Home > Work > Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship
1 " ...one of the great tasks of ecological thinking will be to develop an ecological civicism that restores the organic bonds of community without reverting to the archaic blood-tie at one extreme or the totalitarian "folk philosophy" of fascism at the other. "
― Murray Bookchin , Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship
2 " A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit-oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be prepared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life. "
3 " The word "moral" must be repeated—not as rhetoric to match the claims of reaction but as the felt spiritual underpinnings of a new social vision. It must be repeated not as part of a patronizing sermon but as a living practice that people incorporate into their personal lives and their communities. The vacuity and triviality of life today must be filled precisely by those visionary ideals that sustain the human side of life as well as its material side, or else the coordinates by which the future should be guided will totally disappear in that commodity-oriented world we call the "marketplace of ideas." The more serious indecency of this "marketplace" is that these ideals will be turned into objects—mere commodities—that will lack even the value of things we need to sustain us. They will become the mere ornaments needed to garnish an inherently anti-human and anti-ecological society that threatens to undermine moral integrity as such and the simple social amenities that foster human intercourse. "
