BOOKS
THE REW ARDS OF SE RIOUS NESS
UTOPIAN ESSAYS AND PRACTICAL PROPOSALS.
By
Paul Goodman.
Random House. $5.00.
Brilliant or drab, right or wrong, Paul Goodman's essays are
marked by a seriousness which sets them apart from most of the
"social criticism" written by Americans during the last two decades.
He has resigned himself neither to passivity nor prosperity; he refuses
the role of a tolerated "constructive" critic; he believes that men can
still act upon their desires and that such action must sooner or later
bring them into conflict with the established system. Old-fashioned
Utopian, cheerful romantic, far younger than most writers half his
age, he still hopes to rouse, incite, stir.
Goodman's essays are serious because they proceed from an intel–
lectual center that has been earned through decades of work. There is
a coherent set of libertarian ideas in everything he writes, whether it is
an analysis of urban congestion or sterility in work, an examination of
the literary avant garde or the new moods among college students. In
valuing this sustained devotion to libertarianism, I am not trying to
suggest that there is a special virtue in "position-taking"; by now we
all know how quickly that can harden into a disdain for thought. But
there is a virtue in considering and caring for one's intellectual past,
even when one wishes to correct or partly disavow it, and there is
even more of a virtue in regarding an intellectual career as a history,
an organic development from premises of belief which sustain, even
as they allow for modification of, a writer's work. Goodman
is
today
more tacit and flexible in his anarchism, and somewhat less dogmatic
in his Reichianism, than he was twenty years ago; yet it
is
important
~ .
that the writer of fifty retain some deep ties with the writer he was at
I
thirty. Such an organic development is admirable not merely for its
intrinsic comeliness, but also because it provides some protection against
