Paul Goodman, known in his day as “the philosopher of the New Left,” set the agenda for the youth movement of the Sixties with his best-selling Growing Up Absurd. He produced new books every year throughout that turbulent decade, while lecturing to hundreds of audiences on the nation’s campuses, covering subjects that ranged from movement politics to education and community planning; from psychotherapy and religion to literature, language theory, and media. There was little that did not fall within his purview as an old-fashioned “man of letters.” During this same heady period of his fame he also published his public letters and his journals, the Living Theatre performed his plays, his poems were set to music, and his fiction was chosen for book club distribution. America’s most celebrated public intellectual at the time of his death in 1972, his work still resonates for our own times of national crisis.
New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative
SKU: 9781604860566
Authors: Paul Goodman • Introduction by Michael C. Fisher
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781604860566
Format: Paperback
Page count: 200
Size: 6 x 9
Subjects: Essays, Political Science
Praise
“As this decade in America careens, recoils, and shrieks along, Paul Goodman appears increasingly as our most exemplary intellectual, that is, the most deeply representative and the most worthy one.”
—Theodore Solatoroff in The Washington Post
“Goodman’s frightening brilliance and integrity scared people, for his was the honesty of the moral man who saw things and connections with clarity that others did not even know were there. Writers and thinkers have a vogue. They are in fashion or forgotten. If Goodman is forgotten, if his work is found only in ash heaps, it is where humanity will end up.”
—Marcus Raskin, co-founder, Institute for Policy Studies
“His pleading, sane, frank, troubled and by now tired voice is one of the truest and wisest in American life.”
—Kenneth Keniston, New York Times
Drawing the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman’s Anarchist Writings
SKU: 9781604860573
Author: Paul Goodman • Edited by Taylor Stoehr
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781604860573
Published: July 2010
Format: Paperback
Page count: 128
Size: 9 x 6
Subjects: Essays, Political Science
Praise
“Paul Goodman has been one of the few integrated and hence liberated people of our age… He may well have been the only truly seminal libertarian thinker in our generation.”
—George Woodcock, historian of anarchism
“Paul Goodman brought a new invigorating stream into American anarchism, simply through his insistence that in all the problems of daily life we are faced with the possibility of choice between authoritarian and libertarian solutions. Taylor Stoehr’s sympathetic editing introduces Goodman’s social criticism to a new generation.”
—Colin Ward, community planner and public intellectual
“When I get confused about what is happening and what to do about it, I miss Paul’s eager and perceptive counsel… The important thing about Paul is that he raises the right questions. The fact that most of his answers are brilliant gives the reader an extra bonus.”
—Dave Dellinger, peace activist and founder of Liberation magazine
“The core of Goodman’s politics was his definition of anarchism…look not to the state for solutions but discover them for yourselves… He most passionately believed that man must not commit treason against himself, whatever the state—capitalist, socialist, et al—commands.”
—Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice
The Paul Goodman Reader
SKU: 9781604860580
Author: Paul Goodman • Edited by Taylor Stoehr
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781604860580
Published: 2/2011
Format: Paperback
Page count: 488
Dimensions: 6 x 9
Subjects: Politics, Literature
Praise
“It was that voice of his that seduced me–that direct, cranky, egotistical, generous American voice… Paul Goodman’s voice touched everything he wrote about with intensity, interest, and his own terribly appealing sureness and awkwardness… It was his voice, that is to say, his intelligence and the poetry of his intelligence incarnated, which kept me a loyal and passionate fan.”
—Susan Sontag, novelist and public intellectual
“Goodman, like all real novelists, is, at bottom, a moralist. What
really interests him are the various ways in which human beings living
in a modern metropolis gain, keep or lose their integrity and sense of
selfhood.”
–-W. H. Auden, poet
“Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.”
—Hayden Carruth, poet and essayist
“No one writing now in America makes better sense of literary subjects. His ability to combine linguistic criticism, politics, a version of the nature of man, anthropology, the history of philosophy, and autobiographical testament with literary analysis, and to make a closely woven fabric of argument, seems magical.”
—Robert Meredith, The Nation
Book Events
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Reviews
- Radical Ideas Implicit in the Jeffersonian Democracy on Which the U.S. Was Founded
- Arrested Development
- The Paul Goodman Reader in Publishers Weekly
- Drawing the Line Reviewed in Theory in Action
- New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative— A Review
- Drawing the Line Once Again in The Fifth Estate
- Drawing the Line Once Again in Radical Criminology: An Insurgent Journal
- Talking Anarchy in Ojai Orange
- Talking Anarchy: A Review
- Anarchism and Education: A CHOICE Review
- Anarchism and Education: An Anarchist Studies Review