Paul Goodman (9/9/11-8/2/72) was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, public intellectual & gay-rights activist. He's now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd & as an activist on the pacifist Left in the '60s & an inspiration to that era's student movement. He's less remembered as a cofounder of Gestalt Therapy in the '40s & '50s.
In the mid-40s, together with C. Wright Mills, he contributed to Politics, a journal edited then by Dwight Macdonald. In '47, he published Kafka's Prayer & Communitas, a classic study of urban design coauthored with his brother Percival. Fame came only with the '60 publication of his Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. He also knew & worked with other leading NY intellectuals, including Daniel Bell, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling & Philip Rahv. His writings also appeared in Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent & NY Review of Books.
Growing Up Absurd analyses the causes & effects of: "the disgrace of the Organised System, of semimonopolies, government, advertisers etc. & the disaffection of the growing generation". Goodman asserts that the young really need a more worthwhile world in order to grow up at all, confronting this real need with the world that they've been getting.
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49 of 52 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read Growing Up Absurd in 1967, a few months after I got out of the army, having served my two years as an active duty draftee. I was working as a shipper-dispatcher in a large bakery: I unloaded baked goods from large trucks and distributed them among much smaller trucks for delivery to homes and stores. At the time, that kind of job paid enough to raise a family in which the other spouse worked at her discretion. Working class had not yet devolved into working poor. I drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and ate chocolate eclairs with the truck drivers. The work got done, but there were no time-and-motion study industrial engineers gauging my efficiency. The job was not the sort that you took home. As an occupational bridge between the army and a state university, I thought it was all pretty good. The job made a simple but solid sort of sense, It seemed useful. After reading Paul Goodman's book, I began to wonder why I was aspiring to anything of higher status and income, the kind of work that demanded one or more university degrees.
In retrospect, however, it's good that I was determined to be upwardly mobile. The kind of job I had in 1967 may or may not still exist, but it certainly does not pay the bills which accumulate when raising a family. Working class and working poor have, indeed, become coterminous. This is not something that Goodman foresaw, but in the '60's neither did anyone else except an occasional Marxist who didn't think Keynesian fiscal policy would work well forever.
Even in the '60's, however, and with regard to the hardy and conventional working class, Goodman raised pertinent, and entirely new to me, questions such as "Why would anyone find satisfaction in working as a mechanic repairing trucks that delivered the New York Times?" I was still sufficiently naive that I thought the New York Times was a class act, disseminating truth and, occasionally, wisdom; keeping us free by keeping us informed. I couldn't imagine anything better than the interesting and manly work of a skilled mechanic laboring to assure that all the news fit to print was widely disseminated.
Goodman, however, introduced me to the banality of the world that the times maintained, and the crass materialism that provided rewards for continued, uncomplaining participation. Yes, Goodman respected what Veblen called the instinct of workmanship, but he also saw that it had been perverted to serve meaningless ends and to maintain the hegemony of the emptiness of expensive trinkets and fatuous titles. We lived in a comparatively affluent world, but one in which work was being degraded, generating alienation and normlessness, fostering a drab and desolate existence in which most of us learned that what we did paid the bills but otherwise was not worth doing.
Five decades later, Goodman's analysis is even more accurate and compelling. The world of work is shot through with even greater doses of meaninglessness. To add injury to injury, most "jobs of work" don't even pay the bills. Somehow we've been persuaded that the flood of women into the labor force to do the same grunt work as men, and typically at a much lower level of compensation, has been a giant step toward sexual equality.
The longshoreman, autodidact, and author Eric Hoffer, writing during the same era as Goodman, was fond of extolling the virtues of work as an end in itself. He described the cargo he helped move as "crap," but stil found fulfillment in work.
Goodman was a good deal more critical. He characterized the work that Hoffer valued as absurd. Goodman was right then, and he's even more on target now. Though some of the details, lingo, and images in Growing Up Absurd are dated, the book remains well worth reading. I'm retiring this year, and, looking back, with the possible exception of the time I spent in the bakery, the work I have done -- and there has been a lot of it -- has been absurd. It paid the bills, but at what cost? No surprise to Goodman that the arc of a working life would be replete with questions such as this.
In retrospect, however, it's good that I was determined to be upwardly mobile. The kind of job I had in 1967 may or may not still exist, but it certainly does not pay the bills which accumulate when raising a family. Working class and working poor have, indeed, become coterminous. This is not something that Goodman foresaw, but in the '60's neither did anyone else except an occasional Marxist who didn't think Keynesian fiscal policy would work well forever.
Even in the '60's, however, and with regard to the hardy and conventional working class, Goodman raised pertinent, and entirely new to me, questions such as "Why would anyone find satisfaction in working as a mechanic repairing trucks that delivered the New York Times?" I was still sufficiently naive that I thought the New York Times was a class act, disseminating truth and, occasionally, wisdom; keeping us free by keeping us informed. I couldn't imagine anything better than the interesting and manly work of a skilled mechanic laboring to assure that all the news fit to print was widely disseminated.
Goodman, however, introduced me to the banality of the world that the times maintained, and the crass materialism that provided rewards for continued, uncomplaining participation. Yes, Goodman respected what Veblen called the instinct of workmanship, but he also saw that it had been perverted to serve meaningless ends and to maintain the hegemony of the emptiness of expensive trinkets and fatuous titles. We lived in a comparatively affluent world, but one in which work was being degraded, generating alienation and normlessness, fostering a drab and desolate existence in which most of us learned that what we did paid the bills but otherwise was not worth doing.
Five decades later, Goodman's analysis is even more accurate and compelling. The world of work is shot through with even greater doses of meaninglessness. To add injury to injury, most "jobs of work" don't even pay the bills. Somehow we've been persuaded that the flood of women into the labor force to do the same grunt work as men, and typically at a much lower level of compensation, has been a giant step toward sexual equality.
The longshoreman, autodidact, and author Eric Hoffer, writing during the same era as Goodman, was fond of extolling the virtues of work as an end in itself. He described the cargo he helped move as "crap," but stil found fulfillment in work.
Goodman was a good deal more critical. He characterized the work that Hoffer valued as absurd. Goodman was right then, and he's even more on target now. Though some of the details, lingo, and images in Growing Up Absurd are dated, the book remains well worth reading. I'm retiring this year, and, looking back, with the possible exception of the time I spent in the bakery, the work I have done -- and there has been a lot of it -- has been absurd. It paid the bills, but at what cost? No surprise to Goodman that the arc of a working life would be replete with questions such as this.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Paul Goodman knew the 1950s, its bland neighborhoods, its schools so like prisons, its emphasis on athletics and prom queens. His book, "Growing Up Absurd," told every high school graduate and fresh-faced frosh in college exactly what they already knew.
High school was and is a waste of time and energy. How much better to just skip it entirely. High school students grew up deformed and degenerated, skipping classes, taunting teachers and each other, not doing homework and still making the honor roll.
Just having an adult say these things, recognizing just how absurd high school continues to be is so freeing, and so affirming. And about time, too.
However, nothing notable has been done to improve it since the 1950s, and no matter how that boring school day is arranged, it still feels like prison.
High school was and is a waste of time and energy. How much better to just skip it entirely. High school students grew up deformed and degenerated, skipping classes, taunting teachers and each other, not doing homework and still making the honor roll.
Just having an adult say these things, recognizing just how absurd high school continues to be is so freeing, and so affirming. And about time, too.
However, nothing notable has been done to improve it since the 1950s, and no matter how that boring school day is arranged, it still feels like prison.
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By dylan miller
Format:Paperback
What a great and wonderful book! Bunches of insight about the natural disaffection of the modern citizen. Truly a book about one of society's big questions.
Oh... wait... this was written in 1959? But there's all that government-business collusion? And the outrageous pharmaceutical industry and media monopolization scandals? And the hope for the near-future?
1959?! How stinkin' depressing! Great book. Read it; maybe the world is ripe for change.
Okay, the part about Russia is dated.
Oh... wait... this was written in 1959? But there's all that government-business collusion? And the outrageous pharmaceutical industry and media monopolization scandals? And the hope for the near-future?
1959?! How stinkin' depressing! Great book. Read it; maybe the world is ripe for change.
Okay, the part about Russia is dated.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Goodman's "Cri de Coeur," almost 50 years on...
As another reviewer, Dylan Miller, stated, "this ain't dated." If anything, his analysis of the woes of society is even truer today than when he wrote the book at the beginning of... Read more
Published on December 26, 2008 by John P. Jones III
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing New Under The Sun--Goodman was a seer!
The words are still important to ingest and ruminate, if not meditate, upon. All educators with any soul left must read this book. Read more
Published on December 28, 2007 by John-David Hughes
4.0 out of 5 stars
Paul Goodman -- "Conservative Anarchist"
This is the first title by Paul Goodman that I have read. He had an interesting critique of modern society (c. 1960). If one can get around many of his assumptions (i. Read more
Published on October 6, 2003 by Chris Planer
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