Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman
(Mylar protected dust jacket is tatered at edges, sunned a...)
Mylar protected dust jacket is tatered at edges, sunned and price clipped. Former owner bookplate partially torn from front free endpaper. Stated first edition.
(Like Goodman's Empire City, Parents' Day is the story of ...)
Like Goodman's Empire City, Parents' Day is the story of a young man in search of community, but the author's model here is not Cervantes, Brecht, or Rousseau but rather the Hawthorne of The Blithedale Romance. The nameless narrator of this notorious novel, first published privately in 1951 in an edition of five hundred copies, finds employment as a teacher in an idealistic, forward-thinking boys' school. As in Blithedale, the health of the group is the One Great Good, and that good is threatened at every turn by love between individuals. The narrator breaks the unwritten law of the group when he has a romantic affair - not with a fellow teacher, but worse: with a student. Once the narrator gives in to forbidden love, his sense of community grows dim, and in its place appears a vivid paranoid fantasy that the authorities are on his trail - as they will be, soon enough. What perversity is this that a man can yearn for the extinguishing of his self in perfect communion with others and yet, once he finds such perfect communion, can also yearn for expulsion from the group through acting on selfish desire?
Taylor Stoehr, in his brilliant afterword, says: "It is half the lesson of growing up that, apart from the world of damaged characters doing their best and their worst, there is no society, no community. Life is what it is. The other half of the lesson of growing up is that, just as there is no community apart from the society that we all inhabit, so there is no key, no solution, to the problem of one's own nature and fate." The great problem for Goodman's narrator is that, for all of his longing for community, his chosen community will not have him, not on his own terms - and he will accept no others. This is a life-problem worthy of exploration by a latter-day Nathaniel Hawthorne.
(This is the thirty year epic story of Horatio, an idealis...)
This is the thirty year epic story of Horatio, an idealist who struggles to learn the hardest lesson of all -- how to take his place in a conformist society and still retain his personal identity.
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York Review Books Classics)
(Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best selle...)
Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words.
For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly repressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance.
Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.
Paul Goodman was an American novelist, playwright, poet, literary critic, and psychotherapist, although now best known as a social critic and anarchist philosopher.
Background
Goodman was born on September 9, 1911, in New York City, the son of Barnett and Augusta Goodman. Business failure provoked his father to desert the family, forcing his wife and her three children to move from Greenwich Village to a cheap apartment on the Upper East Side.
Education
Goodman attended Hebrew school as well as a public institution for the academically gifted, Townsend Harris High School, from which he graduated at the top of his class in 1927. Entering the City College of New York, he fell under the influence of the rigorous philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen and began to imbibe the anarchist writings of Peter Kropotkin. Graduating with honors in 1931, Goodman then attended classes in classics at Columbia University, without officially enrolling, before transferring to the University of Chicago. Although the impoverished graduate student completed his Ph. D. requirements by 1940, continued indigence helped prevent him from formally becoming Dr. Goodman until 1954, when the University of Chicago Press published his thesis on The Structure of Literature.
Career
By 1954 Goodman had built a minor reputation outside academia with his short stories, poems, and essays, which were published in a variety of mostly avant-garde periodicals. A committed pacifist who avoided military service during World War II, Goodman subscribed throughout his adult life to an independent, nonviolent, communitarian anarchism. The moral passion with which he rejected social and political norms consigned him, however, to the periphery of American intellectual life; and the consequences, from the 1930's through the 1950's, were poverty, neglect, and estrangement. Yet he never stopped writing, even when unsympathetic editors and publishers denied him a forum. For much of this period, Goodman derived much of his livelihood from lay therapy, which he conducted for about twenty-five hours a week at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. A champion of the theories of Wilhelm Reich, who claimed that physical satisfaction is the basis of mental and emotional health, Goodman became successful enough as a practitioner to coauthor, with Frederick Perls and Ralph Hefferline, a textbook on Gestalt Therapy (1951). Goodman was also an apostle of sexual liberation, and the urgency of desire and the frustration of homosexual yearnings are themes that haunt his fiction. Such candor led to his dismissal from teaching positions at the Manumit School of Progressive Education in New York (1942) and the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1950). He had managed to survive three decades of marginality and failure, when the publication of a loosely connected set of essays made the itinerant teacher and bohemian famous at the age of forty-nine. Growing Up Absurd (1960) had already been rejected by over a dozen publishers, including the firm that had commissioned it. But Goodman's flair for articulating what troubled so many of the young helped reactivate the radical tradition. Such criticism not only helped encourage the political and social changes of the 1960's but also made them intelligible. First serialized in Commentary, Growing Up Absurd validated the disaffection of many young Americans, who could discern little purpose in what Goodman called the Organized System - the bureaucratic apparatus of the liberal state and of consumer capitalism. Believing that human nature is intrinsically creative, innocent, and loving, he argued that oversized institutions violated these generous impulses. He was free to dip into a trunkful of his unpublished manuscripts, releasing five books in 1962, for instance, and showing so astonishing a range that his oeuvre had to be catalogued under twenty-one separate categories in the New York Public Library. With his older brother, the architect Percival Goodman, he offered a utopian contribution to communitarian theory and urban planning, Communitas, which argued for a two-tiered economy (subsistence and luxury) that would remedy the maldistribution of wealth. The New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (1970) was a final sign of his intellectual independence even more than of his radical stance. But Goodman was perhaps best known for his indictment of education as among the most dispiriting manifestations of the Organized System. Compulsory Mis-Education (1964) argued for a series of ingenious experiments, from practical apprenticeships to voluntary schools designed to foster a sense of plenitude; and The Community of Scholars (1962) envisioned small settings of learning that harkened back to a medieval system of higher education largely bereft of administration. Goodman himself frequently taught as well, in institutions as varied as New York University, the University of Wisconsin, Sarah Lawrence College, San Francisco State College, and the University of Hawaii. Social criticism and political activism did not distract his own muse, however. His short stories fill four volumes; and his longer fiction includes the vibrant but self-indulgent tetralogy, The Empire City (1959). His five volumes of plays and even more of poetry have also found admirers, though not widespread critical or scholarly recognition. Whether obscure or famous, Goodman honored his own distinctive code of anarchism. He lived mostly on New York's Lower West Side but spent part of every year on a farm in North Stratford, New Hampshire, where, five years after his son Matthew, a promising scientist, was killed in a fall while mountain climbing, Goodman died of a heart attack.
Goodman's libertarian politics, burnished by pragmatism and empiricism, influenced the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and the nascent New Left, and inspired Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962) and Like a Conquered Province: The Moral Ambiguity of America (1967). An editor of the pacifist journal Liberation from 1962 to 1969, Goodman sharply condemned militarism and statism and became a familiar speaker at protests against American intervention in Vietnam.
Views
Goodman was an outspoken critic of contemporary educational systems as can be seen in his books Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Mis-education. He thought that a person's most valuable educational experiences occur outside the school. Participation in the activities of society should be the chief means of learning. Instead of requiring students to succumb to the theoretical drudgery of textbook learning, Goodman recommends that education be transferred into factories, museums, parks, department stores, etc. , where the students can actively participate in their education.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Interviewing him in 1966, journalist Richard Kostelanetz found Goodman "perceptibly melancholic and remarkably relaxed for a man so active and productive. He talks easily and engagingly. His graying brown hair is long, dry, stiff and unruly; his dress is generally as informal as his language and habits. "
Connections
Goodman was married to Virginia Miller from 1938 until 1943, they had one daughter. Sally Duchsten was married to him from 1945 until his death and was the mother of Goodman's son and another daughter.