Goodman, Paul

GOODMAN, PAUL (1911–1972). Although a best-selling author widely read in New Left and countercultural circles in the 1960s, Paul Goodman had already run through several careers before his decade of fame as the author of Growing Up Absurd (1960). He was trained as a philosopher at City College in New York and the University of Chicago, where his mentors were Morris Cohen and Richard McKeon, and went on to teach mathematics and the Greeks to ninth graders at a progressive school and literature at various colleges. He was fired three times for his open homosexuality. (Goodman was bisexual—a family man, twice married and father of three.)

In the years after World War II, Goodman was a Zelig-like figure at the intersection of the postwar political and cultural avant-gardes. As a regular contributor to Dwight Macdonald’s politics he drew on Wilhelm Reich in a blistering attack on conformist social psychology, “The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud” (1945), that anticipated later critiques by Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and Russell Jacoby. With Fritz Perls he wrote Gestalt Therapy (1951), the theoretical cornerstone of the movement that went by that name, and he practiced psychotherapy for a decade. Gestalt remained a through-line in his social criticism, with group therapy serving as his model of communal belonging and fellow-feeling. With his architect brother Percival Goodman he collaborated on Communitas (1947), a classic of anarchist community planning. He was a frequent lecturer at the Eighth Street Club, speaking on anarchism, art, and gestalt to New York’s community of Abstract Expressionists. His writings on the avant-garde as a prefigurative radical community received intense attention at Black Mountain College, even after he was dismissed from its faculty for his bisexuality. His plays were produced by the Living Theater, where he was a kind of guru-in-residence. Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-education (1962) and The Community of Scholars (1964) made him a formative influence on experimental “free schools” and “free universities” and an ally of Ivan Illich and other theorists of radical pedagogy. The Structure of Literature (1954) and Speaking and Language (1971) were equivalent tours de force in literary criticism and philosophical linguistics. He also published stories, novels, and poems. He considered The Empire City: A Novel of New York City (1942, 1946, 1959) his greatest literary achievement and was heartbroken by its largely dismissive critical reception. Including his social criticism, his output was more than thirty volumes.

Goodman was an anarcho-pacifist in the tradition of William Morris and Peter Kropotkin, and like them a fierce opponent of the factory system and the militarized state. The foundations of his anarchism had been laid in his youth, but he always spoke of himself as “apolitical,” and it was not until World War II threatened that he set himself to formulate his radicalism. He became a central figure among the New York anarchists and published chapters of his manifesto The May Pamphlet (1946) in magazines like Why? Retort, and politics. “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order,” he wrote there; “it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.” During this period his circle overlapped with the War Resisters League and the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution, where many leaders of the anti-war movement served their apprenticeships. Goodman joined the editorial board of Liberation shortly after its founding in 1956, no doubt drawn to the magazine early synthesis of pacifism and radical humanism, and was by 1960 one of the magazine’s most prominent contributors.

Growing Up Absurd catapulted Goodman onto a national stage, selling half a million copies during his lifetime and winning him an avid following among young radicals. The book is noteworthy for its unique synthesis of libertarian leftism and cultural conservatism. Goodman was despairing of the betrayal of the progressive political project and the loss of “man’s work” and genuine patriotism in the “Organized Society.” “I am an anarchist and a patriot,” he wrote in his journal two years before the book appeared—“a curious kind of thing.” The book’s now-shocking claim that young women did not grow up absurd because they found in motherhood a meaningful vocation received little attention at the time. But the homoerotic undercurrents of his portrait of male adolescent alienation and his openly transgressive sexuality (he declared himself “queer”) made Goodman a gay icon before the emergence of a mass Gay Liberation movement.

Throughout the sixties Goodman was a ubiquitous presence on college campuses and on television and radio; he was also a featured speaker at anti-war demonstrations. But he and the New Left parted company over the Leninist tactics and anti-intellectualism that, as he saw it, were betraying the spirit of the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the Port Huron Statement. Soon after, he suffered his first heart attack, and although he continued to speak out on radical issues, especially in New Reformation (1969), he now turned to work that was more congenial. His last books were poetry and apologias. The titles of two collections, Homespun of Oatmeal Gray (1970) and Little Prayers and Finite Experience (1972) spoke to a chastened sensibility. A posthumously published essay summed up his “crazy hope” for a world made “tolerable” for human life. “Politically I only want that the children have bright eyes, the rivers be clean, food and sex be available, and nobody be pushed around.”
After his death in 1972 Susan Sontag eulogized Goodman as “our Sartre, our Cocteau,” with gifts neither French writer had: “a genuine feeling for what human life is about, a fastidiousness and breadth of moral passion.” Goodman described himself as “a man of letters in the old sense,” explaining that he had only one subject in all his multifarious works, “the human beings I know in their man-made scene.”

Blake, Casey Nelson. “Paul Goodman: Anarchist and Patriot,” Raritan, 32, 1 (Summer 2012): 20-33.

Cornell, Andrew. Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.

Dennison, George. “A Memoir.” In Collected Poems, by Paul Goodman. New York: Random House, 1973.

King, Richard. “Paul Goodman.” In The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Mattson, Kevin. “Paul Goodman, Anarchist Reformer: The Politics of Decentralization.” In Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970. State College: Penn State University Press, 2002.

Roszak, Theodore. “Exploring Utopia: The Visionary Sociology of Paul Goodman.” In Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Doubleday, 1969.

Sontag, Susan. “On Paul Goodman,” New York Review of Books (September 21, 1972).

Stoehr, Taylor. Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994.

Stoehr, Taylor, ed. The Paul Goodman Reader. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.

Paul Goodman papers. Houghton Library. Collection Overview. HOLLIS for Archival Discovery. Harvard University Library. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/6759/collection_organization