Social critic and anarchist philosopher Paul Goodman was born to immigrant parents in New York on this date in 1911. Goodman was the author of dozens of books, several of which (most notably Growing Up Absurd, 1960, and Compulsory Mis-Education, 1964) became important inspirational texts for the radical student movement of the 1960s. He was also a lay psychotherapist who worked with Fritz Perls to launch Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and ’50s. As a public intellectual, Goodman wrote on education, personal growth, urban design, political radicalism, pacifism, literature, and many other subjects; in an interview with Studs Terkel, he explained that while he “might seem to have a number of divergent interests . . . [but] they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.” His writings about his own bisexuality (including his 1969 essay, “Being Queer”) helped catalyze the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. The title of Jonathan Lee’s 2011 documentary, Paul Goodman Changed My Life, well applies to many, many radicals of a certain age, for whom Goodman’s work was a challenge and an inspiration. He died of a heart attack in 1972, just before his 61st birthday.
“The issue is not whether people are ‘good enough’ for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.”—Paul Goodman