Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
So I cannot refrain from closing these acknowledgements with the exquisite remarks (all failings of gender aside) of my favorite utopian, William Morris: This has been a wayward book that has taken on a life of its own. I could not have begun writing this book in the early 1970s without a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation, nor could I have completed it a decade later without the sabbatical year provided to me by Ramapo College. My thanks go out to Amadeo Bertolo, Gina Blumenfeld, Debbie Bookchin, Joseph Bookchin, Robert Cassidy, Dan Chodorkoff, John Clark, Jane Coleman, Rosella DiLeo, David and Shirley Eisen, Ynestra King, Allan Kurtz, Wayne Hayes, Brett Portman, Dmitri Roussopoulos, Trent Schroyer, and my colleagues at Ramapo College of New Jersey and the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. In writing The Ecology of Freedom, I have had the support of many people, a few of whom I would like to cite here appreciatively. I have had the benefit of highly sympathetic copy editors, particularly Naomi Steinfeld, who exhibited a remarkable understanding of my ideas and intentions. I wish to thank Linda Goodman, an excellent artist, for bringing her talents as art director to the designing of this book and for rendering it aesthetically attractive. To have so able and absorbing a biologist at hand is more than a privilege it is an intellectual delicacy. Richard Merrill, like Michael Riordan, was an endless source of articles and data from which the scientific material in the Epilogue is derived. For a European perspective, I must thank my dear friend, Karl-Ludwig Schibel, who, in reading the opening chapters, brought to them the sophisticated queries of his students at the University of Frankfurt and obliged me to examine issues that I would have ordinarily ignored. His meticulous reading of this book, his keenly intelligent queries, his searching criticisms, and his demand for conciseness and clarity have made this book more accessible to the Anglo-American reader than I might have been inclined to do. I am indebted to Michael Riordan, who was more than a zealous editor and sympathetic publisher. For the rest, I have drawn upon so vast a cultural tradition that it would be meaningless to saddle the reader with names this tradition appears throughout the book and hardly requires delineation. I have found Hans Jonas’s Phenomenon of Life an ever-refreshing source of inspiration in nature philosophy as well as a book of rare stylistic grace. Gutkind and Martin Buber’s utopian reflections. My intellectual debt to Dorothy Lee and Paul Radin in anthropology is enormous, and I cherish the time I encountered the work of E. To know the development of domination, technics, science, and subjectivity-the latter in natural history as well as in human-is to find the unifying threads that overcome the disjunctions between nonhuman and human nature. I believe that such a libertarian social ecology can avoid the dualistic, neo-Kantian ideologies such as structuralism and many communication theories-a dualism very much in vogue today. However, Kropotkin is unique in his emphasis on the need for a reconciliation of humanity with nature, the role of mutual aid in natural and social evolution, his hatred of hierarchy, and his vision of a new technics based on decentralization and human scale. I do not share his commitment to confederalism based on contract and exchange, and I find his notion of sociality (which I personally interpret to mean symbiotic mutualism ) among nonhuman organisms a bit simplistic. I have tried to resolve these issues by following intellectual pathways opened by the anarchist thinkers of the previous century, particularly Peter Kropotkin’s natural and social mutualism. Thus, I owe a great deal to the work of Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Karl Polanyi, who all so brilliantly anticipated the problems of domination and the crises of reason, science, and technics that beleaguer us today. But we all stand on the shoulders of others, if only-in terms of the problems they raised and we are obliged to resolve. This book stands on its own ground and projects a coherent theory of social ecology that is independent of the conventional wisdom of our time.
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