Remaking Society

The Dutch edition I read opens with a warning by the translator. "Bookchin's least likeable aspect was his taste for polemics." , and this turns out to be true for the book as well. Bookchin is very good at articulating the things that are wrong with other people's positions, and it seems that he is the most critical of people who mostly agree with him, or worse, agree with him for the wrong reasons.

The book also spends a lot of pages on an analysis of human society and its forms dating back to pre-history. The author may have felt that this justified his vision of society, but the overview lacks both the entertaining tone of a popular science writer, and the rigor and references you might expect in a scientific text.

Bookchin was highly aware of intersectional social justice issues, and in that sense his writing has aged well.

If I can try to summarize his ideas, Bookchin seems to dislike determinism, both in its biological and historical forms. Human beings are more complicated than their biological instincts, and our present society isn't the inevitable evolutionary victor it's sometimes made out to be.

This leads to his recommendations for how a society should be run: small communities, goverened as direct democracies, who try to close their own ecological balance, and interact with the rest of the world in a confederal system.

I wish the author had spent more time talking about the things he is for, rather than the things he is against.