The Ecology of Freedom

Excellent investigation into hierarchies of all kinds and their origins. Some of the writing is thick as mud, but there are gorgeous passages scattered throughout. Seems to misunderstand science/evolution somewhat, in that he imagines a striving toward complexity and differentiation throughout the history of matter. This concept then is the basis for his ideas on societal and natural ecology, that there is wholeness in complementarity among difference. He thus advocates for our actions to increase this diversity, complementarity, lack of hierarchy etc., so that we can participate in this evolutionary process and eventually...well no one knows. Something cool one hopes!

I read the "Twenty Years Later" introduction after reading the book. In it, he addresses a lot of woo that became more popular in that time, and that was maybe even inspired by his writing. His views on this striving or inherent direction/reason in nature make him sound like a creationist who doesn't believe in a creator.

So, otherwise, some powerful ideas and a stimulating read.

I learned a lot from this book. At first I found the writing style to be frustrating, the English is difficult to follow and I was young when I started it. I persevered, got used to it, and found that I really came to appreciate how beautifully written this book is - but it's not for everyone

At times I found the history contained in this book to bring to life my imagination. Politically speaking, I like Bookchin's ideas (and the Anarchism/Municipalism that many of his fans adopt) - but I don't think that I found them as transformative for me as other authors - like David Graeber. For example, Bookchin valourises Ancient Athens a lot in this book, and seems to be describing it as an isolated event of mass democratisation. In the context of Graeber's Anarchist Anthropology I think that this is a needless concession to make, when the latter book opened my eyes to the diverse and far-reaching history of democratic practises around the world - and where Ancient Greece fits into that really (as a society which obsessively valued individual competition - which I'm not intending to be dismissive of the Ancient Greeks, they're great)

My favourite part of this book was the inclusion of Gerard Winstanley's poem, which years on I still go back to read often

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.

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)