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Murray Bookchin

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Murray Bookchin

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American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher (1921–2006)

OverviewAI-generated

Murray Bookchin (14 January 1921 – 30 July 2006) was an author associated with anarchist, environmental, and social ecology themes. His bibliography includes works such as *Anarchy and organization*, *Ecology and revolutionary thought*, *Workers and the peace movement*, *On organization*, and *Remaking Society*. He is referenced by 2,128 other encyclopedia articles.

Bookchin’s writings have been tagged with concepts including "green left" and "Nature." He contributed to discussions on revolutionary thought and organization.

Synthesized by Vinony from 20 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, Wikiquote, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born
14 January 1921
Died
30 July 2006
Works
69

Top works

  • Anarchy and organization
  • Ecology and revolutionary thought
  • Workers and the peace movement
  • On organization
  • Remaking Society

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Female
Origin
Canada
Active from
1945-06-20
canadiancountrypopsoft rock

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
30
Total plays
90

Tags

anarchistNatureenviromentalgreen leftsocial ecology

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Murray+Bookchin">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Murray Bookchin

Quotes

  • An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles.
  • Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.
  • The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
  • The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
  • Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.
  • If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)... Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
Mortimore Bookchin , January 14, 1921, New York City , US
Died
July 30, 2006 (2006-07-30) (aged 85), Burlington , Vermont , US
Era
20th- / 21st-century philosophy
Region
Western philosophy
School
Continental philosophy , anarchism , libertarian socialism , Hegelianism
Main interests
Philosophy of ecology , social hierarchy , dialectics , post-scarcity , anarchism , libertarian socialism , ethics, environmental sustainability , ecology, history of popular revolutionary movements
Notable ideas
Communalism , libertarian municipalism , social ecology , dialectical naturalism

via Wikipedia infobox

~35 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Murray Bookchin (/ˈbʊktʃɪn/; January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. Influenced by the works of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin, he was a pioneer in the environmental movement. Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called "communalism", which seeks to reconcile and expand Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist thought.

Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the democratic confederalism of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. He was a central figure in the American green movement. An autodidact who never attended college, he is considered to be one of the most important left theorists of the twentieth century.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Murray Bookchin” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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