Drawing the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings - Softcover

Goodman, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160486057X ISBN 13: 9781604860573

Verlag: PM Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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.

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Drawing the Line Once Again

Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings

By Paul Goodman, Taylor Stoehr

PM Press

Copyright © 2010 Sally Goodman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-057-3

Contents

Preface by Taylor Stoehr, 
Sources of Texts, 
The May Pamphlet, 
Reflections on the Anarchist Principle, 
Freedom and Autonomy, 
Anarchism and Revolution, 
Some Prima Facie Objections to Decentralism, 
The Black Flag of Anarchism, 
The Limits of Local Liberty, 
Civil Disobedience, 
"Getting Into Power": The Ambiguities of Pacifist Politics, 

CHAPTER 1

The May Pamphlet

On Treason Against Natural Societies

We speak of Society, with a capital S, as "against the interests of Society," as though it were a unitary thing, more than the loose confederation of lesser societies which also admittedly exist. The unanimity of behavior in the industrial, economic, military, educational, and mass-entertained Society certainly justifies the usage. Some philosophers call Society "inorganic," meaning that many of the mores, e.g. traffic congestion, are too remote from biological functions and impede them. But in the classical sense of organism, namely that the least parts mutually cause each other, our Society is more organic than societies have ever been; every action, especially the absurd ones, can be shown to have social causes and to be a social necessity. Disease is no less organic than health.

Yet in some of the strongest meanings of social unity, Society is almost chaotic. One such chaos is the confusion of moral judgments in the most important personal issues. Thus, ought a girl to be a virgin at marriage? Is there a single standard for husband and wife? Is theft within the law permissible? Is patriotism ridiculous? It would be possible to collect millions of votes on either side of such questions. I have made a practice of asking various persons what would be their attitude to receiving an incestuous brother and sister as overnight guests, and on this issue got many diverse replies.

Of course the universal confusion and toleration in such matters is itself a sign of social unanimity: namely, that people have agreed to divorce (and disregard) intimate personal concerns and opinions from the public ritual that exerts social pressure. The resulting uniformity of dress, behavior, desire is at the same time intense and bloodless; there is no longer such a thing as earnest speech.

Now with regard to the legal penalty for crimes, like theft, bigamy, addiction, treason, and murder, no such confusion and toleration exists. Once the case is brought to court, there is little diversity of judgment and punishment. One is appalled at the wooden morality that one meets in courts. Yet obviously the lack of social pressure keeps many cases out of court, for there is no scandal; adultery, for example, is a crime that is never brought to court. Does not this put the criminal law in an extraordinary position, and reduce the work of juries — which ought to express the strength of social opinion — to the merely logical function of judging evidence, which a judge could do better?

But the discrepancy between the moral and legal judgment of crime is deeply revealing. On the one hand the people, distracted by their timetables and their commodities, are increasingly less disturbed by the passional temptations that lead to crime; these are condoned, sophisticatedly understood rather than felt, partially abreacted by press and movies; they do not seem diabolic; the easy toleration of the idea goes with trivializing the wish. But on the other hand, the brute existence of any society whatever always in fact depends on the personal behavior of each soul; and a coercive society depends on instinctual repression. Therefore the Law is inflexible and unsophisticated. It is as though Society knows the repressions that make its existence possible, but to the members of Society this knowledge has become unconscious. In this way is achieved the maximum of coercion by the easiest means. The separation of personal and political and of moral and legal is a sign that to be coerced has become second nature. Thus it is that people are "protected from the cradle to the grave"!

Many (I believe most) of the so-called crimes are really free acts whose repression causes our timidity; natural society has a far shorter list of crimes. But on the contrary, there is now an important class of acts that are really crimes and yet are judged indifferent or with approval by law and morals both. Acts which lead to unconcerned behavior are crimes. The separation of natural concern and institutional behavior is not only the sign of coercion, but is positively destructive of natural societies. Let me give an obvious example.

Describing a bombed area and a horror hospital in Germany, a sergeant writes: "In modern war there are crimes, not criminals. In modern society there is evil, but there is no devil. Murder has been mechanized and rendered impersonal. The foul deed of bloody hands belongs to a bygone era when man could commit his own sins ... Here, as in many cases, the guilt belonged to the machine. Somewhere in the apparatus of bureaucracy, memoranda, and clean efficient directives, a crime has been committed." These have become familiar observations: the lofty bombardier is not a killer, just as the capitalist trapped in the market does not willingly deal slow death, etc. The system and now the machine itself are guilty. Shall we bring into court the tri-motor airplane?

The most blessed thing in the world is to live by faith without imputation of guilt: having the Kingdom within. Lo, these persons have no imputation of guilt, and have they the Kingdom within? — riders, as Hawthorne said, of the Celestial Railway!

The crime that these persons — we all, in our degree — are committing happens to be the most heinous in jurisprudence: it is a crime worse than murder. It is Treason. Treason against our natural societies so far as they exist.

Not all commit Treason to our natural societies in the same degree; some are more the principals, some more the accomplices. But it is ridiculous to say that the crime cannot be imputed, or that any one commits it without intent and in ignorance. For every one knows moments in which he conforms against his nature, in which he suppresses his best spontaneous impulse, and cowardly takes leave of his heart. The steps which he takes to habituation and unconsciousness are crimes which entail every subsequent evil of enslavement and mass murder. The murder cannot be directly imputed, the sergeant is right; but the continuing treason must be imputed. (Why is he still a sergeant?)

Let us look a little at the horrible working out of this principle of imputation, which must nevertheless be declared just. We are bred into a society of mixed coercion and nature. The strongest natural influences — parental concern, childish imitation; adolescent desire to stand among one's brothers and be independent; an artisan's ability to produce something and a citizen's duty — all of these are unnaturally exerted to make us renounce and forget our natures. We conform to institutions that up to a certain point give great natural satisfactions, food, learning, and fellowship — then suddenly we find that terrible crimes are committed and we are somehow the agents. And some of us can even remember when it was that we compromised, were unwisely prudent, dismissed to another time a deeper satisfaction than convenient, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 160486057X
• ISBN 13: 9781604860573
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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