Reviews for Work, Family, And Leisure

The average rating for Work, Family, And Leisure based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-12 00:00:00 Hershel Petty An interesting selection of essays by Murray Bookchin published by AK Press in 1994. Essays: "The Future of the Ecology Movement". "Will Ecology Become "the Dismal Science?". "The Population Myth". "Sociobiology or Social Ecology?". These essays mostly date form the 80s and 90s. The first essays I enjoyed and identified with, for Bookchin's uncompromising critique of the mysticism and misanthropy sometimes evident in the ecology and environmentalist movement at the time, and still existing today. This part of the book is very effective and it seems to me that his point is very definitively made. What is Bookchin's standpoint? He calls it "Social Ecology" and to me it seems more appealing and sensible than the more outré factions and tendencies within the environmentalism movement, with their sometimes romanticised view of the natural world. Bookchin views mankind as a part of nature and environmental problems as being social in origin, and has a more realistic view of what constitutes the concepts "wilderness" and "nature". Beyond that, I found the last chapter, on Sociobiology or Social Ecology, hard-going, and would probably need to re-read it in order to understand it completely. Broadly, it is a critique of the philosophical roots of sociobiology and an exploration of its potential reactionary implications, and an extrapolation of Bookchin's own philosophy of social ecology. However, factionalism on the left, and among the anarchists, is always wearying and futile. It remains for the reader to make a synthesis of these disparate trends and distil what is good and useful in the ecology movement as a whole, beyond the divisive infighting between the arcane factions of the left.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-11-25 00:00:00 Paul Nielsen A great collection of essays that focus on social ecology and the aggregation of society to break down non-hierarchical constructs that are prevalent. The fecundity of these ideas are drawn together to show social ecology as a science with an optimistic future and vision instead of a sociobiology or a deep ecology that points more towards a dismal outlook that can pave a path to fascism.