Drawing the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman’s Anarchist Writings

Paul Goodman • Editor: Taylor Stoehr

In this new PM Press initiative, Paul Goodman’s literary executor Taylor Stoehr has gathered together nine core texts from his anarchist legacy for future generations.

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Five years after his death in 1972, Paul Goodman was characterized by anarchist historian George Woodcock as “the only truly seminal libertarian thinker in our generation.” In this new PM Press initiative, Goodman’s literary executor Taylor Stoehr has gathered together nine core texts from his anarchist legacy to future generations.

Here will be found the “utopian essays and practical proposals” that inspired the dissident youth of the Sixties, influencing movement theory and practice so profoundly that they have become underlying assumptions of today’s radicalism. Goodman’s analyses of citizenship and civil disobedience, decentralism and the organized system, show him Drawing the Line Once Again, mindful of the long anarchist tradition, and especially of the Jeffersonian democracy that resonated strongly in his own political thought. This is a deeply American book, a potent antidote to US global imperialism and domestic anomie.

Reviews:

“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

 

Paul Goodman, known in his day as “the philosopher of the New Left,” set the agenda for the youth movement of the 1960s with his bestselling 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 and media. At the same time, a continuous stream of poems, plays, and fiction prompted composer and diarist Ned Rorem to say, “In a society increasingly specialized, he shone as a Renaissance artist.” 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.

Taylor Stoehr, Paul Goodman’s friend and literary executor, has edited many volumes of his fiction, poetry, and social commentary. Among his numerous studies of Goodman’s career, his book Here Now Next tells the story of how today’s widespread Gestalt movement grew out of cross-fertilizing conversations between Goodman, the theorist, and Fritz and Lore Perls, the practitioners, of a daring new therapeutic experiment.  Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Stoehr has written many other books of literary and cultural criticism, translated two collections of poetry, and is author of the forthcoming Changing Lives: Working with Literature in an Alternative Sentencing Program.

Product Details:

Authors: Paul Goodman, Edited by Taylor Stoehr

Publisher: PM Press

Published: July 2010

ISBN: 978-1-60486-057-3

Format: Paperback

Page Count: 128

Dimensions: 9 by 6

Subjects: Essays, Political Science

 

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See and hear book reviews, and other news on the Author’s Page HERE

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Weight 280 g