Drawing the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings

by Paul Goodman

Painting a vivid picture of 1960s counterculture ideas, this new collection of the late Paul Goodman's essential anarchist writingsfrom utopian essays to practical proposalsreveals how he inspired the dissident youth of the era and profoundly influenced movement theory and practice. Long out-of-print, these provocative, insightful, and incisive pieces analyze citizenship and civil disobedience, decentralization and the organized systemall while still mindful of the long anarchist tradition and of the Jeffersonian democracy that resonated strongly in Goodman's own political thought. A potent antidote to U.S. global imperialism and domestic anomie, this collection also includes a new introduction by Goodman's friend and literary executor, Taylor Stoehr, who explains why these nine core texts will thoroughly explicate anarchism for future generations.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Anarchism

129 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes I feel as though, for all his failings, there's no one I agree with so much as Paul Goodman. Other times not so much. When he's wrong, he's often really, really wrong (some of the logic in "The May Pamphlet" isn't just naive and absurd-- it's farcical. Not to mention terribly written, though it's from 1945 and his essays from the 60s are faaaaar more eloquent), but when he's right, it's like he's turned on a light that makes sense of all human endeavour. Sometimes these two things can happen in the same essay (ie, "The May Pamphlet" as well as others here). It's puzzling. I strongly disagree with a bunch of his ideas and even more strongly agree with others, to the point that they seem worth building a religion around. Surely a brilliant man, surely human with all the fallibility that brings with it. Surely worth reading.

[Clay Zdobylak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boy, am I glad I read this. I gave it three stars, not because its not crucial or very moving (nearly every page demands I underline and put stars next to brilliant thoughts), but because he tends to meander from brilliant point to brilliant point with a vocabulary heavy in the radical psychological ruminations of the 1960s. This tended to slow me down.

Either way, the books make me hopeful for our current situation in the 2020s, and I can see how Ursula K. LeGuin and David Graeber also read his work and expounded on many of his core ideas of consensual society, the means being the ends, and the right of the individual to be the instrument of permanent social revolution.

[Drake · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a collection, I thought it got across a good deal of Goodman’s ideas and style. I can now see the philosophy of anarchism as one of decentralism towards greater liberty and self-actualization, rather than a philosophy of chaos.

The claim that most crimes are political rather than moral is difficult; it contains a great deal of truth but also some dangerous oversimplification simultaneously.

My favorite item by far is about “Getting Into Power...”; thoroughly anarchist, profoundly lucid, aware, insightful.

Many ideas in this reader have changed me.

[Braden Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not Goodman's best collection, but still interesting as always.

[Bawbee · Rating 5 out of 5]

highly suggested