Paul Goodman

Aside from anarchism, the late-40s marked Goodman's expansion into psychoanalytic therapy and urban planning.[10] In 1945, Goodman started a second common law marriage that would last until his death.[8] Apart from teaching gigs at New York University night school and a summer at Black Mountain College, the family lived in poverty on his wife's salary.[5] By 1946, Goodman was a popular yet "marginal" figure in New York bohemia and he began to participate in psychoanalytic therapy.[8] Through contact with Wilhelm Reich, he began a self-psychoanalysis.[5] Around the same time, Goodman and his brother, the architect Percival, wrote Communitas (1947). It argued that rural and urban living had not been functionally integrated and became known as a major work of urban planning following Goodman's eventual celebrity.[11]

After reading an article by Goodman on Reich, Fritz and Lore Perls contacted Goodman and began a friendship that yielded the Gestalt therapy movement. Goodman wrote the theoretical chapter of their co-written Gestalt Therapy (1951).[5] In the early 1950s, he continued with his psychoanalytic sessions and began his own occasional practice.[8] He continued in this occupation through 1960,[8] taking patients, running groups, and leading classes at the Gestalt Therapy Institutes.[12]

During this psychoanalytic period, Goodman continued to consider himself foremost an artist and wrote prolifically even as his lack of wider recognition weathered his resolve.[5] Before starting with Gestalt therapy, Goodman published the novel State of Nature, the book of anarchist and aesthetic essays Art and Social Nature, and the academic book Kafka's Prayer. He spent 1948 and 1949 writing in New York and published The Break-Up of Our Camp, stories from his experience working at summer camp.[8] He also continued to write and published two novels: the 1950 The Dead of Spring and the 1951 Parent's Day.[8] He returned to his writing and therapy practice in New York City in 1951[8] and received his Ph.D. in 1954 from the University of Chicago, which published his dissertation, The Structure of Literature, the same year.[4] The Living Theatre staged his theatrical work.[8]

Mid-decade, Goodman entered a rut when publishers did not want his epic novel The Empire City, a new lay therapist licensing law excluded Goodman, and his daughter contracted polio. He embarked to Europe in 1958 where, through reflections on American social ills and respect for Swiss patriotism, Goodman became zealously concerned with improving America. He read the founding fathers and resolved to write patriotic social criticism that would appeal to his fellow citizens rather than criticize from the sidelines.[13] Throughout the late 1950s, Goodman continued to publish in journals including Commentary, Dissent, Liberation (for which he became an unofficial editor[14]), and The Kenyon Review. His The Empire City, was published in 1959.[8] Until this point, his work brought little money or fame.[14]

Goodman's 1960 study of alienated youth in America, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist and pillar of leftist thought during the counterculture.[4] The book of social criticism assured the young that they were right to feel disaffected about growing up into a society without meaningful community, spirit, sex, or work.[15] He proposed alternatives in topics across the humanist spectrum from family, school, and work, through media, political activism, psychotherapy, quality of life, racial justice, and religion. In contrast to contemporaneous mores, Goodman praised traditional, simple values, such as honor, faith, and vocation, and the humanist history of art and heroes as providing hope for a more meaningful society. Goodman's frank vindications and outsider credentials resonated with the young. Throughout the sixties, Goodman would direct his work towards them,[15] and sought to cultivate youth movements such as Students for a Democratic Society that would take up his political message.[16] As the New Left was born with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement's proactively involved and democratic dialogue,[17] Goodman became known as its philosopher.[3]

While he continued to write for "little magazines", Goodman now reached mainstream audiences and began to make money. Multiple publishers were engaged in reissuing his books, reclaiming his backlog of unpublished fiction, and publishing his new social commentary. He continued to publish at least a book a year for the rest of his life,[14] including critiques of education (The Community of Scholars and Compulsory Miseducation), a treatise on decentralization (People or Personnel), a "memoir-novel" (Making Do), and collections of poetry, sketch stories, and previous articles.[18] He produced a collection of critical broadcasts he had given in Canada as Like a Conquered Province.[18] His books from this period influenced the free university and free school movements.[19]

Goodman taught in a variety of academic institutions. He was the Institute for Policy Studies's first visiting scholar before serving multiple semester-long university appointments[14] in New York, London, and Hawaii.[20] While continuing to lecture, Goodman participated in the 1960s counterculture war protests and draft resistance,[18] including the first mass draft-card burning.[19] Goodman spoke regularly on campuses and discussed tactics with students.[14] He flew out to Berkeley at the start of the Free Speech Movement, which he identified as anarchist in character,[14] and became the first San Francisco State College professor to be hired by students.[19] Goodman's son, a Cornell University student, was also active in draft resistance and was under investigation by the FBI before his accidental mountaineering death in 1967,[21] which launched Goodman into a prolonged depression.[18] Despite early interest in the movement, Goodman was not as involved with youth activists of the civil rights movement.[22]

Towards the end of the decade, Goodman used his media stature to encourage Americans to reclaim Jeffersonian anarchism as their heritage. Radical vanguards, who interpreted this as an attempt to stifle their revolutionary fervor, began to heckle and vilify Goodman. Goodman normally thrived in polemics and was not affected by their reaction, but he disagreed with the movement's turn towards insurrectionary politics.[21] In the early 70s, Goodman wrote works that summarized his experience, such as New Reformation and Little Prayers & Finite Experience.[23] His health worsened due to a heart condition, and Goodman died of a heart attack in New Hampshire on August 2, 1972. His in-progress works (Little Prayers and Collected Poems) were published posthumously.[18]

External audio
Goodman's 1966 Massey Lecture on a decent society, useful technology, rural reconstruction, and American democracy

Goodman was most famous as a political thinker and social critic.[3] Following his ascent with Growing Up Absurd (1960), his books spoke to young radicals, whom he encouraged to reclaim Thomas Jefferson's radical democracy as their anarchist birthright.[3] Goodman's anarchist politics of the forties had an afterlife influence in the politics of the sixties' New Left.[14] His World War II-era essays on the draft, moral law, civic duty, and resistance against violence were re-purposed for youth grappling with the Vietnam War.[14] Even as the United States grew increasingly violent in the late 1960s, Goodman retained hope that a new populism, almost religious in nature, would bring about a consensus to live more humanely.[21] His political beliefs shifted little over his life,[23] though his message as a social critic had been fueled by his pre-1960 experiences as a Gestalt therapist and dissatisfaction with his role as an artist.[30]

As a decentralist, Goodman was skeptical of power and believed that human fallibility required power to be deconcentrated to reduce its harm.[19] His "peasant anarchism" was less dogma than disposition: He held that the small things in life (little property, food, sex) were paramount, while power worship, central planning, and ideology were perilous. He rejected grand schemes to reorganize the world[23] and instead argued for decentralized counter-institutions across society to downscale societal organization.[19] Goodman blamed political centralization and a power elite for withering populism and creating a "psychology of powerlessness".[31] He advocated for alternative systems of order that eschewed "top-down direction, standard rules, and extrinsic rewards like salary and status".[19] Goodman often referenced classical republican ideology, such as improvised, local political decision-making and principles like honor and craftsmanship.[32] He loved New York City and thought that Manhattan's mixture of people, customs, and learning contributed to its inhabitants' growth.[33]

Goodman followed in the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism. Like Kant in What Is Enlightenment? (one of Goodman's favorite essays), Goodman structured his core beliefs around autonomy, not freedom, that human ability to pursue one's own initiative and follow through.[34] Influenced by Aristotle, Goodman additionally advocated for self-actualization through participating in societal discourse, rather than using politics solely to choose leaders and divvy resources.[31] He adhered to John Dewey's pragmatism and spoke about its misappropriation in American society. Goodman praised classless, everyday, democratic values associated with American frontier culture.[35] He lionized American radicals who championed such values. Goodman was interested in radicalism native to the United States, such as populism and Randolph Bourne's anarcho-pacifism, and distanced himself from Marxism and European radicalism.[32]

Goodman is associated with the New York Intellectuals circle of college-educated, secular Jews,[36][37][38][39] despite his political differences with the group. Goodman's anarchist politics alienated him from his Marxist peers in the 1930s and 40s[40] as well as later when their thought became increasingly conservative. He criticized the intellectuals as having first sold out to Communism and then to the "organized system".[41] Goodman's affiliations with the New York Intellectuals provided much of his early publishing connections and success, especially as he saw rejection from the literary establishment.[38] Goodman found fonder camaraderie among anarchists and experimentalists such as the Why? Group and the Living Theater.[40] Goodman's role as a New York Intellectual cultural figure was satirized alongside his coterie in Delmore Schwartz's The World Is a Wedding[42] and namechecked in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.[43][44]

Goodman's radicalism was based in psychological theory, which evolved throughout his life. He first adopted radical Freudianism based in fixed human instincts and the politics of Wilhelm Reich. Goodman believed that natural human instinct (akin to Freud's id) served to help humans resist alienation, advertising, propaganda, and will to conform.[45] He moved away from Reichian individualistic id psychology towards a view of the nonconforming self integrated with society. Several factors precipitated this change. First, Reich, a Marxist, criticized Goodman's anarchist interpretation of his work. Second, as a follower of Aristotle, belief in a soul pursuing its intrinsic telos fit Goodman's idea of socialization better than the Freudian conflict model. Third, as a follower of Kant, Goodman believed in the self as a synthesized combination of internal human nature and the external world. Goodman met Fritz Perls around this time. The pair together challenged Reich and developed the theory of Gestalt therapy atop traits of Reich's radical Freudianism.[46]

Gestalt therapy emphasizes the living present over the past and conscious activity over the unconsciousness of dreams. The therapy is based in finding and confronting unresolved issues in one's habitual behavior and social environment to become a truer, more self-aware version of oneself.[47] It encourages clients to embrace spontaneity and active engagement in their present lives.[48] Unlike the silent Freudian analyst, Goodman played an active, confrontational role as therapist and believed his role was less to cure sickness than to adjust clients to their realities in accordance with their own desires by revealing their blocked potential. Goodman believed that the therapist, acting as a "fellow citizen", had a responsibility to reflect the shared, societal sources of these blockages. These themes, of present engagement and of duty to identify shared ills, provided a theory of human nature and community that became the political basis of Goodman's New Left vision and subsequent career in social criticism.[49] Goodman's collective therapy sessions functioned as mutual criticism on par with Oneida Community communal self-improvement meetings.[30]

External video
Goodman discusses the role of public schools with William F. Buckley Jr. on Firing Line, 1966

Goodman's thoughts on education came from his interest in progressive education and his experience with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and free university movement.[50]

Goodman doesn't offer a single definition of human nature, and suggests that it needs no definition for others to that some activities are against it.[51] He contends that humans are animals with tendencies and that a "human nature" forms between the human and an environment he deems suitable: a continually reinvented "free" society with a culture developed from and for the search for human powers.[52] When denied this uninhibited growth, human nature is shackled, culture purged, and education impossible, regardless of the physical institution of schooling.[52]

To Goodman, education aims to form a common humanity and, in turn, create a "worthwhile" world.[53] He figured that "natural" human development has similar aims,[54] which is to say that education and "growing up" are identical.[53] However, as outlined in Growing Up Absurd, a dearth of "worthwhile opportunities" in a society precludes both education and growing up.[53] Goodman contended that a lack of community, patriotism, and honor stunts the normal development of human nature and leads to "resigned or fatalistic" youth. This resignation leads youth to "role play" the qualities expected of them.[55]

In Compulsory Mis-education, Goodman explains "mis-education" as a process not on the spectrum of education, but rather a brainwashing process that advocates for a singular worldview, the "confusion" of personal experience and feelings, and the fearfulness and insecurity towards other worldviews.[56] Goodman's books on education extol the medieval university and advocated for alternative institutions of instruction.[19] He saw himself as continuing the work started by John Dewey.[57]