This book was written to satisfy
the need for a consistently radical social ecology: an ecology of freedom.
It had been maturing in my mind since 1952 when I first became acutely
conscious of the growing environmental crisis that was to assume such
monumental proportions a generation later. In that year, I published a
volume-sized article, "The Problems of Chemicals in Food" (later to be
republished in book form in Germany as Lebensgefiihrliche Lebensmittel).
Owing to my early Marxian intellectual training, the article examined
not merely environmental pollution but also its deep-seated social origins.
Environmental issues had developed in my mind as social issues,
and problems of natural ecology had become problems of "social
ecology" -an expression hardly in use at the time.
The subject was never to leave me. In fact, its dimensions were to
widen and deepen immensely. By the early sixties, my views could be
summarized in a fairly crisp formulation: the very notion of the domination
of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by
human. For me, this was a far-reaching reversal of concepts. The many
articles and books I published in the years after 1952, beginning with
Our Synthetic Environment (1963) and continuing with Toward an Ecological
Society (1980), were largely explorations of this fundamental theme.
As one premise led to another, it became clear that a highly coherent
project was forming in my work: the_Q��(tJ()�25Pl<iin!he�l!1�rKel1ce()f
social hierarchy and domination and to elucidate the means, sensibility,
and practice that could yield a truly harmonious ecological society. My
book Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) pioneered this vision. Composed of
essays dating from 1964, it addressed itself more to hierarchy than class,
to domination rather than exploitation, to liberatory institutions rather
than the mere abolition of the State, to freedom rather than justice, and
pleasure rather than happiness. For me, these changing emphases were
2 The Ecology of Freedom
not mere countercultural rhetoric; they marked a sweeping departure
from my earlier commitment to socialist orthodoxies of all forms. I visualized
instead a new form of libertarian social ecology-or what Victor
Ferkiss, in discussing my social views, so appropriately called "eco-anarchism."
As recently as the sixties, words like hierarchy and domination were
rarely used. Traditional radicals, particularly Marxists, still spoke almost
exclusively in terms of classes, class analyses, and class consciousness;
their concepts of oppression were primarily confined to material exploitation,
grinding poverty, and the unjust abuse of labor. Likewise, orthodox
anarchists placed most of their emphasis on the State as the ubiquitous
source of social coercion. * Just as the emergence of private property
became society's "original sin" in Marxian orthodoxy, so the emergence
of the State became society's "original sin" in anarchist orthodoxy. Even
the early counterculture of the sixties eschewed the use of the term hierarchy
and preferred to "Question Authority" without exploring the genesis
of authority, its relationship to nature, and its meaning for the creation
of a new society.
During these years I also concentrated on b�vv_a truly free so<:iety,
( b,aos�d on ecological principles, could mediate hU111anity's relationsl1ip
,with nature .. As a result, I began to explore the development of a new
\ te-chnology�ca!�_(!JQ. cQm2!_�h�f1�ibl�_11��(lf1._<!iJJ:l�f1si()l1.�: .. §.�c
h �S!t
\nology would include small solar and wind installations, organic garldens,
and the use of local "natural resources" worked by decentralized
I
communities. This view quickly gave rise to another-t.b�!!��4JQrclilre<:t
df2moqacy,fol"tlrb(ln decentralizaticm, for a high mea�ure of self- .
I�u!f!ciency, for self�empowerment based on communal forms of social
llif�=-=-in sllort, the nonauthoritarian Commune composed of communes.
As I published these ideas over the years-especially in the decade
between the early sixties and early seventies-what began to trouble me
""as the extent to which people tended to subvert their unity, coherence,
and radical focus. Notions like decentralization and human sC<l.le�for
e)(ample;were deftly adopted without reference to solar anciwind te.<:b.
niques or bioagricultural practices that are their material unde!pirmiggs.
Hadi seginent was permitted to plummet off on its own, while the philosophy
that unified them into an integrated whole was permitted to
languish. Decentralization entered city planning as a mere strategem for
* I use the word "orthodox" here and in subsequent pages advisedly. I refer not to the
outstanding radical theorists of the nineteenth century-Proudhon, Kropotkin, and
Bakunin-but to their followers who often turned their ever-evolving ideas into rigid,
sectarian doctrines. As a young Canadian anarchist, David Spanner, put it in a personal
conversation, "If Bakunin and Kropotkin devoted as much time to the interpretation of
Proudhon as many of our contemporary libertarians do ... , I doubt if Bakunin's God and
the State or Kropotkin's Mutual Aid would have ever been written."
Introduction 3
community design, while alternative technology became a narrow discipline,
increasingly confined to the academy and to a new breed of technocrats.
In turn, each notion became divorced from a critical analysis of
society-from a radical theory of social ecology.
It has become clear to me that it was the unity of my views-their
ecological holism, "not merely their individual components-that gave
them a radical thrust. That a society is decentralized, that it uses solar or
wind energy, that it is farmed organically, or that it reduces pollutionnone
of these measures by itself or even in limited combination with
others makes an ecological society. Nor do piecemeal steps, however
well-intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal,
global, and catastrophic character. If anything, partial "solutions"
serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep-seated nature of the
ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical
insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the
necessary changes.
Combined in a coherent whole and supported by a consistently radical
practice, however, these views challenge the status quo in a farreaching
manner-in the only manner commensurate with the nature of
the crisis. It was precisely this synthesis of ideas that I sought to achieve
in The Ecology of Freedom. And this synthesis had to be rooted in
history-in the development of social relations, social institutions,
changing technologies and sensibilities, and political structures; only in
this way could I hope to establish a sense of genesis, contrast, and continuity
that would give real meaning to my views. The reconstructive utopian
thinking that followed from my synthesis could then be based on
the realities of human experience. What should be could become what
must be, if humanity and the biological complexity on which it rests
were to survive. Change and reconstruction could emerge from existing
problems rather than wishful thinking and misty vagaries.
IMI y use of the word hierarchy in
the subtitle of this work is meant to be provocative. Th�re i� _Cl_StrC>l1_g
tpeoreticai lleed t() _contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of
the words class and State; careless use of these terms can. prodw:eCi
dangerous simplification of social reality. To use the words hierarchy,
class, and State interchangeably, as many social theorists do, is insidious
and obscurantist. This practice, in the name of a "classless" or "libertarian"
society, could easily conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships
and a hierarchical sensibility, both of which-even in the absence
of economic exploitation or political coercion-would serve to perpetuate
unfreedom.
4 The Ecology of Freedom
By hierarchy, I mean the cultural, traditional and psychological systems
of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political
systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer.
Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in
a "classless" or "Stateless" society. I refer to the domination of the
young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of
"masses" by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their "higher social
interests," of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological
sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality,
and of nature by society and technology. Indeed, classless but hierarchical
societies exist today (and they existed more covertly in the past); yet
the people who live in them neither enjoy freedom, nor do they exercise
control over their lives.
Marx, whose works largely account for this conceptual obfuscation,
offered us a fairly explicit definition of class. He had the advantage of
developing his theory of class society within a sternly objective economic
framework. His widespread acceptance may well reflect the extent
to which our own era gives supremacy to economic issues over all
other aspects of social life. There is, in fact, a certain elegance and grandeur
to the notion that the "history of all hitherto existing society has
been the history of class struggles." Put quite simply, a ruling class is a
privileged social stratum that owns or controls the means of production
and exploits a larger mass of people, the ruled class, which works these
productive forces. �lass relationships are essentially relationships of
production based on ownership of land, tools, machines, and the produce
thereof. Exploitation, in turn, is the use of the labor of others to
provide for one's own material needs, for luxuries and leisure, and for
the accumulation and productive renewal of technology. There the matter
of class definition could be said to rest-and with it, Marx's famous
method of "class analysis" as the authentic unravelling of the material
bases of economic interests, ideologies and culture.
I::!it!.l:arsby, although it includes Marx's definition o( class �nd even
giv_espse to clctsS society historically, g9��beyond tbis lim!t�dIl!e�!l1Qg
im}2uted to.a largely economic form of stratificatioJ). To say this, how'=
ever, does not define the meaning of the term hierarchy, and I doubt
that the word can be encompassed by a formal definition. L�i�\V it hi�
torically and existentially as a complex system of command and obediet:J:ce
in which elites enjoy varying degrees ofcontioI over their subordiIla_t�s
without necessarily exploiting them. Such elites may completely
lask any form of maferial wealth; they may�even-bedispossessed of it;
much as Plato's "guardian" elite was socially powerful but materially
�or.
.
Hierarchy is not merely a social condition; it is also a state of consciousness,
a sensibility toward phenomena at every level of personal
and social experience. Early preliterate societies ("organic" societies, as I
Introduction 5
call them) existed in a fairly integrated and unified form based on kinship
ties, age groups, and a sexual division of labor. * Their high sense of
internal unity and their egalitarian outlook extended not only to each
other but to their relationship with nature. People in preliterate cultures
viewed themselves not as the "lords of creation" (to borrow a phrase
used by Christian millenarians) but as part of the natural world. They
were JleJ!her above nature nor below it but within it.
In(Q� �� lfffi: es-the-differences15etWeenindividuals, age groups,
sexes-and between humanity and the natural manifold of living and
nonliving phenomena-were seen (to use Hegel's superb phrase) as a
"unity of differences" or "unity of diversity," not as hierarchies. Their
outlook was distinctly ecological, and from this outlook they almost unconsciously
derived a body of values that influenced their behavior toward
individuals in their own communities and the world of life. As I
contend in the following pages, ecology knows no "king of beasts" and
no "lowly creatures" (such terms come from our own hierarchical mentality).
Rather it deals with ecosystems in which living things are interdependent
and play complementary roles in perpetuating the stability
of the natural order.
Gradually, organic societies began to develop less traditional forms
of differentiation and stratification. Their primal unity began to break
down. The sociopolitical or "civil" sphere of life expanded, giving increasing
eminence to the elders and males of the community, who now
claimed this sphere as part of the division of tribal labor. Male supremacy
over women and children emerged primarily as a result of the male's
social functions in the community-functions that were not by any
means exclusively economic as Marxian theorists would have us believe.
Male cunning in the manipulation of women was to appear later.
Until this phase of history or prehistory, the elders and males rarely
exercised socially dominant roles because their civil sphere was simply
not very important to the community. Indeed, the civil sphere was
markedly counterbalanced by the enormous significance of the woman's
"domestic" sphere. Household and childbearing responsibilities were
much more important in early organic societies than politics and military
* Lest my emphasis on integration and community in "organic societies" be misunderstood,
I would like to voice a caveat here. By the term "organic society," I do not mean a
society conceived as an organism-a concept I regard as redolent with corporatist and
totalitarian notions of social life. For the most part, I use the term to denote a spontaneously
formed, noncoercive, and egalitarian sOciety-a "natural" society in the very definite
sense that it emerges from innate human needs for association, interdependence, and care.
Moreover, I occasionally use the term in a looser sense to describe richly articulated communities
that foster human sociability, free expression, and popular control. To avoid misunderstanding,
I have reserved the term "ecological society" to characterize the utopistic
vision advanced in the closing portions of this book.
6 The Ecologlj of Freedom
affairs. Early society was profoundly different from contemporary society
in its structural arrangements and the roles played by different members
of the community.
Yet even with the emergence of hierarchy there were still no �conomic
classes or state structures, nor were people materially exploited in
a systematic manner. Certain strata, such as the elders and shamans and
ultimately the males in general, began to claim privileges for
themselves-often merely as matters of prestige based on social recognition
rather than material gain. The nature of these privileges, if such
they can be called, requires a more sophisticated discussion than it has
received to date, and I have tried to examine them carefully in considerable
detail. Only later did economic classes and economic exploitation
begin to appear, eventually to be followed by the State with its farreaching
bureaucratic and military paraphernalia.
But the dissolution of organic societies into hierarchical, class, and
political societies occurred unevenly and erratically, shifting back and
forth over long periods of time. We can see this most strikingly in the
relationships between men and women-particularly in terms of the
values that have been associated with changing social roles. For example,
although anthropologists have long assigned an inordinate degree
of social eminence to men in highly developed hunting cultures-an
eminence they probably never enjoyed in the more primal foraging
bands of their ancestors-the supercession of hunting by horticulture,
in which gardening was performed mainly by women, probably redressed
whatever earlier imbalances may have existed between the
sexes. the "aggressive" male hunter and the " passive" female
food-gatherer are the theatrically exaggerated images that male anthropologists
of a past era inflicted on their "savage" aboriginal subjects, but
certainly tensions and vicissitudes in values, quite aside from social relationships,
must have simmered within primordial hunting and gathering
communities. To deny the very existence of the latent attitudinal
tensions that must have existed between the male hunter, who had to
kill for his food and later make war on his fellow beings, and the female
foodgatherer, who foraged for her food and later cultivated it, would
make it very difficult to explain why patriarchy and its harshly aggressive
outlook ever emerged at all.
Although the changes I have adduced were technological and partially
economic-as terms like food-gatherers, hunters, and horticulturists
seem to imply-we should not assume that these changes were di- �
rectly responsible for shifts in sexual status . Given the level of
hierarchical difference that emerged in this early period of social lifeeven
in a patricentric community-women were still not abject inferiors
of men, nor were the young placed in grim subjugation to the old. Indeed,
the appearance of a ranking system that conferred privilege on
one stratum over another, notably the old over the young, was in its
Introduction 7
own way a form of compensation that more often reflected the egalitarian
features of organic society rather than the authoritarian features of
later societies.
When the number of horticultural communities began to multiply to
a point where cultivable land became relatively scarce and warfare increasingly
common, the younger warriors began to enjoy a sociopolitical
eminence that made them the "big men" of the community, sharing civil
power with the elders and shamans. Throughout, matricentric customs,
religions, and sensibilities coexisted with patricentric ones, so that the
sterner features of patriarchy were often absent during this transitional
period. Whether matricentric or patricenh-ic, the older egalitarianism of
organic society permeated social life and faded away only slowly, leaving
many vestigial remains long after class society had fastened its hold
on popular values and sensibilities.
The State, economic classes, and the systematic exploitation of subjugated
peoples followed from a more complex and protracted development
than radical theorists recognized in their day. Their visions of the
origins of class and political societies were instead the culmination of an
earlier, richly articulated development of society into hierarchical forms.
The divisions within organic society increasingly raised the old to supremacy
over the young, men to supremacy over women, the shaman
and later the priestly corporation to supremacy over lay society, one
class to supremacy over another, and State formations to supremacy
over society in general.
For the reader imbued with the conventional wisdom of our era, I
cannot emphasize too strongly that society in the form of bands, families,
clans, tribes, tribal federations, villages, and even municipalities
long antedates State formations. The State, with its specialized functionaries,
bureaucracies, and armies, emerges quite late inhuman social
development-often well beyond the threshold of history. It remained
in sharp conflict with coexisting social structures such as guilds, neighborhoods,
popular societies, cooperatives, town meetings, and a wide
variety of municipal assemblies.
But the hierarchical organization of all differentia did not end with
the structuring of "civil" society into an institutionalized system of obedience
and command. In time, hierarchy began to invade less tangible
fields of life. Mental activity was given supremacy over physical work,
intellectual experience over sensuousness, the "reality principle" over
the "pleasure principle," and finally judgment, morality, and spirit were
pervaded by an ineffable authoritarianism that was to take its vengeful
command over language and the most rudimentary forms of symbolization.
The vision of social and natural diversity was altered from an organic
sensibility that sees different phenomena as unity in diversity into
a hierarchical mentality that ranked the most miniscule phenomena into
mutually antagonistic pyramids erected around notions of "inferior"
8 The Ecology of Freedom
and "superior." And what began as a sensibility has evoived into concrete
social fact. Thus, the effort to restore the ecological principle of
unity in diversity has become a social effort in its own right-a revolutionary
effort that must rearrange sensibility in order to rearrange the
real world.
A hierarchical mentality fosters the renunciation of the pleasures of
life. It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the "inferiors," and pleasure
and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their "superiors."
The objective history of the social structure becomes internalized
as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may
be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline
of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression
then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and
later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in
a cumulative form up to the present day-not merely as capitalism but
as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we
explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of
our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold. We may eliminate
social injustice, but we will not achieve social freedom. We may eliminate
classes and exploitation, but we will not be spared from the trammels
of hierarchy and domination. We may exorcize the spirit of gain
and accumulation from our psyches, but we will still be burdened by
gnawing guilt, renunciation, and a subtle belief in the "vices" of sensuousness.
the need for a consistently radical social ecology: an ecology of freedom.
It had been maturing in my mind since 1952 when I first became acutely
conscious of the growing environmental crisis that was to assume such
monumental proportions a generation later. In that year, I published a
volume-sized article, "The Problems of Chemicals in Food" (later to be
republished in book form in Germany as Lebensgefiihrliche Lebensmittel).
Owing to my early Marxian intellectual training, the article examined
not merely environmental pollution but also its deep-seated social origins.
Environmental issues had developed in my mind as social issues,
and problems of natural ecology had become problems of "social
ecology" -an expression hardly in use at the time.
The subject was never to leave me. In fact, its dimensions were to
widen and deepen immensely. By the early sixties, my views could be
summarized in a fairly crisp formulation: the very notion of the domination
of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by
human. For me, this was a far-reaching reversal of concepts. The many
articles and books I published in the years after 1952, beginning with
Our Synthetic Environment (1963) and continuing with Toward an Ecological
Society (1980), were largely explorations of this fundamental theme.
As one premise led to another, it became clear that a highly coherent
project was forming in my work: the_Q��(tJ()�25Pl<iin!he�l!1�rKel1ce()f
social hierarchy and domination and to elucidate the means, sensibility,
and practice that could yield a truly harmonious ecological society. My
book Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) pioneered this vision. Composed of
essays dating from 1964, it addressed itself more to hierarchy than class,
to domination rather than exploitation, to liberatory institutions rather
than the mere abolition of the State, to freedom rather than justice, and
pleasure rather than happiness. For me, these changing emphases were
2 The Ecology of Freedom
not mere countercultural rhetoric; they marked a sweeping departure
from my earlier commitment to socialist orthodoxies of all forms. I visualized
instead a new form of libertarian social ecology-or what Victor
Ferkiss, in discussing my social views, so appropriately called "eco-anarchism."
As recently as the sixties, words like hierarchy and domination were
rarely used. Traditional radicals, particularly Marxists, still spoke almost
exclusively in terms of classes, class analyses, and class consciousness;
their concepts of oppression were primarily confined to material exploitation,
grinding poverty, and the unjust abuse of labor. Likewise, orthodox
anarchists placed most of their emphasis on the State as the ubiquitous
source of social coercion. * Just as the emergence of private property
became society's "original sin" in Marxian orthodoxy, so the emergence
of the State became society's "original sin" in anarchist orthodoxy. Even
the early counterculture of the sixties eschewed the use of the term hierarchy
and preferred to "Question Authority" without exploring the genesis
of authority, its relationship to nature, and its meaning for the creation
of a new society.
During these years I also concentrated on b�vv_a truly free so<:iety,
( b,aos�d on ecological principles, could mediate hU111anity's relationsl1ip
,with nature .. As a result, I began to explore the development of a new
\ te-chnology�ca!�_(!JQ. cQm2!_�h�f1�ibl�_11��(lf1._<!iJJ:l�f1si()l1.�: .. §.�c
h �S!t
\nology would include small solar and wind installations, organic garldens,
and the use of local "natural resources" worked by decentralized
I
communities. This view quickly gave rise to another-t.b�!!��4JQrclilre<:t
df2moqacy,fol"tlrb(ln decentralizaticm, for a high mea�ure of self- .
I�u!f!ciency, for self�empowerment based on communal forms of social
llif�=-=-in sllort, the nonauthoritarian Commune composed of communes.
As I published these ideas over the years-especially in the decade
between the early sixties and early seventies-what began to trouble me
""as the extent to which people tended to subvert their unity, coherence,
and radical focus. Notions like decentralization and human sC<l.le�for
e)(ample;were deftly adopted without reference to solar anciwind te.<:b.
niques or bioagricultural practices that are their material unde!pirmiggs.
Hadi seginent was permitted to plummet off on its own, while the philosophy
that unified them into an integrated whole was permitted to
languish. Decentralization entered city planning as a mere strategem for
* I use the word "orthodox" here and in subsequent pages advisedly. I refer not to the
outstanding radical theorists of the nineteenth century-Proudhon, Kropotkin, and
Bakunin-but to their followers who often turned their ever-evolving ideas into rigid,
sectarian doctrines. As a young Canadian anarchist, David Spanner, put it in a personal
conversation, "If Bakunin and Kropotkin devoted as much time to the interpretation of
Proudhon as many of our contemporary libertarians do ... , I doubt if Bakunin's God and
the State or Kropotkin's Mutual Aid would have ever been written."
Introduction 3
community design, while alternative technology became a narrow discipline,
increasingly confined to the academy and to a new breed of technocrats.
In turn, each notion became divorced from a critical analysis of
society-from a radical theory of social ecology.
It has become clear to me that it was the unity of my views-their
ecological holism, "not merely their individual components-that gave
them a radical thrust. That a society is decentralized, that it uses solar or
wind energy, that it is farmed organically, or that it reduces pollutionnone
of these measures by itself or even in limited combination with
others makes an ecological society. Nor do piecemeal steps, however
well-intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal,
global, and catastrophic character. If anything, partial "solutions"
serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep-seated nature of the
ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical
insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the
necessary changes.
Combined in a coherent whole and supported by a consistently radical
practice, however, these views challenge the status quo in a farreaching
manner-in the only manner commensurate with the nature of
the crisis. It was precisely this synthesis of ideas that I sought to achieve
in The Ecology of Freedom. And this synthesis had to be rooted in
history-in the development of social relations, social institutions,
changing technologies and sensibilities, and political structures; only in
this way could I hope to establish a sense of genesis, contrast, and continuity
that would give real meaning to my views. The reconstructive utopian
thinking that followed from my synthesis could then be based on
the realities of human experience. What should be could become what
must be, if humanity and the biological complexity on which it rests
were to survive. Change and reconstruction could emerge from existing
problems rather than wishful thinking and misty vagaries.
IMI y use of the word hierarchy in
the subtitle of this work is meant to be provocative. Th�re i� _Cl_StrC>l1_g
tpeoreticai lleed t() _contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of
the words class and State; careless use of these terms can. prodw:eCi
dangerous simplification of social reality. To use the words hierarchy,
class, and State interchangeably, as many social theorists do, is insidious
and obscurantist. This practice, in the name of a "classless" or "libertarian"
society, could easily conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships
and a hierarchical sensibility, both of which-even in the absence
of economic exploitation or political coercion-would serve to perpetuate
unfreedom.
4 The Ecology of Freedom
By hierarchy, I mean the cultural, traditional and psychological systems
of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political
systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer.
Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in
a "classless" or "Stateless" society. I refer to the domination of the
young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of
"masses" by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their "higher social
interests," of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological
sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality,
and of nature by society and technology. Indeed, classless but hierarchical
societies exist today (and they existed more covertly in the past); yet
the people who live in them neither enjoy freedom, nor do they exercise
control over their lives.
Marx, whose works largely account for this conceptual obfuscation,
offered us a fairly explicit definition of class. He had the advantage of
developing his theory of class society within a sternly objective economic
framework. His widespread acceptance may well reflect the extent
to which our own era gives supremacy to economic issues over all
other aspects of social life. There is, in fact, a certain elegance and grandeur
to the notion that the "history of all hitherto existing society has
been the history of class struggles." Put quite simply, a ruling class is a
privileged social stratum that owns or controls the means of production
and exploits a larger mass of people, the ruled class, which works these
productive forces. �lass relationships are essentially relationships of
production based on ownership of land, tools, machines, and the produce
thereof. Exploitation, in turn, is the use of the labor of others to
provide for one's own material needs, for luxuries and leisure, and for
the accumulation and productive renewal of technology. There the matter
of class definition could be said to rest-and with it, Marx's famous
method of "class analysis" as the authentic unravelling of the material
bases of economic interests, ideologies and culture.
I::!it!.l:arsby, although it includes Marx's definition o( class �nd even
giv_espse to clctsS society historically, g9��beyond tbis lim!t�dIl!e�!l1Qg
im}2uted to.a largely economic form of stratificatioJ). To say this, how'=
ever, does not define the meaning of the term hierarchy, and I doubt
that the word can be encompassed by a formal definition. L�i�\V it hi�
torically and existentially as a complex system of command and obediet:J:ce
in which elites enjoy varying degrees ofcontioI over their subordiIla_t�s
without necessarily exploiting them. Such elites may completely
lask any form of maferial wealth; they may�even-bedispossessed of it;
much as Plato's "guardian" elite was socially powerful but materially
�or.
.
Hierarchy is not merely a social condition; it is also a state of consciousness,
a sensibility toward phenomena at every level of personal
and social experience. Early preliterate societies ("organic" societies, as I
Introduction 5
call them) existed in a fairly integrated and unified form based on kinship
ties, age groups, and a sexual division of labor. * Their high sense of
internal unity and their egalitarian outlook extended not only to each
other but to their relationship with nature. People in preliterate cultures
viewed themselves not as the "lords of creation" (to borrow a phrase
used by Christian millenarians) but as part of the natural world. They
were JleJ!her above nature nor below it but within it.
In(Q� �� lfffi: es-the-differences15etWeenindividuals, age groups,
sexes-and between humanity and the natural manifold of living and
nonliving phenomena-were seen (to use Hegel's superb phrase) as a
"unity of differences" or "unity of diversity," not as hierarchies. Their
outlook was distinctly ecological, and from this outlook they almost unconsciously
derived a body of values that influenced their behavior toward
individuals in their own communities and the world of life. As I
contend in the following pages, ecology knows no "king of beasts" and
no "lowly creatures" (such terms come from our own hierarchical mentality).
Rather it deals with ecosystems in which living things are interdependent
and play complementary roles in perpetuating the stability
of the natural order.
Gradually, organic societies began to develop less traditional forms
of differentiation and stratification. Their primal unity began to break
down. The sociopolitical or "civil" sphere of life expanded, giving increasing
eminence to the elders and males of the community, who now
claimed this sphere as part of the division of tribal labor. Male supremacy
over women and children emerged primarily as a result of the male's
social functions in the community-functions that were not by any
means exclusively economic as Marxian theorists would have us believe.
Male cunning in the manipulation of women was to appear later.
Until this phase of history or prehistory, the elders and males rarely
exercised socially dominant roles because their civil sphere was simply
not very important to the community. Indeed, the civil sphere was
markedly counterbalanced by the enormous significance of the woman's
"domestic" sphere. Household and childbearing responsibilities were
much more important in early organic societies than politics and military
* Lest my emphasis on integration and community in "organic societies" be misunderstood,
I would like to voice a caveat here. By the term "organic society," I do not mean a
society conceived as an organism-a concept I regard as redolent with corporatist and
totalitarian notions of social life. For the most part, I use the term to denote a spontaneously
formed, noncoercive, and egalitarian sOciety-a "natural" society in the very definite
sense that it emerges from innate human needs for association, interdependence, and care.
Moreover, I occasionally use the term in a looser sense to describe richly articulated communities
that foster human sociability, free expression, and popular control. To avoid misunderstanding,
I have reserved the term "ecological society" to characterize the utopistic
vision advanced in the closing portions of this book.
6 The Ecologlj of Freedom
affairs. Early society was profoundly different from contemporary society
in its structural arrangements and the roles played by different members
of the community.
Yet even with the emergence of hierarchy there were still no �conomic
classes or state structures, nor were people materially exploited in
a systematic manner. Certain strata, such as the elders and shamans and
ultimately the males in general, began to claim privileges for
themselves-often merely as matters of prestige based on social recognition
rather than material gain. The nature of these privileges, if such
they can be called, requires a more sophisticated discussion than it has
received to date, and I have tried to examine them carefully in considerable
detail. Only later did economic classes and economic exploitation
begin to appear, eventually to be followed by the State with its farreaching
bureaucratic and military paraphernalia.
But the dissolution of organic societies into hierarchical, class, and
political societies occurred unevenly and erratically, shifting back and
forth over long periods of time. We can see this most strikingly in the
relationships between men and women-particularly in terms of the
values that have been associated with changing social roles. For example,
although anthropologists have long assigned an inordinate degree
of social eminence to men in highly developed hunting cultures-an
eminence they probably never enjoyed in the more primal foraging
bands of their ancestors-the supercession of hunting by horticulture,
in which gardening was performed mainly by women, probably redressed
whatever earlier imbalances may have existed between the
sexes. the "aggressive" male hunter and the " passive" female
food-gatherer are the theatrically exaggerated images that male anthropologists
of a past era inflicted on their "savage" aboriginal subjects, but
certainly tensions and vicissitudes in values, quite aside from social relationships,
must have simmered within primordial hunting and gathering
communities. To deny the very existence of the latent attitudinal
tensions that must have existed between the male hunter, who had to
kill for his food and later make war on his fellow beings, and the female
foodgatherer, who foraged for her food and later cultivated it, would
make it very difficult to explain why patriarchy and its harshly aggressive
outlook ever emerged at all.
Although the changes I have adduced were technological and partially
economic-as terms like food-gatherers, hunters, and horticulturists
seem to imply-we should not assume that these changes were di- �
rectly responsible for shifts in sexual status . Given the level of
hierarchical difference that emerged in this early period of social lifeeven
in a patricentric community-women were still not abject inferiors
of men, nor were the young placed in grim subjugation to the old. Indeed,
the appearance of a ranking system that conferred privilege on
one stratum over another, notably the old over the young, was in its
Introduction 7
own way a form of compensation that more often reflected the egalitarian
features of organic society rather than the authoritarian features of
later societies.
When the number of horticultural communities began to multiply to
a point where cultivable land became relatively scarce and warfare increasingly
common, the younger warriors began to enjoy a sociopolitical
eminence that made them the "big men" of the community, sharing civil
power with the elders and shamans. Throughout, matricentric customs,
religions, and sensibilities coexisted with patricentric ones, so that the
sterner features of patriarchy were often absent during this transitional
period. Whether matricentric or patricenh-ic, the older egalitarianism of
organic society permeated social life and faded away only slowly, leaving
many vestigial remains long after class society had fastened its hold
on popular values and sensibilities.
The State, economic classes, and the systematic exploitation of subjugated
peoples followed from a more complex and protracted development
than radical theorists recognized in their day. Their visions of the
origins of class and political societies were instead the culmination of an
earlier, richly articulated development of society into hierarchical forms.
The divisions within organic society increasingly raised the old to supremacy
over the young, men to supremacy over women, the shaman
and later the priestly corporation to supremacy over lay society, one
class to supremacy over another, and State formations to supremacy
over society in general.
For the reader imbued with the conventional wisdom of our era, I
cannot emphasize too strongly that society in the form of bands, families,
clans, tribes, tribal federations, villages, and even municipalities
long antedates State formations. The State, with its specialized functionaries,
bureaucracies, and armies, emerges quite late inhuman social
development-often well beyond the threshold of history. It remained
in sharp conflict with coexisting social structures such as guilds, neighborhoods,
popular societies, cooperatives, town meetings, and a wide
variety of municipal assemblies.
But the hierarchical organization of all differentia did not end with
the structuring of "civil" society into an institutionalized system of obedience
and command. In time, hierarchy began to invade less tangible
fields of life. Mental activity was given supremacy over physical work,
intellectual experience over sensuousness, the "reality principle" over
the "pleasure principle," and finally judgment, morality, and spirit were
pervaded by an ineffable authoritarianism that was to take its vengeful
command over language and the most rudimentary forms of symbolization.
The vision of social and natural diversity was altered from an organic
sensibility that sees different phenomena as unity in diversity into
a hierarchical mentality that ranked the most miniscule phenomena into
mutually antagonistic pyramids erected around notions of "inferior"
8 The Ecology of Freedom
and "superior." And what began as a sensibility has evoived into concrete
social fact. Thus, the effort to restore the ecological principle of
unity in diversity has become a social effort in its own right-a revolutionary
effort that must rearrange sensibility in order to rearrange the
real world.
A hierarchical mentality fosters the renunciation of the pleasures of
life. It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the "inferiors," and pleasure
and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their "superiors."
The objective history of the social structure becomes internalized
as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may
be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline
of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression
then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and
later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in
a cumulative form up to the present day-not merely as capitalism but
as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we
explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of
our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold. We may eliminate
social injustice, but we will not achieve social freedom. We may eliminate
classes and exploitation, but we will not be spared from the trammels
of hierarchy and domination. We may exorcize the spirit of gain
and accumulation from our psyches, but we will still be burdened by
gnawing guilt, renunciation, and a subtle belief in the "vices" of sensuousness.
