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

"To me, the chief principle of anarchism is not freedom but autonomy...behavior is more graceful, forceful, and discriminating without the intervention of top-down authorities, whether State, collective, democracy, corporate bureaucracy, prison wardens, deans, prearranged curricula, or central planning. These may be necessary in certain emergencies, but it is at a cost to vitality... By and large, the use of power to do a job is inefficient in the fairly short run. Extrinsic power inhibits intrinsic function."---From Drawing the Line Once Again

"Paul Goodman has been one of the few integrated and hence liberated people of our age. He may well have been the only truly seminal libertarian thinker in our generation."---George Woodcock, historian of anarchism

"Paul Goodman brought a new invigorating stream into American anarchism, simply through his insistence that in all the problems of daily life we are faced with the possibility of choice between authoritarian and libertarian solutions."---Colin Ward, community planner and public intellectual

Goodman's literary executor Taylor Stoehr has gathered together nine core texts from his anarchist legacy to future generations---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 U.S. global imperialism and domestic anomie.

Paul Goodman, known in his day as "the philosopher of the New Left," set the agenda for the youth movement of the Sixties with his best-selling Growing Up Absurd. During this same heady period of his fame he also published his public letters and his journals, the Living Theatre performed his plays, his poems were set to music, and his fiction was chosen for book club distribution.
Taylor Stoehr, Paul Goodman's friend and literary executor, has edited many volumes of his fiction, poetry, and social commentary. A professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Stoehr is also the author of half a dozen other books of literary and cultural criticism, and translator of two collections of poetry.