Murray Bookchin

**Murray Bookchin** (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American libertarian socialist, political and social philosopher, speaker and writer. For much of his life he called himself an anarchist, although as early as 1995 he privately renounced his identification with the anarchist movement. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology.

Bookchin was a radical anti-capitalist and always favored the decentralisation of society. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, grassroots democracy, had an influence on the Green Movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets. His criticisms of "new age" Greens such as Charlene Spretnak contributed to the divisions in the American Green movement in the 1990s.

Although an anti-capitalist, Murray Bookchin often met with libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard and occasionally attended Libertarian Party (United States) conventions, endorsing their presidential candidate Roger MacBride in 1976.

Bookchin has influenced the thinking of captured Kurdish militant Abdullah Öcalan, who has renounced violence and now wants a peaceful solution to the question of Kurdish autonomy.

## Libertarian municipalism

Bookchin was the first to use the term "Libertarian municipalism", to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the State with a confederation of free municipalities. Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist.

### Books

- _Our Synthetic Environment_ 1962
- _The Limits of the City_ (1973) .
- _The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship_ (1987 and 1992)
- _The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism_ (1990 and 1996) Montreal: Black Rose Books.

### Articles

- " Beyond Neo-Marxism ". _TELOS_ 36 (Summer 1978). New York: Telos Press

## References

- Biehl, Janet (1997), _The Murray Bookchin Reader_ (An Anthology). Cassell .

## Other websites

- Murray Bookchin Archive at _Anarchy Archives_
- Institute for Social Ecology (ISE)
- _Communalism_: International Journal for a Rational Society
- Social Ecology London . English study/action group exploring Bookchin's ideas.
- Democratic Alternative. Scandinavian communalist organization based on Bookchin's ideas. In Svenska, Norsk, Espanol, English.
- My Graphics About Murray Bookchin: blog and archive of comic strip stories about Bookchin's life maintained by Janet Biehl.

## Infobox (philosopher)

- **region**: Western Philosophy
- **era**: 20th-century philosophy, 20th / 21st-century philosophy
- **color**: #B0C4DE
- **image**: Murray Bookchin.jpg
- **image size**: 200px
- **name**: Murray Bookchin
- **birth date**: January 14, 1921
- **birth place**: New York City, New York (state), New York
- **death date**: July 30, 2006
- **death place**: (Burlington, Vermont) (age 85)
- **school tradition**: founder of social ecology
- **main interests**: Social ecology, libertarian municipalism, social hierarchy, dialectics, post-scarcity anarchism, libertarian socialism, communalism, ethics, history of popular revolutionary movements
- **influences**: Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Hans Jonas, Denis Diderot
- **notable ideas**: social ecology, libertarian municipalism, dialectical naturalism