Kevin Carson does an outstanding job in this book of integrating insights from a wide range of disciplines--economics, history, organizational studies, moral and political theory--into an impressive synthesis that exhibits unmistakable continuity with both the libertarian and socialist traditions. Building on his earlier Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and engaged, as usual, with an eclectic array of figures including Benjamin Tucker, Oliver Williamson, Murray Rothbard, and Karl Marx, Carson continues his creative development of the Proudhonian mutualist tradition in ways that will put anyone--whether self-identified with the right or the left--who cares about freedom, community, and a healthy relationship with the non-human world in his debt. Vulgar libertarians, vulgar Marxists, and corporate liberals and conservatives may well be unimpressed; for the rest of us, however, the chance to learn from Carson, even when we disagree with him, is not to be missed.
