Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an
American anarchist and
libertarian socialist author, orator, historian, and
political theoretician. A pioneer in the
ecology movement, Bookchin initiated the
critical theory of
social ecology within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and ecology. Among the most important were
Our Synthetic Environment (1962),
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) and
The Ecology of Freedom (1982). In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the increasingly apolitical lifestylism of the contemporary anarchist movement (see:
lifestyle anarchism) and stopped referring to himself as an anarchist. Instead, he founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called
Communalism.