Taylor Stoehr

xviii, 334 p. ; 22 cm

A one man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman is both a prolific writer and famed social critic. This compendious volume features excerpts not only from his bestselling titles such as Growing Up Absurd (Vintage, 1973), but also from his landmark books on education, psychotherapy, language, poetics and anarchism. Also featured are samples from his comic novels, poems and short stories creating a must-have reader of this acclaimed writer's dynamic, engaging and challenging work which continues to resonate.

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. (Source: [PM Press](