Murray BookchinMaimon Schwarzschild

It was the summer of 1967 and I was a high school kid knocking around New York City.  Somehow I found myself spending an afternoon with Murray Bookchin.  He seemed to me then – and he seems to me now – the ideal of what an anarchist intellectual ought to be.  He had wild grey hair, and a happily intelligent and pixieish manner.  He must have been in his late forties: he seemed hoary with age to me.  His apartment was on the lower east side, big and completely disorderly.  He pressed some of his writings into my hands, in Anarchos and like journals, which I accepted gratefully and I hope I still have somewhere.  He was an altogether warm and appealing man.

He had a small but devoted following among the 1960s left, and also among some non-leftist libertarians, although his own (vehemetly erudite) intellectual roots were in the European democratic and anarchist left of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Born in 1921, he parted company from the Communist Party while still in his teens.  For the rest of his life, he repudiated totalitarianism utterly.  He was an offbeat and interesting mind, and a most attractive human being.

Murray Bookchin died last week in Vermont.  Here is a tribute to him by Brian Tokar, and here is an obituary by his companion, Jane Biehl.  Alav ha-shalom.