Reviews for Responding to social change

The average rating for Responding to social change based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-02 00:00:00 Ted Bence First of all, sorry for the no picture, I couldn't find one off the web to steal, and the bookcover was taken off the library edition I read so taking my own photograph would've been pointless. This book basically is a summary of stuff Bookchin has said elsewhere, in perhaps a slightly more accessible, if vaguer, form. Thus, the sparce referencing of his historical and archaelogical claims (e.g. that gerontocracy was the first "hierarchy") are annoying. While not exactly forgivable, this omission is at least understandable. Less defensible is Bookchin's repeated invocation of Scala Natura. This refers to a "hierchy of being" expounded first by Thomas Aquinas and modified subsequently, that basically says there has been a dynamic, and moreover morally important, unfolding from "basic" amoebas all the way through echinodemers to humans. The idea is specious and biologically misleading. For instance, the pinus genome is considered innumerably more "complex" than the human genome, and to claim that mammals are more complex than, for instance, birds, is a dubious supposition. Bookchin's damning and scathing critique of "Deep Ecology" and other mystical element s of the environmental movement are valid, but repetitive to the point of seriously compromising the integrity of this work. To be fair, at the onset he states that his goal is to demonstrate how the rape of our natural environment is rooted in the oppression of man by man. Hence the misanthropomism of the touchy-feely organic joggers is unfounded. The point is well taken. Yet one often gets the distinct sense that Bookchin is far more suspicious and disdainful of the mindless "activists" and "spiritual ecologists" than he is of the industrial conglomerates and our capitalist rulers. This fixation on what are, at the end of the day, unwelcome but certainly not mortal tendencies within the libertarian environmentalist movement makes one wonder just how "in touch" Bookchin is with the consumerist right and the herd mentality that form a much graver threat to the Enlightened society he espouses. The conjunction of the book being little more than a rather curt summary of ideas expounded in, for example, "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" and his insistance on the mortal danger of the tree-hugging-apolitical -neo-pagan-"Environmentalists" (also pointed out in, for example, Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit against Antihumanism, Mysticism and Primitivism) conjoined with his cursorial and at times histrionic treatment of anthropology, history, and biologhy make for an admittedly dull reading. Still, those seeking a concise introduction to what the dude's been up to might get something out of it

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-03 00:00:00 Stephen Lewis Meh