Twenty-Three Books
From a pseudonymous warning about chemicals in food to a posthumous case for the next revolution — fifty-three years of argument. Most remain in print; every title links out to where a copy can be found. His books circulate worldwide in translation.
Our Synthetic Environment
1962 · Knopf
Published as Lewis Herber six months before Silent Spring — an indictment of chemicalized agriculture, urban ill-health, and the industrial degradation of daily life.
Crisis in Our Cities
1965 · Prentice-Hall
Herber again: metropolitan sprawl, pollution, and the case for cities returned to a human measure.
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
1971 · Ramparts Press · Reissued — Black Rose Books, 1986 · Latest edition — AK Press, 2004
The 1960s essays — ecology and revolutionary thought, liberatory technology, Listen, Marxist! — freedom rethought for an age of abundance.
The Limits of the City
1974 · Harper & Row · Revised edition — Black Rose Books, 1986
A history of the city as an arena of citizenship, and of its dissolution into the megalopolis.
The Spanish Anarchists
1977 · Free Life Editions · Latest edition — AK Press, 1998
The heroic years, 1868–1936: the buried history of the world’s largest anarchist movement.
Toward an Ecological Society
1980 · Black Rose Books
Essays against environmentalism-as-technics, for an ecological society rooted in community.
The Ecology of Freedom
1982 · Cheshire Books · Reissued — Black Rose Books, 1991 · Latest edition — AK Press, 2005
The magnum opus: the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy, and the legacy of freedom set against it.
The Modern Crisis
1986 · New Society Publishers
Market society against the moral economy — with the clearest short statements of social ecology.
The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship
1987 · Sierra Club Books · Reissued as Urbanization Without Cities — Black Rose Books, 1992 · Revised as From Urbanization to Cities — Cassell, 1995
How urbanization devoured the city — and the civic politics that could reclaim it.
Remaking Society
1989 · Black Rose Books
The whole argument in one compact volume — hierarchy, ecology, and the reconstructive way out.
The Philosophy of Social Ecology
1990 · Black Rose Books
Dialectical naturalism: essays on nature, reason, and an ethics grounded in evolution.
Defending the Earth
1991 · South End Press
The public dialogue with Earth First!’s Dave Foreman — deep ecology and social ecology argued face to face.
Re-enchanting Humanity
1995 · Cassell
A defense of reason and humanism against misanthropy and mysticism in green thought.
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism
1995 · AK Press
The polemic: social revolution against personalist withdrawal — “an unbridgeable chasm.”
The Third Revolution, Vol. I
1996 · Cassell
Popular movements in the revolutionary era — from the Peasant Wars through 1848.
The Third Revolution, Vol. II
1998 · Cassell
The Paris Commune and the revolutionary tradition of the late nineteenth century.
Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left
1999 · AK Press
Interviews and essays, 1993–1998 — the road from Marxism through anarchism to Communalism, summed up.
The Third Revolution, Vol. III
2004 · Continuum
The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 — the soviets against the party-state.
The Third Revolution, Vol. IV
2005 · Continuum
The final volume: the German upheavals and the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
Social Ecology and Communalism
2007 · AK Press
Posthumous collection edited by Eirik Eiglad — four late essays distilling the whole project.
The Politics of Cosmology
— · Unpublished manuscript
A vast late work on science, nature, and politics — still in the archive, awaiting publication.
The Next Revolution
2015 · Verso
The late essays on popular assemblies and confederation, edited by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor — the book that traveled to Rojava.
About Bookchin
Further reading — the biography, the anthologies, and the studies written about his life and work.