One of the makers of the Anarchism in America video (about which I’ve previously blogged) has a piece up at HoughPough on Ron Paul, Libertarianism, and the Anarchist Connection. Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Ezra Heywood, Angela Heywood, Emma Goldman, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Murray Bookchin all get name-checked.
The friendly words quoted from Bookchin do not reflect his later views (on which I’ve blogged glancingly).
A one-in-a-million essay that knowledgably discusses both libertarianism and anarchism in a mainstream publication without entirely endorsing or condemning either, or being massively ignorant and/or snarky.
Also, while I’m sure Bookchin did later repudiate alliances with the likes of Hess and Rothbard, that isn’t what he’s talking about in the essay on “lifestyle anarchism.” If I remember correctly, it’s mostly the neo-Stirnerite post-leftists and primitivists like Bey, Zerzan & co. that he rails against. He probably would lump them both together as bourgeois individualists though. I like the point in the essay on Bookchin you link to, which ponts out that this is an undialectical analysis.
while I’m sure Bookchin did later repudiate alliances with the likes of Hess and Rothbard, that isn’t what he’s talking about in the essay on “lifestyle anarchism.”
True, but in that essay Bookchin attacks 19th-century individualist anarchism generally, including Proudhon, as “middle-class indulgence, rooted far more in liberalism than in anarchism”; and even anarcho-communists like Goldman get the boot for being too individualistic. So I think the essay signals pretty clearly a withdrawal of any sympathies toward Rothbard and Hess even if he doesn’t name them here.
Here are Bookchin’s earlier, very friendly comments toward Rothbard et al.