Becoming Environmental: Murray Bookchin in the Postwar Era

Abstract

This dissertation offers a critical reconstruction of Murray Bookchin’s early political thought, placing a particular emphasis on the role that changing perceptions of the environment played in shaping his ideas. It argues that the distinction between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecology’ that Bookchin developed in his later work was prefigured by a series of interactions with social and natural science in the postwar era. Drawing on close readings of texts, previously unpublished material based on archival research in New York, Amsterdam, and with documents from the Bookchin Trust, this dissertation seeks to further our understanding of postwar radicalism, Marxist and anarchist political ideologies, and the ecological critique of capitalism. Recent scholarship in political theory and intellectual history has turned to past theorists of the environment and ecology to address the politics of climate change in the 21st century. Bookchin is an important intellectual figure to study, not just because of his contribution to the revitalisation of anarchist politics in the mid-20th century, but also because he was an astute commentator of Western democratic politics becoming environmental. Surprisingly, however, Bookchin’s political thought has received little attention by intellectual historians. Three in-depth studies of his work exist at the time of writing: the first two focus almost exclusively on his later work; the third offers a biographical sketch. Other studies focus on Bookchin’s reception in recent social movements, or they apply elements of Bookchin’s later thought to contemporary theoretical problems. This is promising research to be sure, but Bookchin fails to be read on his own terms, and the political experience contained in his early work is left encoded. This dissertation blends an accurate historical reconstruction of the conceptual structure of Bookchin’s early political thought with an engagement with the possibilities of a historically informed criticism of contemporary modes of environmental thinking. The individual dissertation chapters address four crucial moments of political rupture in the postwar era in which Bookchin expands the meaning of the concepts of ‘ecology’, ‘utopia’, ‘scarcity’, and ‘cities’ in response to specific actors embedded in particular theoretical discourses. Taken together, these essays speak to the shifting semantic space of political discourses surrounding the relationship between humans and their environments, and they defend the continued relevance of Bookchin’s early work.