern spirituality.Murray (...) Stein explores the problem of spirituality within the cultural context of modernity and offers a way forward without relapsing into traditional or mythological modes of consciousness. Chapters work towards finding the proper vessel for contemporary spirituality and dealing with the ethical issues that crop up along the way. Stein shows how it is an individual path but not an isolationist one, often using many resources borrowed from a variety of religious traditions: it is a way of symbol, dream and experiences of the numinous with hints of transcendence as these come into personal awareness. Minding the Self: Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality uses research from a wide variety of fields, such as dream-work and the neuroscience of the sleeping brain, clinical experience in Jungian psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethics, Zen Buddhism, Jung's writings and the recently published Red Book. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, Jungian scholars, undergraduates, graduate and post-graduate students and anyone with an interest in modern spirituality. (shrink)

Doris argues that an agent is responsible for her behavior only if that behavior expresses (a relevant subset of) the agent’s values. This view has problems explaining responsibility for mistakes or episodes of forgetfulness. These problems highlight a conceptual problem with Doris’s theory of responsible agency and give us reasons to prefer an alternative (non-valuational) theory of responsible agency.

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

In his new introduction to this current edition of this classic in the field originally published in 1982 (Humanities Press), Hoppe (economics, U. of Nevada, Las Vegas--as was the late author) extols Rothbard's marriage of the "value-free" science of economics with the normative enterprise of ethics and their offspring: libertarianism. Discussion areas are: natural law, a theory of liberty, the state vs. liberty, modern alternative theories of liberty, and toward a theory of strategy for liberty. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, (...) Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

In this study of the works of Sren Kierkegaard, Murray Rae focuses on his understanding of the Christian faith and the nature of Christian conversion. The transformation of an individual under the impact of revelation is explored both in terms of the New Testament concept of metanoia and in comparison with claims to cognitive progress in other fields.

Citizenship education in established democracies is challenged by declining youth participation in democracy. Youth disenchantment and disengagement in democracy is primarily evident in formal political behaviour, especially through voting, declining membership of political parties, assisting at elections, contacting politicians, and the like. If citizenship education is to play a major role in addressing these concerns it will need to review the impact it is making on young people in schools. This paper reviews a major national project on youth participation in (...) democracy in Australia set in the context of a national citizenship education programme. The Youth Electoral Study found that citizenship education in Australian schools has at best been marginally successful and substantially more is required to raise levels of democratic engagement. The paper explores many opportunities available to education systems and schools to address these issues through reconceptualising aspects of the formal and the informal curriculum. (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive overview of the philosophy of propositions, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Comprising 33 original chapters by an international team of scholars, the volume addresses both traditional and emerging questions concerning the nature of propositions.

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

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood. Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating (...) sentential force as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance force, and discuss its implications. (shrink)

This is a commentary on selected texts of Plato concerned with poetry: the Ion and relevant sections of the Republic. It is the first commentary to present these texts together in one volume, and the first in English on Republic 2 and 3 and Ion for nearly 100 years. The introduction sets Plato's views in their Greek context and outlines their influence on later aesthetic thought. An important feature of the commentary is its exploration of the ambivalence of Plato's pronouncements (...) through an analysis of his own skill as a writer. (shrink)

Combined oral contraceptives have been demonstrated to have significant benefits for the treatment and prevention of disease. These medications also are associated with untoward health effects, and they may be directly contraceptive. Prescribers and users must compare and weigh the intended beneficial health effects against foreseeable but unintended possible adverse effects in their decisions to prescribe and use. Additionally, those who intend to abide by Catholic teachings must consider prohibitions against contraception. Ethical judgments concerning both health benefits and contraception are (...) approached in this essay through an overview of the therapeutic, prophylactic, untoward, and contraceptive effects of COC and discussion of magisterial and traditional Catholic teachings from natural law. Discerning through the principle of double effect, proportionate reason, and evidence gathered from the sciences, medical and moral conclusions are drawn that we believe to be fully compliant with good medicine and Catholic teaching. (shrink)