Theory of Eco-anarchism: Bookchin’s Critique of Authority

Abstract

Bookchin’s sociological analysis is a social critique. Its focus is authority. In our reading of his critique of authority, it is not simply a critique of relations of subordination and superordination in which one has the right to command and the other the duty to obey. It is, rather, a critique of social relations as such. This is the interpretive hypothesis we suggest for capturing the sense of his social critique. Bookchin perceives all relations of authority as relations of domination which could be formalised, in his understanding of them, as hierarchical relations of inequality in which A dictates the action of B and B submits to A’s directives. Such relations are necessarily social relations.