La ecología de la libertad: Surgimiento y disolución de la jerarquía

by Murray Bookchin, Álvaro G. Ormaechea (Translator)

«La noción misma de la dominación de la naturaleza por el hombre se deriva del dominio muy real de lo humano por lo humano». Con esta sucinta formulación, Murray Bookchin, una voz activa en los movimientos ecológico y anarquista durante más de cuarenta años, presenta su obra más ambiciosa. Su inspirada síntesis de ecología, antropología y teoría política revela la contradicción entre imposición y libertad en la cultura humana, tanto entre seres humanos como hacia la naturaleza, señalando constantemente el camino hacia un futuro ecológico y sostenible, donde no todo es un recurso explotable. Teniendo en cuenta que en la naturaleza prevalecen la cooperación, la simbiosis y el comportamiento emergente —procesos que denomina redes de alimentación y círculos de interdependencia—, propone como alternativa al capitalismo contemporáneo el desarrollo sostenible, la tecnología apropiada y especialmente la ecología social. La narrativa histórica de Bookchin es sencilla: la devastación ambiental, económica y política nace en el momento en que las sociedades humanas comienzan a organizarse jerárquicamente. Y la lección por aprender es igualmente básica: la pesadilla continuará hasta que se disuelva la jerarquía y los seres humanos desarrollen estructuras sociales más sostenibles e igualitarias.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Ecology, History, Theory, Environment

592 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1982

About the author

Murray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

Reviews

[Javier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Besides Edward Said's Orientalism, The Ecology of Freedom is the most exciting and fascinating book I've read in a long time.

Bookchin here promotes his idea of social ecology and his vision of an ecological society (and world). He takes issue with so-called environmentalist movements, which, like the psychotherapist that Herbert Marcuse roundly criticizes, seek merely to have society adapt to the madness of extant structures rather than promote radical change, as social ecology advocates. He also denounces New-Age, biocentric mysticism as feel-goodery that fails to call into question relations of power, hierarchy, and domination and, relatedly, is easily commodified within the capitalist structures that (Bookchin says) it should be subverting and overthrowing.

The core of Bookchin's argument here is the creation of a qualitatively better society, rather than a merely quantitatively better one (something that he criticizes liberals, Marxists, and socialists on). He embarks on a review of anthropological accounts of 'primitive peoples,' who he finds to have lived within a non-hierarchical social nexus that, instead of private property, functioned according to the rights of usufruct (open access to all), an ethics of complementarity (instead of competition), and an irreducible minimum, whereby everyone was afforded the basic necessities of life without reserve. Bookchin denounces Thomas Hobbes' account of human nature here, characterizing it as mere apologism for hierarchy and domination. He also finds much of liberal theory--that which dominates ideology today--to be a natural outgrowth of Hobbesian thought. As with Hobbes, Bookchin finds Sigmund Freud's account of human psychology to be incorrect at best and reactionary at worst, as he attributes human 'evil' to immutable human traits rather than socialization processes shaped by hierarchical, dominant interests.

Positively, Bookchin here posits a return to the values of 'primitive' societies. He finds that only through doing away with hierarchical social relations (capitalism, though more than this of course) can humanity realize its potentiality through affirming the subjectivity of every individual--and, claims Bookchin, the subjectivity of nature--in place of treating people/the environment as mere objects, tools of production, and 'resources.' Bookchin, then, seeks not a less offensive capitalism or a Marxian socialism but a libertarian municipalism, in which everyone can cultivate herself within an authentic, caring, loving social nexus plagued not by hierarchy, Karl Marx's 'realm of necessity,' or the spectre of ecological collapse. Bookchin emphasizes that the project of social ecology must be guided not by the dominant mode--power--but rather by ethics, imagination, and utopianism if it is to defend its advocacy of qualitative change. As in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin stresses the need for 'liberatory technologies' that will help to do away with hierarchical modes of social organization and transcend the oppressive and ecocidal impulses of much of our current reality.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murray Bookchin (R.I.P., 2006) was one of the most important American theorists of the 20th century. He is most known for pioneering and promoting 'social ecology,' which holds that "the domination of nature by [hu:]man stems from the domination of human by human." In other words, the only way to resolve the ecological crisis is to create a free and democratic society.

The Ecology of Freedom is one of Bookchin's classic works, in which he not only outlines social ecology, but exposes hierarchy, "the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command", from its emergence in pre-'civilized' patriarchy all the way to capitalism today. The purpose of the book is to show that hierarchy is exclusively a human phenomena, one which has only existed for a relatively short period of time in humanity's 2 million year history. For that reason, and also because he finds examples of people resisting and overturning hierarchies ever since their emergence, Bookchin believes we can create a world based on social equality, direct democracy and ecological sustainability.

It seems to me this fundamental hope in human possibility is the most essential contribution of this book. In discussing healthier forms of life than we currently inhabit, Bookchin makes a distinction between "organic societies", which were pre-literate, hunter-gatherer human communities existing before hierarchy took over, and "ecological society", which he hopes we will create to bring humanity back into balance with nature, but without losing the intellectual and artistic advances of "civilization" (his quote-marks).

Of 'organic society' he says "I use the term to denote a spontaneously formed, noncoercive, and egalitarian society - a 'natural' society in the very definite sense that it emerges from innate human needs for association, interdependence, and care." This, he explains, is where we come from. Not a utopia free of problems, but a real society based on the principle of "unity of diversity," meaning respect for each member of the community, regardless of sex, age, etc. - an arrangement that is free of domination. He also characterizes organic societies as "part of the balance of nature - a forest community or a soil community - in short, a truly ecological community or ecocommunity peculiar to its ecosystem, with an active sense of participation in the overall environment and the cycles of nature."

Things didn't go wrong all at once, or all the sudden. It took eons of slow changes that eroded the solidarity and equality within certain societies before anything as destructive or coercive as the State, with its coercive and violent redistribution of goods, emerged. Along the way, many enclosures upon community life were reversed in whole or part. Nevertheless, a few areas of the world saw things degenerate into militaristic ruling classes coming to power, determined to conquer and destroy. To acquire power for themselves required putting others down, by force if necessary, and taking as much as possible from the planet. These people are still in control, hence our current state of affairs.

The other crucial point made in this book is that the structure of power is really the overriding issue when we think about moving towards an ecological society. Alternative technologies certainly have a role, as do more environmental consciousness, culture, etc. But none of these can do much unless we democratize the way power is distributed in society. Any attempt to "green" capitalism, for example, is futile because the system as such is precisely what is destroying the planet. Remedying this requires empowering people to take control of their lives and surroundings away from those interested only in domination of humans and the Earth. In Bookchin's words, to achieve "harmony with nature", we first need "harmony in society."

The sweep of ideas that compose the doctrine of social ecology are compelling and extremely relevant for us today living in both social and ecological crises. Unfortunately Bookchin, while a great theorist, was a pretty lousy writer. In Ecology of Freedom he approaches subjects like a philosopher, attempting to separate himself from previous thinkers and carve an ideological niche for himself. He also constantly references other philosophers (mostly white dudes), in a way that assumes the reader knows what he is talking about. Most of the time, I didn't.

What Bookchin lacked was the ability to speak to a mass audience, in their own language. He could not take the vast plethora of ideas in his head and synthesize them into a simple and readable program for change. Instead, we're left with incredibly important and relevant ideas caught up in a web of philosophical jargon and sectarian attacks on other radicals. (His schizophrenic relationship with Karl Marx is especially frustrating because he never just comes out and says what he finds essential about Marx and what he finds destructive - we just get tons of side-comments as if he's speaking to Marx while discussing other topics with the reader).

Nevertheless, I gained something from this book by taking Bookchin with a dose of irreverence. He had a lot of good ideas, but like all theorists, he's no one to follow blindly. He was imperfect. Nevertheless, like the best of us he put his limited energies into making this world a better place.

[Kevin Carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the anthropological and historical discussion was frequently engaging, it was also rambling and excessive. I couldn't really get into it until chapter ten. I know this was supposed to be Bookchin's "grand unifying theory of everything" opus, but it was still pretty self-indulgent. And yes, I know, I probably don't have room to talk.

[andrahne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not easy to read, but you should do if you want to grasp relation between domination and ecology. And more about hierarchy, ethics, politics..

You may prefer Remaking Society, shorter and easier book to start social ecology of Bookchin.

[Laszlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

As our society starts to dawn on the prospect of self-annihilation through the degradation of nature and acceleration of climate change, albeit slowly and with great pushback, we are faced with the question of: ''How did we get here?''. Ranging from the reformist to the reactionary, none of the theories have yet to reach a cohesive and encompassing answer to the question other than those based on purely materialistic and scientifc economic premises, and we see the lack of a clear understanding of this in a slow progress in implementing solutions. However, as Murray Bookchin very well understood, the answer to the solutions lies in understanding the source of the problem, yet in mainstream circles this is rarely even considered.

In this incisive and visionary work combining:philosophy, anthropology and political theory, Bookchin manages what other leftist theorists have failed, to create a synthesis of Marxist and anarchist traditions but in sphere of an ecological outlook on society. Firstly, Bookchin traces the emergence of hierarchy, from its earliest beginning in preliterate societies, as the main culprit for the vast swath of ills that have been inflicted on humanity, that now, at its peak technological development is consuming the Earth and putting in jeopardy the fate of humanity, all in the name of infinite growth and accumulation. Secondly, in the process of developing our hierarchical modes of organisation, we have applied the fundamentals of our societies now based on dominance and control, on our relations with nature. We have forgotten our origins, placed nature outside as the great ''Other'' and have treated it in the same way we have treated our fellow man, with a sense of property, dominance, violence and egotism. Essentially, to look at the problem of how to treat nature, we must look at the issue of how we treat our fellow kin, from where our dominant behaviors were reflected on the environment.

Bookchin identifies 'first nature', in which one can include what we would call ''the environment''and 'second nature', which is society and the communion of people on Earth. However, in creating this dichotomy, Bookchin eschews creating a dualistic viewpoint but rather emphasises the role of symbiosis and deep interconectedness, the complementarity of our existence with all that is outside of human society. This concept will form the basis of introducing the concept of social ecology.

Bookchin shows how hierarchy evolves over many centuries in a slow gradual process, it is first implemented by the growing strength of a priestly or shamanic class, that will start eroding the communalistic and mutualistic values of Neolithic communities through faultlines that, probably, appeared on those of age and gender. Environmental effects will exacerbate this, especially in the case of pastoral peoples faced with scarcity and finally with the emergence of the first major civilizations of Egypt and Summer, we see hierarchy entrenched in a rigid social system. However, the fight of the earliest communities against the formation of city and later nation states is testament to the inherent repugnance and abusive relationship these new forms of organisation elicit in the traditions of early communities.The book follows the evolution of hierarchy as it shakes off the matricentric roots of humanity and the ideals of usufruct and consociation, of autonomy and individuality into a highly structured, centralized and violent nation state, ruled by an entrenched religious and political class. As hierarchy emerges, so does property, ownership, patriarchy, dominance and relations of control, of distancing between the organic connections once held by humanity.

Bookchin traces this evolution both in the social realm but also in the realms of reason, ethics and technology to see how hierarchy effects our thinking and framing of our world and the tools we utilize to exploit resources human or material. The lack of an ethical approach leaves reason and technology with purely instrumental and egotistical aims, too narrow to encompass the width and breath of its implications. Technology is used to control and dominate the working class and achieve maximum amount of output to the detriment of human communities instead of liberating Man from toil and to achieve ''freedom for'' instead of ''freedom from'',while reason and science are blocked in a mechanistic view of mankind that fails to liberate it from its shackles and exacerbates a view of humanity that does not encompass the wholeness of our existence.

Bookchins proposition to recognize hierarchy as the source of our problems is refreshing and adds a vast variety of open spaces and areas to explore and uncover. In our need to refashion society, we must, for the sake of our survival and continued existence, renounce the tradition of dominance, epitomized in todays visceral capitalism that consumes and grows in ways that will potentially make human life untennable. Our vision of our future should include a society that is based on libertarian principles, on the concept of the equality of unequals, of the respect for our individuality and subjective experience, of our desires and pleasurable pursuits and a reorganization and restructuring of our society to a scale that is in harmony with and symbiosis with our natural environment,envisioned by him through confederated autonomous communes, to not only use its resources but to add to the bounty and beauty of nature as a member of its ecosystem.

Although there are shortcomings, related to a certain degree to a cohesion and flow of certain chapters and the very philosophical approach Bookcin uses and the lack of a deeper analysis of property and its role in the evolution of hierarchy, especially with regards to slavery (here, Bookchin could have made great use of the works of Thorsten Veblen to name one, as to how the enslavement of women eroded community life and brought about the fall of matricentric cultures) Ecology of Freedom is a paradigm shifter, and although relegated to the underground of political theory it is the duty of all who agree with its thesis and care for continued human life on Earth, to propagate the concept of social ecology, struggle for it and add to the thread that Bookchin started weaving.

The role of Man in the global ecosystem can be compared to that of the beaver. The beaver builds dams to create shelters and be able to hunt for fish, this in turn changes the surrounding environment by changing the flow of the river, but the beaver does so in harmony and symbiosis with it so that it does not affect the other members of the ecological life-cycle but even enhance and add to to the fecundity of the surrounding environment. Humans, do more or less the same thing, except by virtue of their level of consciousness and abstraction and technological powers on the one hand and their dominant and distanced approach to nature, build dams, farms, factories, roads etc. in dischord with the natural balance and diminishing its wealth. We have much to learn from beavers.

Renouncing mysticism and mysanthropy and the legacy of violence and dominance, we must start making the steps of changing and adapting our society and reconnecting it with our origins. If Bookchin's vision is accused of being utopic, then I would say to them what the 1968 students declared and to which Bookchin added: ''We must do the impossible...lest we face the unthinkable.''

[Dimos Kifokeris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1982, The ecology of freedom is Murray Bookchin's (1921-2006) magnum opus, central in its author's philosophical and political output. Along with Our synthetic environment (1962), Post-scarcity anarchism (1971) and The philosophy of social ecology: essays on dialectical naturalism (1990), it forms the basic quadruple of an otherwise large literary body of work. This work established (even posthumously) Bookchin as one of the most influential philosophers and political scientists of the 20th century and a profound figure of contemporary social ecology, anarchism (with which, admittedly, Bookchin became disenchanted in the late 1990s) and Communalism (the final form of his collective ideas, after his disenchantment with anarchism). In the mentioned quadruple, The ecology of freedom is by far the most expansive and foundational work and, in my opinion, it should be the first studied in the line of his writings, despite the fact that two of the rest of his basic books precede it.

The book has been criticised, especially by Ulrike Heider, as overly utopian, but such labels have been, eventually, largely dispelled in the '00s. The ecology of freedom has been elevated as a concise text that formed the basis of, among other things, the body politic of Rojava, the Kurdish de facto autonomous democratic confederalist region in northern Syria, which is in the spearhead of the decades-long struggle of the Kurdish people for the establishment of their independent entity. Among other things, Rojava is thus far the only edifice worldwide that is explicitly developed in the principles of direct democracy, decentralised and communal society, sustainability, polyethnicity (in spite of the more quantitavely prevalent Kurdish population) and an unparalleled level of gender equality, evident even in the militant conflicts in which Rojava is forced to participate in the ongoing Syrian Civil War.

To write a review of such a work, amounting in nearly 390 pages, featuring a multitude of concepts and citing several hundred references (of, among others, philosophical, economical, anthropological, social, political, historical, religious, biological and scientific studies) is virtually impossible. So I will just try to put in text a conglomeration of ideas, impressions and influences under my scope as both an engineer and a radical libertarian (if such a largely dysfunctional label can be tolerated).

The ecology of freedom is critical of the class-centered analysis of orthodox Marxism, the simplistic anti-state forms of libertarianism and liberalism, and the Freudian analyses on subjectivity that are redolent with Victorian rationalism (and not reasoning). In this vein, it presents a more complex view of societies, the central cancerous quality of which is domination. In Bookchin's view, domination (of young by the old, of usufruct by militarism, of the labor force by the burgeois, of women by men, of reason by rationalism, of science and technology by scientism, of nature by inorganic society and others) is the main eroding force that impedes humanity, a force that exists and brings about disaster even in presumably classless and/or stateless societies.

The accumulation of hierarchical systems throughout history, that has occurred up to contemporary societies and which tends to determine the human collective and individual psyche, is also pointed out. We read that "... the objective history of the social structure becomes internalized as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day - not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception."

The principles of unity of diversity, post-scarcity, irreducible minimum, complimentarity, usufruct and, most importantly, of the equality of unequals (echoeing, albeit in a more generously ethical way and taking into extreme account the individual's aspirations, the maxim from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs) are analysed far more deeply than in the cases of more classical forms of anarchism (as that advocated, for example, by Proudhon and Kropotkin), where consociation is realized in the terms of a contract, with its underlying premise of equivalence - a system of "equity" that, ironically, reaches its apogee in the burgeois conceptions of "right" and the moral coinage of the modern State. For such an analysis, Bookchin defined social ecology in largely critical terms - as an anthropology of hierarchy and domination; elaborated the conflict of sensibilities between preliterate societies and the emerging State; explored the imposition of rule, acquisitive impulses and property rights; and chronicled the commitment of traditional societies to usufruct, complimentarity and the irreducible minimum against class societies' claims to property, the sanctity of contract and adherence to the rule of equivalence. In the latter, Bookchin was always careful to emphasize that the study of preliterate communities and their success in the aforementoned principles should not be romanticised into a new age parochial living, a return to neolithic ways of living in scarcity and a "lifestyle anarchism" that sheds the achievements of civilization; but indeed, diffuse (in his vision of a future ecological and reason-ridden society of the equality of unequals) these principles in all aspects of intellect, science, progress (albeit not in the burgeois meaning of the word) and cutting-edge technology - thus, transforming a sterile environmentalism into robust ecology.

The analysis went so far as to point out that hierarchy, command and obedience articulate their sense of authority in the way that humans have been taught to see themselves: as objects to be manipulated, as things to be used and as aspects of a superstructure, an "external" nature that by no means can be integrated with "the rest of the" nature itself, which is "something else", something that is meant only to be exploited and, distorting post-Marxian views, to be transmutated into objects through sheerly economistic terms. In a sentimental remark that follows Henri Bergson's concepts, Bookchin tries (and succeds, in my opinion) to dialectically dissolve such a tainted notion (by no means in a metaphysical way, but rather in a rational one), going as far as to conceptualise the biosphere (and its crown jewels, reason and self-awareness) as an entropy-reducing factor.

It is really difficult to delineate the multitude of notions in the conceptual framework of The ecology of freedom but, following the progression of its chapters, it can be denoted that it tracks the concept of social ecology and the outlook of an organic society, it historically studies the emergence of hierarchy, the epistemologies of rule and the legacy of domination, it demarcates the notion of justice in conjuction and, at the same time, opposition to the one of freedom as the absence of domination, it annotates the progression of humanity's spiritual, religious and reasoning ideas, it analyses the images and social matrix of technology, it crucially denotes the ambiguities of freedom (in order not to be lost in utopian thinking) and it finally sets the conceptual bases of an ecological society. What is really helpful is that, along with a vast multitude of citations and footnotes, almost all of the twelve chapters are very comprehensible and can communicate their concepts even to less advanced (in regard to these notions) readers. Exceptions to this are, particularly, the relatively small chapters 7, 9 and 10, that feature a very complex Hegelian, Fichteian and Marxian dialectic, and require at least a basic background in ontology, political science, reason and the philosophy of technology, particularly that of Aristotle and the 17th, 18th and 19th century philosophers and political scientists (Marx, Engels, Charles Fourier and Francis Bacon notwithstanding).

It should be noted that, apart from its analysis as a whole, certain aspects of The ecology of freedom can stand wonderfully on their own and be the bases of discreet research. Among others, I note the excellent analysis on how monastic Christianity owes its background to the philosophical doctrines of the Stoics, the foundations of gnosticism and how they either served or opposed hierarchical religions during the course of the centuries, the meticulous presentation of the utopian and radical thinking of Fourier and de Sade (its problematic aspects notwithstanding), the in-the-face notation of domination and subordination as constituent parts of modern capitalism and the extreme importance appointed to tendencies that rightfully further the confrontation of the psychic problems of hierarchy and the social problems of domination, like "radical forms of feminism that encompass the psychological dimensions of male domination, indeed, domination itself; ecology conceived as a social outlook and personal sensibility; and community as intimate, human-scale forms of association and mutual aid."

All in all, The ecology of freedom is an essential reading for both the ones that are ideologically attached and detached to its concepts. It can serve for both the validation and invalidation of one's state of mind, and a source of robust dialectic. Personally, I find the delineated ideas extremely important, attractive and basic for one's radical and libertarian thinking (whether being an anarchist or not), in spite of not being completely in line with some of them. Bookchin, although devastating at certain points of his analysis - where his scientific breakdown of human suffering and his insigthful dialectics about the fall of reason into muddy puddles of nihilistic rationalism are really a multitude of punches in the gut - offers a pragmatistically optimistic view of the future and the evolution of mankind as part of natural history, in the line that these are able to be realized through social ecology.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murray Bookchin elaborately argues that the ecological problems facing humanity are inextricably linked to the emergence of hierarchy, and the domination of human by human. In the first ten chapters the author tries to reconstruct—via anthropological evidence—the emergence of hierarchy, while contrasting that with all the social movements that tried to retain a radical libertarian of society. I will let the author's words best describe this first part of the book:

Up to now, I have had to define social ecology in largely critical terms—as an anthropology of hierarchy and domination. I have been concerned primarily with authority and the conflict in sensibilities between preliterate societies and the emerging State. I have explored the imposition of rule, acquisitive impulses, and property rights on a recalcitrant archaic world, one that has persistently resisted "civilization"—at times violently, at other times passively. I have chronicled the commitment of traditional societies to usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum against class society's claims to property, the sanctity of contract, and its adherence to the rule of equivalence. In short, I have tried to rescue the legacy of freedom that the legacy of domination has sought to extirpate from the memory of humanity. (p. 318)

In the latter part of the book—and intertwined in the above narrative—the author describes his notion of social ecology, which can be presented in an "elevator-speech" form via the following paragraph:

To think ecologically for design purposes is to think of technics as an ecosystem, not merely as cost effective devices based on "renewable resources." Indeed, to think ecologically is to include na­ture's "labor" in the technical process, not only humanity's. The use of organic systems to replace machines wherever possible—say, in pro­ducing fertilizer, filtering out sewage, heating greenhouses, providing shade, recycling wastes, and the like—is a desideratum in itself. (p. 265)

For me, most importantly—as a self-avowed rational skeptic—was how this book managed to push me to raise myriads of questions that I have not considered before—partly because they are virtually missing from public discourse. The most world-view shattering being the question of the impact that hierarchy, and domination has had on the way in which society employs the three things I hold most dear: reason, science, and technology. And of tantamount importance is the fact that the critiques laid out by the author do not devolve into infantile mysticism, or antirational thought:

These three great pathways or "tools" (to use the language of mod­ern instrumentalism) for achieving human freedom—reason, science, and technics—that seemed so assured merely a generation ago no longer enjoy their high status. Since the middle of the twentieth cen­tury, we have seen reason become rationalism, a cold logic for the so­phisticated manipulation of human beings and nature; science become scientism, an ideology for viewing the world as an ethically neutral, essentially mechanical body to be manipulated; and technics become mod­ern technology, an armamentorium of vastly powerful instruments for asserting the authority of a technically trained, largely bureaucratic elite. (p. 268)

This book has given me things to think about for years to come. And at this point in time has enshrined itself as one of the most revelatory books ever.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh how I wanted to love this book and wanted to be unable to put it down… but it was a real tough read. Tough in part because of the content (though I had my own issues with the language used), but mostly tough because of Bookchin’s rambling and and frequent jumps between thoughts and entire concepts mid-page. Granted, he warns readers in the beginning of this book that he can’t help himself in that regard, but it made reading these incredibly dense concepts that much more difficult.

I did come away with really interesting thoughts and ideas of his, but really those weren’t until maybe 10 chapters in?

[D.R.O · Rating 5 out of 5]

he’s excessive but it’s bc his brain is so big.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sweeping analysis of dominance and hierarchy. I read this a few decades ago and found it as relevant today as I did then. I believe this book is foundational to an understanding of his anarchical brand of municipalism and economy

[Verdiana Calvetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work did not exactly match with my expectations, because I started off with a bit unconscious of how the main ideas and scopes (which I was instead quite aware of) would be developed. Main ideas which are, anyway, the most comprehensible message of the book: human society, or better human societies, must be rebuilt from scratch, beginning with a change in their premises, especially ethical and rational ones, which should enlighten and invest the relationship between humans, but also between human kind and nature - ethics and reason which invest, according to the Bookchinian philosophy of nature - which, from what I've caught, is a sort of reprisal of Aristotelian metaphysics, in light of some thesis brought upon recently by contemporary biology and philosophy of biology - also any relationship between other organic organism and the inorganic matter as a whole subjective entity, which ignores the antagonisms the human civilization was built on.
It is exactly this argument that ends up being obscure to me, to the extent that I think I've missed some points here and sincerely found myself all worn out in the effort - of course, being this an opus with more than 500 pages, very thick in content, with (apparently) many steps, leaps and deviations from the main argument of, say, a chapter, to some kind of abstract clarification, redundant examples or digressions. I must admit and denounce myself to be absolutely ignorant at the moment about anarchism, communalism and political theory regarding these views, so I guess it's pretty physiological that I lose the thread sometimes, but gosh: Bookchin made it so easy to feel lost on. Which is, genuinely, a shame, because the topics and the implications themselves, the irreducibly and uncompromisingly ethical stand of conceiving ourselves active part of the nature and our communities as well, are precious to me, and that's the take home message I've acquainted. Many specific arguments have been inspiring to me and require me to look more into them in further readings (from Bookchin himself or other thinkers): the dialectic of antagonism between nature and humanity and between humans as a requisite for the establishment of hierarchy, the epistemology of domination which is introjeced in our psyche, the distinction between government and management, the refusal of the marxian theory of abstract labour, the call for an aestheticized life experience and for a freedom of (rational) choice not in the realm of necessity within a society that has monopolized the concept of scarcity to the interest of the elites.
I'm sure I will dwell on this work again in a time to come - for now I think I need to build a larger conceptual framework regarding philosophy to grasp the power in this huge opus. I'm still glad I've tried.

(English is not my first language so I apologize for any mistake)


edit almost four years later, with a degree in philosophy and some knowledge in contemporary anthropology: now I understand pretty much everything, AND SO I do not like this book anymore. Basically Bookchin is a social evolutionist in the like of good old Kropotkin, but with an hegelian understanding of "society" as not opposed to "nature" but rather as different qualities of the same dynamic of reality. Nowadays it's unreadable.

[Nebuchadnezzar Kander · Rating 5 out of 5]

How could we ever escape the disaster of our species if we do not firstly find the right philosophical path to tread on? Bookchin takes us on a journey to the roots of of our hierarchal thought processes, and its not just a dismal one. On that road we will discover how rich life truely is, how gorgeous communal life was and can be for us. We won't be wasting time and energy on meaningless bullshit. Then we'll be living an authentically democratic life, with real freedom, good usage of technology and a strong connection to nature. Reading this book I was reminded of things I read in David Graeber's book Debt. Both these anarchist thinkers try to tell us something important: Life doesn't have to be like this, another world is possible. It already is, in a sense. I would recommend everyone to read at least the first chapter of this magnificent book.

[Hamza Sarfraz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is certainly an interesting book on social theory. Some of the takes in it are unique and worth exploring. But overall, the whole concept seems like a bit of overreach and a lot of abstraction. Plus, the writing is very inaccessible.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, brain hurt

[Adam Butt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't always know what he's talking about but I'm pretty sure he's right.

[Sara]

El libro es densisimo y merecería una nueva traducción porque ya es difícil de leer como para añadirle dificultad.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

In short, I see this as an amazing book, and one which I will certainly return to when I have experienced more philosophies.

Possibly my favorite aspect of The Ecology of Freedom was how Bookchin can begin with a premise, display deep analysis and dense information regarding the premise, and eventually connect the evidence with this premise in an extremely engaging wrap-up, both throughout the book and within every chapter. While I've seen Bookchin's verbose style being criticized as something dull or lacking in entertainment value, but I found it informative and to-the-point. Occasionally, he would actually crack jokes within complex sentences, and while they were academically worded, it is still worth noting.

In terms of content, this book was most definitely dense, yet not necessarily in a bad way. Bookchin states in the beginning that he acknowledges how some portions of the book may seem drawn-out or boring, and this can be true for someone who does not want to read about, say, the Gnosticism movement or the development of an Authoritarian Technics. On that specific note, I would like to state that "The Ambiguities of Freedom" is a hell of a chapter. In a book with chapters around 15-30 pages, this chapter jumped out at me as the meat of the philosophy. However, most information felt valuable upon reaching the end; discussions such as that regarding early Christian utopianism in "The Legacy of Freedom" resurfaced through Bookchin's quasi-Hedonism, the "epistemology of rule" was present in its rejection when communalist society was described, and the ecological practices of organic society were taken into account when Bookchin delved into environmentalism.

On the subject of environmentalism: "The Ecology of Freedom" certainly seems to emphasize its subtitle, "The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy," much more than the title itself. Obviously, ecology is a recurring theme in the book, being discussed alongside the topics of organic society and technics. However, Bookchin seems to focus far more heavily on the "hierarchy" side of things for the majority of the 400-some pages.

Nit-picky criticism aside, the analysis and critique of hierarchy in this is amazing, as one would expect. To an extent, his criticisms may be too intricate for a reader who is a beginner in anarchist, communist, or anti-hierarchical philosophy. Moreover, the criticisms were beyond what one may simply notice by observing the behavior of hierarchy. At one point, Bookchin brings up Freudo-Marxian thought, psychoanalysis, and the epistemology of rule within a small part of the book; this section was possibly the most impactful, as it revealed some deeply-ingrained concepts that I didn't know how to explain within my own beliefs. This theory seemed somewhat like that of Gramsci's cultural hegemony, as it explored the perpetuation of hierarchy through psychocultural influence.

As an environmentalist, potentially my favorite section of the book was the very end, where Bookchin finally laid out an arsenal of ecological concepts, explaining his thoughts on Third Nature and what essentially seemed to be Permaculture and bioregionalism. I wish he had given some more attention to the topic of animal liberation or how we treat the entities within our biosphere, but the articulation of his ecological concepts was stellar nonetheless.

My criticism of this book is simple, albeit a bit weird: I believe Bookchin should've gone all-in on making this his magnum opus and seminal philosophical text. It may have been a poor decision in terms of revenue, but if this included the content from "The Philosophy of Social Ecology," "Re-Enchanting Humanity," "The Limits of the City," and his other essays on post-scarcity, this would've been a Capital-level text. I certainly wouldn't mind 800+ pages of pure Bookchinite philosophy residing within one far-reaching text.

Again, I loved this book, and I think it is hugely underrated. I would recommend it for anarchists, communists, environmentalists, liberals, whoever. One must first understand some basics, like the actual meanings of the terms I just listed, but otherwise this book can be understood far better than something like Hegel, despite the density I have described.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a challenge for me to complete, but I'm glad I did. In retrospect, it seems largely composed of long, detailed tangents strung together thematically as historical evidence for Bookchin's ideas about the history of civilization. That's what I mean when I say I found it difficult. In the same way, Mumford's Technics and Human Development became a bog of historical detail. That should probably be attributed more to my preferences than the authors' deficiencies, however.

Bookchin sees two currents flowing through our history: one libertarian, one authoritarian. The former, he argues, was the one more characteristic of pre-literate, pre-state societies. The latter, with the upper hand since the rise of the state, has formed a world alien to our ancestors and our true nature:

“Trapped by a false perception of a nature that stands in perpetual opposition to our humanity, we have redefined humanity itself to mean strife as a condition for pacification, control as a condition for consciousness, domination as a condition for freedom, and opposition as a condition for reconciliation.” (365)

These conditions preserve social relations domination and hierarchy, even as "equality" is upheld by the powerful as a fundamental value.

Equality is not typically associated with an authoritarian impulse. But Bookchin's insight is to distinguish between "inequality of equals" (the sense implied in the US Declaration of Independence) and the "equality of unequals." The latter is the truly libertarian equality, in force since the earliest human societies, which the authoritarian political ideologies based on false equivalence that we have inherited (from sources as far back as the Greeks) will never tolerate.

Despite thousands of years of repression, he argues, the libertarian ideal persists. Ecology, then, provides a new mode of expressing these age-old values of "organic society" that may be incorporated into a new society with the added recognition of a universal humanity--the great gift of civilization--beyond mere tribal and national identity, without our self-imposed separation from nature, to the world's ultimate benefit.

[Mario · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mr. Bookchin utterly fails to explain the emergence of hierarchies in any meaningful way. He openly states that there are no known "preliterate" societies without hierarchies, discusses these harmful hierarchies, and then states they don't have to exist. This one example is indicative of his whole approach to the book. He fantastically critiques all aspects of society, yet fails to explain how to repair it; he doesn't even try (he does mention failed examples such as New Harmony, but only to depict how bad it failed). The author also disdains reverence for science and supports Fourier's belief in hedonistic rejection of societal norms, once again, not explaining what that actually entails. In this sense, the piece should be viewed as political theory at best and a harangue at worst.
I gave this two stars because the author does discuss interesting information. The introduction to the 1991 edition entitled "20 years later" is a redeeming section. I think in many ways Mr. Bookchin realized his many errings. He lambasts and disavows "ecofeminists" and "atavists" and describes a biological reality behind the structuring of society. It is hard to see how this introduction was written by the same man.

[boocia]

i don't think i walked away being particular impressed with this book, but also bookchin is a Big Deal so i did feel the need to reach, to find this revelation that seemed a bit promised.

i think i struggled with this book because it used an argumentative Style that I think i'm unfamiliar with? it was hard to follow (though bookchin warns us in the intro that this isn't a book for coming to conclusions, it's one for starting dialogues and getting the reader's brain to start going in the right direction), paragraphs and chapters swirling around the same points more than building up to anything. exploratory. i did just come off two months of science writing (topic-sentence -> evidence -> conclusion style) so that probably didn't help. it was evidence and argument, but obviously editorial also, expressly appealing to outrage in a way i had trouble connecting to. but i think that was also something i liked; this book feels like it's trying to do a hard reboot on my whole-ass brain, and is explicitly about how domination and hierarchy and modern science sever rationalism from humanity, so it does feel like it's on me/society that i don't grok argument that uses Reason (in the classic greek sense, an ethical sense), as opposed to using a lifeless rationalism alone.

in addition i think i am not familiar enough with anthropology as a Field to assess the evidence bookchin cites, really. his use of a whole variety of specific indigenous ppls' value systems and worldviews as a body of evidence for a seemingly generic and universal human instinct to relate to nature in a more commensalist way felt pretty dang mystical to me. it was the 70s, i guess? it felt like rhetoric from a different time i had difficulty adapting or contextualizing now? scope also felt weird; mostly greek and roman and medieval europe or indigenous civilizations in south and north america; but i feel if his takes are going to be about humanity as a whole he's missing evidence from any other part of the world? the set up felt a little like the whole history of the world was these romantically natural primitives And modern westerners.

i struggled most with this idea of a mother-child bond being this universal experience that is the root of a more giving or open or unconditionally loving instinct in society; especially the way bookchin waxed it, defo felt a little uhhh objectifying or falling into some classic women-as-totems trap.

anyway there were some vibes that i did like, i almost felt like it was my brain being stubborn and not molding to this book as hard as it should:
- as mentioned the idea of returning(?) to a Reason that is more holistic than, as bookchin says, instrumentalism and measurement. one that has ethics. that being said i still don't really know what that means. i was a little defensive of his weaponization of Kuhn as pointing to how modern western science is not 'in touch' with nature, is all just paradigms and abstractions unrelated to reality. maybe i'm in a paradigm of my own, but it is hard to think about a science that is more "true to Nature", as he suggested without really detailing further.
- though one thing he does say that was compelling is suggesting that scientists, and i think especially biologists and ecologists (this is before Dawkins but super on point for the Selfish Gene), are Very aggressive about not ascribing intention or Meaning to the actions of living things. i liked the idea that a science that thinks about nature having more of an intention, or animals having more of a "purpose" within an environment, could be useful? though i think he gets wacky with it, like at one point he says wolves pick off the oldest of the caribou as a sort of mercy euthanization? but on the other hand, is interpreting events in this way any more or less helpful than talking about the idk, old-caribou-identification gene having a higher chance of being reproduced and increasing the survivability of its current host or whatever? i liked trying to get my brain to fit Bookchin's vision, though again i don't think it really took ...
- on returning; i think i am tickled by marx and lenin for talking about the Future, and bookchin spends a lot of time pointing to learning about the past. or rather, re-grounding our historical progress in understanding the history of civilizations and taking the good parts. idk how i feel abt this but i think i liked playing with the idea that post-industrialization there was a Severing of past and future, our relationships with each, in a way that has psychic and social ripples that should be Thought about.
- bookchin criticizes marx for having a very aggressive subject-object attitude towards man and nature (one taking and one an inert resource). he also folds it up into attitudes on technology; there is this marx take that technology informs the structure of society that i always found so exciting (darko suvin goes on to take this idea into the scifi novum). bookchin criticizes this as overlooking how technology is itself developed along certain lines because of pre-existing societal structures. did mechanization/the factory generate wage slavery etc, or did the dominant castes' investment in wanting wage slaves make mechanization/the factory happen? he also folds this idea in another way; pointing to how evolutionary biologists always talk about selection pressures On animals, and only Separately talk about how animals change their environments. the two are silo'd;
i did really love thinking about interrelationality being obfuscated in the interested of domination structures.
- there were a lot of hard to follow vibes but i did respect that he was explicitly like the Good future Is gonna be all solar and wind power. idk what other shit's going on but i Do know these technologies are gonna be part of it.

anyway idk this book was pretty muddly for me but i had fun

[John Ledingham · Rating 4 out of 5]

started april 2020 then again march 2021 with more gusto, finally finished. man! it's been a ride folks. a lot of good in this book. a lot of blabbermouthery too. bookchin really likes to repeat himself, and dig deep into matters i'm not sure needed digging into. way too much dry academic shit going into semantics and ancient greek political sciences for my liking. but the heart of this book is strong, and his intellect is unquestionable - it leaves me with as concrete and convincing a schematic for an anarchist/libertarian socialist society as any, a thorough analysis of our capitalist condition, hierarchal thinking, and objectifying views of "nature" and of ourselves. his principles of personal freedom, communitarian social structure, and an existential biodiversity are all strong inspiring concepts. will probably read personally abridged again. about as comprehensive and clear a work on modern anarchism as could possibly be written. thanks murray

[Robert Kortus · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can tell how much I’m enjoying a book by how many pages I dog-ear. This is one of those books.

One of the best books I’ve read in a while; “The Ecology of Freedom” was able to take many disparate beliefs i have regarding politics, community, nature, economics, etc. and put a cohesive framework around them to show how they can be connected.

Bookchin is one of the best writers I’ve come across, with an exceptional command of language that had me rereading passages multiple time. He manages to pack more truth and insight into a single paragraph than most writers can put into a chapter.

I would NOT recommend this book to anyone however - it is a very heady read and a bit challenging. It also helps to have a cursory understanding of a wide range of topics such as politics, economic models, environmentalism, history, etc. But for those up to the challenge; it is well worth the intellectual reward.

[Walt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had very high expectations of this book. It proposes to show how human society emerged into nature and imposed hierarchies upon itself, then to use that understanding to envision a new "social ecology." The second half of the book, that which examines the social aspects of science and technology and describes the principles of a socioecological society is as excellent as I hoped. Unfortunately, the historical section dismisses large areas of human experience (especially religion and non-European societies) as not useful and essentializes women into archetypal mother figures rather than attempting to understand the formation of gender structures and experience. Despite these limitations, I think social ecology seems like a useful framework for integrating anarchi-communism into the more-than-human world.

[Lucien · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is not perfect, but I want to give it five stars nonetheless. As other critics have pointed out, Bookchin's writing still is sometimes difficult to follow. The ideas in this book are incredible, and some can help to get a really new perspective on things, which is the best a book can manage according to me. Unfortunately, I feel like I have understood some of his ideas, but without being able to put them into world, and I would enjoy a vulgarization of them.
That said, I recommend this book to anyone! To cultivate oneself with emancipatory ideas about freedom is really necessary nowadays if we want to have a chance to save our specie from auto-destruction and misery. And Bookchin has inspired real-life revolution, like the democratic project of north syria/Rojava, witness that it's not just theory if we're willing to act against hierarchy and exploitation!

[Dayton Martindale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't agree with Bookchin on everything, but he asks the right questions and pursues the right trains of thought. The book's an incredibly expansive journey through human history that—while for all I know some of his anthropology is bogus and/or outdated, and certainly some of his biology is—takes seriously what was good about preliterate societies while also hoping to learn from the misadventure called "civilization" and move forward into something distinct from both hunter/gatherer primitivism and modern hierarchical society. It's less readable than some of his other writing, but also more thought-provoking.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know everyone loves this book, but I've tried to read it several times now and I can't make it through because of the thick academic language. The chapters I've read though makes a good argument that a lot of how humans view nature comes from the cultures we come from, like in ants where people think of the Queen Ant as the ruler, when in fact ants act more communally and on instinct rather than through orders or anything like that (the queen produces the babies.)

[Mitchell Stern · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is full of interesting ideas and provides a thorough overview of the history of societal development, the flaws that arose on the way and how people challenged them. My reason for docking a star is twofold. First I found a lot of it dense and hard to follow at times. Second I feel Bookchin is a bit too dismissive of spirituality as a tool of liberation (especially in his introduction as in much of the body there is evidence of its use as a liberation tool!).

[Nate · Rating 1 out of 5]

This would be a good book if the author wasnt sucking himself off half the book. He really thinks hes cracked it when hes really just recycling old hegelian ideas, applying them to the environmentand winning brownie points without actually writing any theory that can be easily digest, the epitome of the problem with the left today.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is vast in its scope. Bookchin analyzes the evolution of hierarchy in societies from the stone-age to the end of the 20th century.

[Rob Mackenzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't wait for the abridged version. It was dense, erudite, and hard work. By the time I got to the end, I'd forgotten the beginning and lost all revolutionary fervour.