The Ardent Anarchist

THE COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS (175 pp.)--Paul Goodman--Random House ($3.95).

DRAWING THE LINE (III pp.)--Paul Goodman--Random House ($1.50).

"The organization of American society," writes Paul Goodman, 51, roving lecturer, author and professional dissenter, "is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony, and a baroque state waging cold war against another baroque state."

Before Greece and North Korea, before Hungary or the Berlin Wall, this sort of cumulative indictment might have evoked sage nods and won its author a reputation for fearless thinking. But to a cold war-scarred world, a man who cannot tell the difference between Russia and the U.S. seems too unhinged to be tellingly cogent on any other topic. As criticism, it seems a bit like the officer who stops in the midst of battle to dress down a soldier for failing to shave.

Still, the officer may have a point; the man should have shaved. And Goodman presses it like the single-minded zealot he is. He calls himself an anarchist--which itself has an old-fashioned ring. He wants to break up America's big corporations and other mammoth institutions because they have dehumanized life and robbed the individual of his power of decision and sense of purpose. Overorganization, Goodman charges, has dammed up the natural instincts of human beings, which, if released, would make the world a better place. No other American writer of the present time--either of the right or of the left--has so forcefully and persistently championed the individual against the state, and for this reason Goodman has attracted a wide following of people who feel frustrated and helpless and long for the democracy of a simpler day. "Only the anarchists are really conservative," writes Goodman, "because they want to conserve sun and space, animal nature, primary community, experimenting inquiry."

Unveiling a Tree. In the course of his career, Goodman has made his anarchist's pitch from many platforms: as novelist and short-story writer, poet and playwright, community planner, sociologist, psychotherapist, teacher (mostly at Columbia University). He began his fulminations against organized society in his fiction, in which a jumble of ideas is loosely arranged into plots. All the characters talk the same Goodmanese, part slang, part preaching. "Allow me. I will explain it to you" is a typical conversational gambit. Horatio Alger, the hero of Goodman's biggest novel, The Empire City, pilfers all the cards on file on him in the city, for 20 years prowls about New York in a perfect state of anonymity and anarchy. When an air raid has demolished New York in one of Goodman's short stories, the survivors agree to build a model society. They launch it by pulling down the last remaining billboard and unveiling a tree while listening, enraptured, to a recording of a Beethoven quartet.

Overrun by Administrators. Goodman is best known for his writings on the plight of modern youth. Growing Up Absurd argues that today's problem children are the fault of a society that offers them squalid ideals and dull jobs. The behavior of juvenile delinquents and the beats, wayward as it is, is in fact a wholesome protest against adult mores. Writes Goodman. "Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skilled and spirited men to run that system with.''

Goodman's latest book. The Community of Scholars, quite brilliantly attacks the colleges for failing today's youth. The college, writes Goodman, was once a self-sufficient community of teachers and students that preserved its independence from the state much like a medieval walled city. Now the walls have been breached by the state and the campuses overrun by mediocre administrators who truckle to outside pressures and intimidate the teachers. There are more administrators in New York State alone, writes Goodman, than in all the school systems of Western Europe. "The ultimate rationale of administration," writes Goodman, "is that a school is a teaching machine, to train the young by predigested programs in order to get preordained marketable skills." The young are no longer in college to learn but to be made serviceable to the state.

Cold War Therapy. When Goodman writes on politics, he secedes not only from society but sometimes from the facts. In Drawing the Line, a collection of essays on civil disobedience, Goodman scarcely mentions Communism as a cause of the cold war. By Freudian analysis, he traces the origins of the cold war to the pent-up emotions of Americans that must have aggressive outlets. After damning nearly everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt for continuing the cold war, Goodman announces his own cure for cold war tensions: "An occasional fist fight, a better orgasm, friendly games, a job of useful work, being moved by things that are beautiful, curious or wonderful."

Like other romantics before him, Goodman is too prone to exaggerate the badness of government--politicians, generals, police--and to find too much goodness in everybody else. When human beings are freed from the restraints of government, as Goodman would like, they often turn into beasts, as they did in the French Revolution in spite of the Goodman-like optimism of the French Enlightenment philosophers. Goodman's ideas would be more useful if they were less apocalyptic. But in democracy's never-ending dialogue, Goodman's is an always provocative--if never level--voice.

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