Seeds of Liberation

by Paul Goodman

A partial list of contents:

Albert Camus - Neither Victims nor Executioners
Bertrand Russell - Three Statements
Albert S. Bigelow - Why I Am Sailing into the Pacific Testing Area
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Our Struggle
Bayard Rustin - The Meaning of Birmingham
Paul Goodman - Getting into Power
James Baldwin - The Artist's Struggle for Integrity

551 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.

Reviews

[Nicolas Garcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has been a long hard road. Some thinkers have been far too radical, some not nearly enough. Although we may not agree on how things must change for the better we agree that things must change for the better. although we may disagree on the extent of inequality, we agree there is inequality. Life is a struggle.