From the publisher: Since his youth in the 1930s, Murray Bookchin has devoted his life to looking for ways to replace today's capitalist society, and the system that immiserates most of humanity and poisons the natural world, with a more enlightened and rational alternative. A close student of the European revolutionary tradition, he is best known for introducing the idea of ecology into leftist thought, and for first positing that a liberatory society would also have to be an ecological society. Over the course of several decades, libertarian municipalism, the political dimension of the broader body of ideas known as social ecology, was developed by this social theorist. It is the culmination of a lifetime of his thinking about how society might best be radically transformed in a humane and rational way.
In brief, libertarian municipalism seeks to revive the democratic possibilities latent in existing local governments and transform them into direct democracies. It aims to decentralize these political communities so that they are humanly scaled and tailored to their natural environments, restoring the practices and qualities of citizenship, so that men and women can collectively take responsibility for managing their own communities, according to an ethics of sharing and cooperation, rather than depend on elites.
Written in short, to-the-point chapters, this book presents an introductory overview of the ideas as Bookchin developed them. In addition to laying out the basic components of libertarian municipalism's political ideas, it sketches the historical and philosophical context in which Bookchin grounds them and provides substantial material on the practical questions of creating and organizing a libertarian municipalist movement. Happily, Bookchin himself has been supportive of this project and has generously provided the lengthy interview that makes up the last third of this book.