The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.
Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 7
“Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal.”
Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 396
Context: Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal. This is why I maintain that no state in the modern world is legitimate. No present-day authority can claim to be instructed by God, for all authority is set in the framework of a totalitarian state. This is why I decide for anarchy.
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism. It is those who have never lived under tyranny who call me petit bourgeois.
“Reason Interview: Murray Bookchin: A controversial anarchist talks about government, the Libertarian Party, Ayn Rand, and the evolution of his own ideas” http://reason.com/archives/1979/10/01/interview-with-murray-bookchin/1, Leslee J. Newman, Reason magazine, (October 1979) pp. 34-39.
Financial Times, 1 October, 1976.
Quoted in "Allende Sees Chile Finding Her Own Way to Socialism" by Joseph Novitski, in The New York Times (4 October 1970)
Context: We start from different ideological positions. For you to be a Communist or a Socialist is to be totalitarian; for me no.… On the contrary, I think Socialism frees man.
Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 18
