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Redrawing The Line: The Anarchist Writings of Paul Goodman
-from the 2011 Jonathon Lee film "Paul Goodman Changed My Life." paulgoodmanfilm.com
Drawing The Line Once Again: Paul Goodmans Anarchist Writings, PM Press, 2010, 122 pages, trade paperback, S14.95
We relatively unknown today, Paul Goodman was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In books like Growing Up Absurd, published in 1960, Goodman captured the Zeitgeist of his era, catapulting himself to the forefront of American intellectual life as one of the leading dissident thinkers inspiring the burgeoning New Left.
Goodman, who passed away in 1972 at the age of 60, was an iconoclastic radical with a wide ranging scope of intellectual vision and a multi-faceted character. He was an anarchist, a family man, openly bisexual in a sexually repressive era, a psychologist (one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy), and a poet. He saw himself as a classical man of letters, and at his peak output, released nearly a book a year.
PM Press has recendy reprinted some of Goodman's writings in three volumes. The first, Drawing The Line Once Again: Paul Goodmans Anarchist Writings, collects short essays from throughout Goodman's lifetime including "The May Pamphlet," one of his earliest pieces. Many of these pieces were later incorporated into his longer works.
"The May Pamphlet" is in many ways Goodman's manifesto, outlining some of his basic principles. From advocating a free society, to discussing the nature of language, to an examination of the education system and its function as a system of coercion, the themes and principles outlined in it are revisited time and again throughout his writings.
One of the key ideas examined in the "May Pamphlet," is his concept of a free society. This is one constantly striving towards what Goodman calls the natural society or how we would live and interact with one another if outside elements did not intrude in our fives. The free society strikes a balance between our natural impulses and desires, and the cultural expectations of society at-large.
"A free society," Goodman writes, "cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life." While...