Bookchin, Murray (b. 1921)
The foremost contemporary anarchist theorist, Bookchin was born in New York of Russian Jewish immigrant parents. During the 1930s he was a militant in the Young Pioneers.
and the Young Communist League. He later entered the Trotskyist movement, worked in an iron foundry and auto plant, and organized for several unions, including United Auto Workers locals. By the 1950s he was writing, extensively for the libertarian Marxist journal Contemporary Issues.
In the 1960s Bookchin emerged as a central figure in contemporary anarchism. He was a force in various anarchist organizations, including the Radical Decentralist Project, the third largest faction of Students for a Democratic Society. As both a theorist and an indefatigable speaker, he exerted a major influ ence on the revival of anarchism as both a cultural tendency and a political movement.
By the 1970s Bookchin’s theoretical work became his prime focus. While his pioneering work in ecology began in the early 1950s, it ‘came to maturity with his founding of the Institute for Social Ecology in 1974 and in a series of major works on ecological social the‘ory, including Post-Scarcity Anarchist (1971), Toward an Ecological Society (1980), and his magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom (1982). In. other writings he established his place in radical urbanism and the critique of technology.
Bookchin’s work continued to evolve in the 1980s, He developed a theory of libertarian municipalism, a full-scale critique of nature philosophy, and the defense of radical ecology (“fundamentalism”) within the Green movement. He is director emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, See also: Anarchism, Radical Environmentalism
John P. Clark REFERENCES Clark, John P. The Anarchist Moment. Montreal Black Rose Books, 1984