Murray Bookchin, 1921–2006

Murray Bookchin is one of the most well-known and influential activist-theorists of radical green politics of the twentieth century. In the late 1960s Bookchin taught at the Alternative University in New York, one of the largest ‘free universities’ in the USA, then at City University of New York in Staten Island. For Bookchin, libertarian municipalism is defined as, ‘a confederal society based on the co-ordination of municipalities in a bottom-up system of administration as distinguished from the top-down rule of the nation-state’. Bookchin is well known as a polemical writer and has spent much time and energy criticizing those aspects of the ecological movement which he sees as based on flawed and dangerous political and moral principles, aims and analyses of the ecological crisis. Bookchin has been enormously influential within the ecological movement in North America and Europe, and was one of the most invigorating and original thinkers about green politics.