The Society I Live in Is Mine
AuthorPaul Goodman
SubjectSocial commentary
PublisherHorizon Press
Publication date
April 4, 1963 (April 4, 1963)
Pages180
OCLC419522

The Society I Live in Is Mine is a 1963 book collecting Paul Goodman's social commentary ephemera. In letters to the editor, essays, speeches, reviews, and other clippings, Goodman addresses the general public on a range of civic problems, both to influence their thinking and to model the type of alert and intervening citizen he believes is necessary for societal change. His proposals span from urban renewal to school administration, with a particular focus on education and youth, and reflect his community anarchist position in wanting to spur individual initiative, oppose supreme power, and experiment with social alternatives. Goodman wrote to a variety of officials and New York publications and includes his commentary on these letters, such as whether they were printed. He also includes a number of book reviews and reprinted essays from Dissent and Liberation magazines. Horizon Press published the book. Critics were heartened by Goodman's approach to civics but differed on whether Goodman's method was egotistical or entertaining.

Contents and themes

"The society in which I live is mine, open to my voice and action, or I do not live there at all. The government, the school board, the church, the university, the world of publishing and communications, are my agencies as a citizen. To the extent that they are not my agencies, at least open to my voice and action, I am entirely in revolutionary opposition to them and I think they should be wiped off the slate."

Paul Goodman[1][2]

The Society I Live in Is Mine collects social commentary ephemera by Paul Goodman, including letters to the editor, essays, and speeches both published and unpublished in newspapers and magazines. Much of the content is written to address the general public[3] with the intent to urge others to become more alert and intervening citizens by his own example.[4] Goodman describes the collection as "angry letters on public morals and politics"[5] written to "influence the general consensus".[4] He is appalled by how few people self-regard as citizens and instead view society as machinery of authorities in which they participate. Goodman intends to prove that by becoming heard, people can more fully participate in and enjoy their society.[6] Bountiful, authentic, concerned citizens is Goodman's panacea for a society dulled by standardization, neglect, and injustice.[1]

The range of topics covered in his correspondence has no strict categorization[6] but reflects the range of civic problems that interest him.[6] Goodman's general position is that of a "community anarchist": He believes in reducing supreme power (sovereignty), increasing individual initiative, and experimenting in topics such as education and disarmament.[4] Though he writes mostly from a liberal perspective, Goodman makes some arch-conservative points in the name of diminishing sovereignty,[6] notably his position against nation-states and for "personal liberty and local initiative".[2] As one reviewer put it, the collection's only unifying theme is "the mind of Paul Goodman", reflecting his positions as an anarchist and pacifist, and his advocacy for sexual freedom, libertarian education, and face-to-face communication in small communities. His range of positions include: abolishing suburbs,[2] abolishing advertising,[7] rallying civil disobedience and peace marches in response to war,[2] dividing cities into village neighborhoods, offering informal apprenticeships for adolescents, encouraging sex,[7] reducing school administration, and experimenting with small classes and amateur teachers.[8][10]

He spends particular focus on education[5] and the "waste of the young".[11] Goodman advocates for greater teacher and student liberties despite his era's opposition to progressive schooling.[5] He argues against school standardization as a path to student achievement and believes that American society will be wiser and freer for more greatly distributing the authority to explore personal initiative and make mistakes. In this way, he argues against containing dropouts in institutions like schools and would rather provide them with another way to live decently.[11] Goodman argues against literacy, which he sees as having "no practical importance" in societal decision-making, used mainly to advertise and campaign to individuals.[5]

The book includes many letters to publications and public officials, and some speeches and reviews.[4] Goodman considered "occasional letters" such as these to be the sharpest articulation of an author's style and thought.[2] He wrote to a range of New York publications including public newspapers, alt weeklies, academic faculty and student publications, and counter-cultural periodicals.[12] His public letters tend towards larger societal problems: to a university on advertising, to the New York State Commissioner of Education on good teachers blamed for the bad decisions of administrators, and to the United Nations Secretary General on citizen demonstrations.[6] His proposals are not always pleasing; the text contains notes disclosing where his recipients did not print or acknowledge his letters.[6] The book includes commentary on the general effect of the letters.[4] Where his letters went unpublished, Goodman blames the editor's judgment or courage.[2]

His reviews include republications of commentary on books by James Baldwin (Another Country),[14] James B. Conant (Slums and Suburbs), Benjamin Spock (Problems of Parents), Maurice R. Stein (The Eclipse of Community), Vincent Riccio and Bill Slocum (All the Way Down: The Violent Underworld of Street Gangs), and Robert Penn Warren (Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South).[15] Goodman's reprinted essays from Dissent and Liberation include "Reflections on Literature as a Minor Art", "A Tour of South Africa", and "Format and Anxiety".[16]

Publication

The author, around the time of publication

Horizon Press published the book in hardcover on April 4, 1963.[17] The press was known for publishing early books by unknown authors and unknown books by familiar authors.[18] Horizon had published Goodman's earlier short story collection Our Visit to Niagara (1960) and would also publish his Compulsory Mis-education the next year (1964).[19] By the time of the book's publication, Goodman's social criticism already had a considerable following among American youth.[4]

Reception and legacy

Reviewers commented on Goodman as a gadfly: "strident, denunciatory, sometimes simplistic"[5] but "always earnest"[7] and fitting into no neat pigeonhole.[5] Raymond Price Jr. and August Derleth were heartened by Goodman’s articulate opinions, approach to civics as a “right and responsibility” to act in one’s own society,[2] and willingness to take part in the affairs of others.[1] The Santa Maria Times hoped that Goodman's advocation would not encourage letterwriting from contributors with less panache.[6] Critics differed on the benevolence of Goodman’s naysaying, a quality that Nat Hentoff found stimulating[11] but that appeared to The San Francisco Examiner as crankiness[5] and to Price as intellectual vanity.[2] Price called the book an "exercise in ego fulfillment" in which Goodman postures extravagantly, dismisses his detractors, and stifles debate, wearing down the reader.[2] Hentoff, however, felt that Goodman’s hectoring insistence is what made him one of American society’s most thoroughly independent minds.[11]

Thinkers like Goodman who break out of traditional patterns of thought, wrote the Washington Evening Star, are "destined to perpetrate one outrage after another".[20] The critic found Goodman's positions to be sensible yet extreme, such that he could appreciate the proposals but struggled to agree fully.[20] Goodman's solutions, to Hentoff, were debatable or impossible, requiring "a prior social revolution that he does not know how to instigate".[11]

As a book of ephemera, Price found the book to be unfocused and felt that Goodman would have been better off without digging up his letters. Price figured that The Society I Live in Is Mine would fulfill those followers of Goodman already endeared to his style.[2] While the Santa Maria Times recognized that books of letters to editors were rare and considered the book to be an interesting experiment, he did not think Goodman’s letters would pass the test of time like those of Thomas Babington Macaulay or Benjamin Franklin.[6] For Hentoff, the book was most valuable for how it distills Goodman central ideas but it also appealed as entertainment, to witness Goodman's "indignant, sardonic, and often devastatingly accurate assaults",[4] for example, on cultural absurdities like preschool television without spontaneity, or forcing children to shelter with a book over their heads in a school of science.[11] The New Yorker agreed that Goodman was funnier than he realized.[7] Goodman is readable, said Hentoff, because all his years of fervent opposition have not turned him "chronically self-righteous or humorless".[11]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Derleth 1963.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Price 1963.
  3. ↑ Price 1963; The New Yorker 1963.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Hentoff 1963, p. 54.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Stanley 1963.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Hogan 1963.
  7. 1 2 3 4 The New Yorker 1963.
  8. ↑ Widmer 1980, p. 83.
  9. ↑ Widmer 1980, p. 163.
  10. ↑ These positions recur in his proposals as a member of Manhattan local school boards in the early 1960s.[9][4]
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Hentoff 1963, p. 55.
  12. ↑ Nicely 1979, pp. 75–84.
  13. ↑ Pearre 1963.
  14. ↑ The Nashville Banner described Goodman's Baldwin review as "famous".[13]
  15. ↑ Nicely 1979, pp. 61, 70, 79, 82, 83.
  16. ↑ Nicely 1979, pp. 64, 77, 82.
  17. ↑ Nicely 1979, p. 87.
  18. ↑ Johnston, David Cay (April 23, 1997). "Ben Raeburn, 86, Publisher of the Known and the Aspiring". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 25, 2023. Retrieved February 25, 2023.
  19. ↑ Nicely 1979, pp. 73, 96.
  20. 1 2 Mintz 1963.

Bibliography

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