New Reformation by Paul Goodman

New Reformation by Paul Goodman

New Reformation was Paul Goodman's last book of social criticism. The man who set the agenda for the Youth Movement of the Sixties with his best-selling Growing Up Absurd, and who wrote a book a year to keep his "crazy young allies" focused on the issues as he saw them, stepped back in 1970 to re-assess the results of what he considered a moral and spiritual upheaval comparable to the Protestant Reformation--"the breakdown of belief, and the emergence of new belief, in sciences and professions, education, and civil legitimacy."

Michael Fisher's introduction situates Goodman in his era and traces the development of his characteristic insights, now the common wisdom of every radical critique of American society. A poet and novelist famous in his day for books on decentralization, community planning, psychotherapy, education, linguistics, and media, nowhere is Goodman's voice more prescient and still relevant than in New Reformation.

In his bestselling book Growing Up Absurd, Paul Goodman, recognized as the philosopher of the New Left at the time, set the agenda for the 1960s youth movement. Over that chaotic decade, he published new books every year while teaching to hundreds of audiences on college campuses on topics ranging from movement politics to education and community planning, from psychology and religion to literature and media. Simultaneously, a steady stream of poems, plays, and fiction inspired composer and diarist Ned Rorem to write, In an increasingly specialized culture, he shined as a Renaissance artist. His work still resonates for our own times of national crises, as he was America's most recognized public intellectual at the time of his death in 1972.