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.
In his probing introduction to New Reformation, cultural and intellectual historian Michael C. Fisher speaks for a new generation of young scholars still in their twenties, as he assesses the initial impact and continuing relevance of Goodman’s problematic love affair with the radical youth of the Sixties. Fisher wrote his honors thesis on Goodman as an undergraduate at the UniversityCalifornia at Davis, and is currently in his second year of doctoral studies in history at the University of Rochester.
