John Galbraith Paul Goodman Jane Jacobs Popular Books

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Growing Up Absurd is a 1960 book by Paul Goodman on the relationship between American juvenile delinquency and societal opportunities to fulfill natural needs. Contrary to the then-popular view that juvenile delinquents should be led to respect societal norms, Goodman argued that young American men were justified in their disaffection because their society lacked the preconditions for growing up, such as meaningful work, honorable community, sexual freedom, and spiritual sustenance. Goodman's book drew from his prior works, psychotherapy practice, and personal experiences and relations in New York City. The small New York press that originally commissioned the book asked Goodman to return his advance when the resulting book, written in late 1959, focused less on the commissioned subject of city youth gangs than on the American culture and value systems in which the youth were raised. Nineteen publishers rejected Growing Up Absurd before Norman Podhoretz used selections from the book to relaunch his magazine, Commentary. After Podhoretz encouraged Random House publisher Jason Epstein to reconsider the book, Goodman had a contract the next day. Random House published Growing Up Absurd in 1960 and a Vintage Books paperback edition followed two years later. Growing Up Absurd became a bestseller with 100,000 copies sold in its first three years and translations into five languages. It was widely read across 1960s college campuses and popular among student activists and the New Left, who assimilated the author's ideology. Growing Up Absurd transformed Goodman's outcast career into mainstream notoriety as a social critic, including invitations to lecture at hundreds of colleges, though Goodman's fame did not endure long after his death in 1972. Many specifics of Growing Up Absurd became dated with time and, in later years, retrospective reviewers criticized Goodman's exclusion of women from his analysis. New York Review Books reissued Growing Up Absurd in 2012. Background In the United States, the affluent postwar 1950s was a time of both general prosperity and conformity. The latter had become a theme of social criticism by the decade's end. Critiques on the relation between social norms and the individual psyche included David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), and Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (1959). As a whole, this literature portrayed American culture as white-collar subservience to mass advertising and corporate life. Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960) belongs to this tradition, having consolidated, as historian Kevin Mattson put it, "a decade's worth of social criticism". Among American writers of the period, concern for proper childrearing and education loomed larger than questions of workplace conformity and middle-class standards. They largely wrote in disapproval of what youth culture portended for the country's future. The image of the juvenile delinquent became a pervasive symbol for this decline, reflected in the rise of urban youth gang warfare and the popular portrayal of the maladjusted, non-conformist outsider in films and theater such as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and West Side Story (1957). Synopsis In Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, Paul Goodman faults American culture and values for the rise of juvenile delinquency in the late 1950s. Delinquency and "dropping out" of society, Goodman argues, are sane and justified responses to an adult society not worth growing up into, lacking in meaningful vocation, honorable community, sexual freedom, spiritual sustenance, and other qualities that youth require in their society to develop their social and moral identities, i.e. to grow up. He writes primarily about disaffected young men—urban juvenile delinquents and the beatnik subculture—and refers to the prevalent sterile, conformist American social order as the "organized system". Goodman disagrees with the then-common view that the solution for youth disaffection was to bring the youth to respect societal norms. Siding with the youth, he argues that the young already understood and rejected societal standards as unimportant. In this way, Goodman makes the youth social problem into less a problem than a symptom of a more existential need. Goodman contends that American society ruined the concept of vocation and created artificial demands through advertising. Affluent, postwar advanced capitalism boasted high employment but, Goodman writes, at the cost of reliance on "artificial ... demand for useless goods" that created unfulfilling, bureaucratic work, without a sense of purpose or service. Goodman believes that vocation that focuses on use, interest, style, and love has meaning and self-justified purpose, but that work focused on role, procedure, and profit tends towards meaninglessness. Thus youth were rightfully disaffected, says Goodman, at the prospect of joining an adult society lacking fulfillment. The chapters of Growing Up Absurd apply this argument to facets of life including "Faith", "Jobs", "Patriotism", and sexuality ("Social Animal"). Goodman describes the period's mechanical social order and its feeling of inescapability and forced conformity as an "apparently closed room" fixated on a "rat race". He posits that citizens traded the simple pleasures of daily life for the securities of living under an affluent, mechanized order enabled by corporations, a situation he calls "sociolatry". To Goodman, this trade-off—that a society would choose the preservation of its systems over the sake of its own people—is "absurd". Goodman holds that "socializing" youth to play specialized roles in an adult society is inherently wrong for betraying their nature in the name of societal benefit. Goodman asks, "Socialization to what?" If societal aims are wrong, the urge to socialize children to societal roles becomes circular and self-serving. No amount of amelioration, he writes, including better schools or more social workers—would justify this socialization. Those seeking to correct delinquency, Goodman says, should instead improve society and culture's opportunities to meet the appetites of human nature. Goodman faulted social critics, including himself, and academic sociologists for being content with studying this system without endeavoring to change it. He posits that attempts to mold human nature to social order would backfire, and that "freedom and meaning will outweigh anomie" if given the chance. To create a society worthy for youth to want to join, Goodman resolves, certain "unfinished" revolutions must be brought to their conclusion on topics including companionship, democracy, free speech, pacifism, progressive education, syndicalism, and technology. He implores readers to pursue these ideals seriously, and to direct their rebellion towards political ends, in the book's final chapter, "The Missing Community". P.... Discover the John Galbraith Paul Goodman Jane Jacobs popular books. Find the top 100 most popular John Galbraith Paul Goodman Jane Jacobs books.