Goodman believed that humans were inherently creative, communal, and loving, except when societal institutions alienate individuals from their natural selves, such as making them suppress their impulses to serve the institution. Goodman's oeuvre addressed humanism broadly across multiple disciplines and sociopolitical topics including the arts, civil planning, civil rights and liberties, decentralization and self-regulation, democracy, education, ethics, media, technology, "return to the land", war, and peace. When criticized for prioritizing breadth over depth, Goodman would reply that his interests did not break neatly into disciplines and that his works concerned the common topics of human nature and community as derived from his concrete experience. He fashioned himself a
man of letters and artist-humanist, i.e., a public thinker who writes about
the human condition and who creates not as a visual artist but by discharging his duties as a citizen. Goodman's wide interests reflected a concept he believed, acted on, and titled one of his books
The Society I Live in Is Minethat everything is everyone's business. Goodman was prolific in sharing specific ideas for improving society to match his aims, and actively advocated for them in frequent lectures, letters, op-eds, and media appearances. Goodman's intellectual development followed three phases. His experience in marginal subcommunities, small anarchist publications, and bohemian New York City through the 1940s formed his core, radical principles, such as decentralization and pacifism. His first transformation was in psychological theory, as Goodman moved past the theories of Wilhelm Reich to develop Gestalt therapy with Fritz Perls. His second transformation opened his approach to social criticism. He resolved to write positively, patriotically, and accessibly about reform for a larger audience rather than simply resisting
conformity and "drawing the line" between himself and societal pressures. This approach was foundational to building the New Left.
Politics and social thought Goodman was most famous as a political thinker and social critic. Following his ascent with
Growing Up Absurd (1960), his books spoke to young radicals, whom he encouraged to reclaim
Thomas Jefferson's radical democracy as their anarchist birthright. Goodman's anarchist politics of the forties had an afterlife influence in the politics of the sixties' New Left. His World War II-era essays on the draft, moral law, civic duty, and resistance against violence were re-purposed for youth grappling with the Vietnam War. Even as American activism grew increasingly violent in the late 1960s, Goodman retained hope that a new
populism, almost religious in nature, would bring about a consensus to live more humanely. His political beliefs shifted little over his life, though his message as a social critic had been fueled by his pre-1960 experiences as a Gestalt therapist and dissatisfaction with his role as an artist. As a decentralist, Goodman was skeptical of power and believed that human fallibility required power to be deconcentrated to reduce its harm. "Anarchists", Goodman wrote, "want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power". His "peasant anarchism" was less dogma than disposition: he held that the small things in life (little property, food, sex) were paramount, while power worship, central planning, and ideology were perilous. He rejected grand schemes to reorganize the world and instead argued for decentralized counter-institutions across society to downscale societal organization into small, community-based units that better served immediate needs. Goodman blamed political centralization and a
power elite for withering populism and creating a "psychology of powerlessness". He advocated for alternative systems of order that eschewed "top-down direction, standard rules, and extrinsic rewards like salary and status". Goodman often referenced
classical republican ideology, such as improvised, local political decision-making and principles like honor and craftsmanship. He defined political action as any novel individual initiative (e.g., policy, enterprise, idea) without wide acceptance. Goodman believed that one's duty as a citizen, nevertheless as a student or faculty member, was to take political stances. Civil liberty, to Goodman, was less about freedom from coercive institutions, as commonly articulated in anarchist politics, and more about freedom to initiate within a community, as is necessary for the community's continued evolution. He believed individual initiative—human ardor and animal drives—and the everyday conflict it creates to be the foundation of communities and a quality to be promoted. Love and the creative rivalry of fraternity, wrote Goodman, is what spurs the individual initiative to do what none could do alone. Goodman followed in the tradition of
Enlightenment rationalism. Like
Immanuel Kant in
What Is Enlightenment? (one of Goodman's favorite essays), Goodman structured his core beliefs around
autonomy: the human ability to pursue one's own initiative and follow through, as distinct from "freedom". Influenced by
Aristotle, Goodman additionally advocated for
self-actualization through participating in societal discourse, rather than using politics solely to choose leaders and divvy resources. He adhered to
Deweyan pragmatism—the pursuit of practical knowledge to guide one's actions—and spoke about its misappropriation in American society. Goodman praised classless, everyday, democratic values associated with
American frontier culture. He lionized American radicals who championed such values. Goodman was interested in radicalism native to the United States, such as populism and
Randolph Bourne's anarcho-pacifism, and distanced himself from Marxism and European radicalism. Goodman is associated with the
New York Intellectuals circle of college-educated, secular Jews, despite his political differences with the group. Goodman's anarchist politics alienated him from his Marxist peers in the 1930s and 40s as well as later when their thought became increasingly conservative. He criticized the intellectuals as having first sold out to Communism and then to the "organized system". Goodman's affiliations with the New York Intellectuals provided much of his early publishing connections and success, especially as he saw rejection from the literary establishment. Goodman found fonder camaraderie among anarchists and experimentalists such as the Why? Group and the
Living Theater. Goodman's role as a New York Intellectual cultural figure was satirized alongside his coterie in
Delmore Schwartz's
The World Is a Wedding and namechecked in
Woody Allen's
Annie Hall. Despite early interest in the
civil rights movement, Goodman was not as involved with its youth activists.
Psychology Goodman's radicalism was based in psychological theory, his views on which evolved throughout his life. He first adopted radical Freudianism based in fixed human instincts and the politics of Wilhelm Reich. Goodman believed that natural human instinct (akin to Freud's
id) served to help humans resist alienation, advertising, propaganda, and will to conform. He moved away from Reichian individualistic id psychology towards a view of the nonconforming self integrated with society. Several factors precipitated this change. First, Reich, a Marxist, criticized Goodman's anarchist interpretation of his work. Second, as a follower of Aristotle, belief in a soul pursuing its intrinsic
telos fit Goodman's idea of socialization better than the Freudian conflict model. Third, as a follower of Kant, Goodman believed in the self as a synthesized combination of internal human nature and the external world. As he developed these thoughts, Goodman met Fritz Perls in 1946. The pair together challenged Reich and developed the theory of Gestalt therapy atop traits of Reich's radical Freudianism. Gestalt therapy emphasizes the living present over the past and conscious activity over the unconsciousness of dreams. The therapy is based in finding and confronting unresolved issues in one's habitual behavior and social environment to become a truer, more self-aware version of oneself. It encourages clients to embrace spontaneity and active engagement in their present lives. Unlike the silent Freudian analyst, Goodman played an active, confrontational role as therapist. He believed his role was less to cure sickness than to adjust clients to their realities in accordance with their own desires by revealing their blocked potential. The therapist, to Goodman, should act as a "fellow citizen" with a responsibility to reflect the shared, societal sources of these blockages. These themes, of present engagement and of duty to identify shared ills, provided a theory of human nature and community that became the political basis of Goodman's New Left vision and subsequent career in social criticism. Goodman's collective therapy sessions functioned as mutual criticism on par with
Oneida Community communal self-improvement meetings.
Education Goodman's thoughts on education came from his interest in progressive education and his experience with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and free university movement. Goodman invokes "human nature" as multifaceted and unearthed by new culture, institutions, and proposals. He offers no common definition of "human nature" and suggests that no common definition is needed even when claiming that some action is "against human nature". Goodman contends that humans are animals with tendencies and that a "human nature" forms between the human and an environment he deems suitable: a continually reinvented "free" society with a culture developed from and for the search for human powers. When denied this uninhibited growth, human nature is shackled, culture purged, and education impossible, regardless of the physical institution of schooling. Goodman saw himself as continuing the work started by
John Dewey. To Goodman, education aims to form a common humanity and, in turn, create a "worthwhile" world. He figured that "natural" human development has similar aims, which is to say that education and "growing up" are identical. "Mis-education", in comparison, has less to do with education or growing up, and is rather a
brainwashing process of inculcating a singular worldview that discounts personal experience and feelings, with fearfulness and insecurity towards other worldviews. As outlined in
Growing Up Absurd, a dearth of "worthwhile opportunities" in a society precludes both education and growing up. Goodman contended that a lack of community, patriotism, and honor stunts the normal development of human nature and leads to "resigned or fatalistic" youth. This resignation leads youth to "role play" the qualities expected of them. Goodman's books on education extol the
medieval university and advocated for alternative institutions of instruction. He advocates for replacing compulsory schooling with various forms of education more specific to individual interests, including the choice to not attend any school. He argues that the busyness of American high schools and extracurricular activities preclude students from developing their individual interests, and that students should spend years away from schooling before working towards a liberal arts college degree. Goodman believes in dismantling large educational institutions to create small college federations and "alternative colleges" that promoted direct relations between faculty and students. He was encouraged by the free university movement's initiative, as students actively pursued their genuine interests outside the traditional academic constraints of credits and requirements. This independent drive affirmed his belief that students have both the right and ability to organize as an exploited political class, assert their perspectives, and promote their views. He was discouraged when students did not express as much interest as he had in
the Western tradition. His works on American school social criticism were among the first in a 1960s body of literature that became known as the romantic critics of education. Critics of public schools borrowed his ideas for years after the 1960 publication of
Growing Up Absurd, and Goodman's ideas on education reverberated for decades. == Personal life ==