The Society I Live in Is Mine

The Society I Live in Is Mine is a 1963 book of Paul Goodman's social commentary ephemera. In letters to the editor, essays, speeches, reviews, and other clippings, Goodman addresses the general public on a range of civic problems, both to influence their thinking and to model the type of alert and intervening citizen he believes is necessary for societal change. His proposals span from urban renewal to school administration, with a particular focus on education and youth, and reflect his community anarchist position in wanting to spur individual initiative, oppose supreme power, and experiment with social alternatives.

Goodman wrote to a variety of officials and New York publications and includes his commentary on these letters, such as whether they were printed. He also includes a number of book reviews and reprinted essays from Dissent and Liberation magazines. Horizon Press published the book. Critics were heartened by Goodman's approach to civics but differed on whether Goodman's method was egotistical or entertaining.

Contents and themes
The Society I Live in Is Mine is a collection of social commentary ephemera by Paul Goodman, including letters to the editor, essays, and speeches both published and unpublished in newspapers and magazines. Much of the content is written to address the general public with the intent to urge others to become more alert and intervening citizens by his own example. Goodman describes the collection as "angry letters on public morals and politics" written to "influence the general consensus". He is appalled by how few people self-regard as citizens and instead view society as machinery of authorities in which they participate. Goodman intends to prove that by becoming heard, people can more fully participate in and enjoy their society. A multitude of authentic, concerned citizens is Goodman's panacea for a society dulled by standardization, neglect, and injustice.

The book includes many letters to publications and public officials, and some speeches and reviews. Goodman considered "occasional letters" such as these to be the sharpest articulation of an author's style and thought. He wrote to a range of New York publications including public newspapers, alt weeklies, academic faculty and student publications, and counter-cultural periodicals. His public letters tend towards larger societal problems: to a university on advertising, to the New York State Commissioner of Education on good teachers blamed for the bad decisions of administrators, and to the United Nations Secretary General on citizen demonstrations. His proposals are not always pleasing; the text contains notes disclosing where his recipients did not print or acknowledge his letters. The book includes commentary on the general effect of the letters. Where his letters went unpublished, Goodman blames the editor's judgment or courage.

His reviews include republications of commentary on books by James Baldwin (Another Country), James B. Conant (Slums and Suburbs), Benjamin Spock (Problems of Parents), Maurice R. Stein (The Eclipse of Community), Vincent Riccio and Bill Slocum (All the Way Down: The Violent Underworld of Street Gangs), and Robert Penn Warren (Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South). Goodman's reprinted essays from Dissent and Liberation include "Reflections on Literature as a Minor Art", "A Tour of South Africa", and "Format and Anxiety".

The range of topics covered in his correspondence has no strict categorization but reflects the range of civic problems that interest him. Goodman's general position is that of a "community anarchist": He believes in reducing supreme power (sovereignty), increasing individual initiative, and experimenting in topics such as education and disarmament. Though he writes mostly from a liberal perspective, Goodman makes some arch-conservative points in the name of diminishing sovereignty, notably his position against nation-states and for "personal liberty and local initiative". As one reviewer put it, the collection's only unifying theme is "the mind of Paul Goodman", reflecting his positions as an anarchist and pacifist, and his advocacy for sexual freedom, libertarian education, and face-to-face communication in small communities. His range of positions include: abolishing suburbs, abolishing advertising, rallying civil disobedience and peace marches in response to war, dividing cities into village neighborhoods, offering informal apprenticeships for adolescents, encouraging sex, reducing school administration, and experimenting with small classes and amateur teachers.

He focuses particularly on education and what he calls "the waste of the young". Goodman advocates for greater teacher and student liberties despite his era's opposition to progressive schooling. He argues against school standardization as a path to student achievement and believes that American society will become wiser and more capable of distributing authority to explore personal initiative and make mistakes. In this way, he argues against minimizing dropouts in institutions like schools and would rather provide them with another way to live decently. Goodman argues against literacy, which he sees as having "no practical importance" in societal decision-making, used mainly to advertise and campaign to individuals.

Publication


Horizon Press published the book in hardcover on April 4, 1963. The press was known for publishing early books by unknown authors and unknown books by familiar authors. Horizon had published Goodman's earlier short story collection Our Visit to Niagara (1960) and would also publish his Compulsory Mis-education the next year (1964). By the time of the book's publication, Goodman's social criticism already had a considerable following among American youth.

Reception and legacy
Reviewers commented on Goodman's role as a social gadfly: "strident, denunciatory, sometimes simplistic" but "always earnest" and fitting into no neat pigeonhole. Raymond Price Jr. and August Derleth were heartened by Goodman’s articulate opinions, approach to civics as a “right and responsibility” to act in one’s own society, and willingness to take part in the affairs of others. Goodman's appeal for more public letterwriting made more sense for Goodman himself, wrote the Santa Maria Times, than for the general public lacking his panache. Critics differed on whether Goodman’s chiding approach was benevolent: While Nat Hentoff found this technique stimulating, it appeared to The San Francisco Examiner as crankiness and to Price as intellectual vanity. Price called the book an "exercise in ego fulfillment" in which Goodman postures extravagantly, dismisses his detractors, and stifles debate, wearing down the reader. Hentoff, however, felt that Goodman’s hectoring insistence is what made him one of American society’s most thoroughly independent minds.

Thinkers like Goodman who break out of traditional patterns of thought, wrote the Washington Evening Star, are "destined to perpetrate one outrage after another". The critic found Goodman's positions to be sensible yet extreme, such that he could appreciate the proposals but struggled to agree fully. Goodman's solutions, to Hentoff, were debatable or impossible, requiring "a prior social revolution that he does not know how to instigate".

As a book of ephemera, Price considered the book to be unfocused and did not think Goodman's old letters needed republication. The reviewer figured that The Society I Live in Is Mine appealed best to those already endeared to Goodman's style. The Santa Maria Times similarly did not think Goodman’s letters would pass the test of time, like those of Thomas Babington Macaulay or Benjamin Franklin, though Goodman's book of letters to editors was itself a rare concept and interesting experiment. For Hentoff, the book was most valuable for its distillation of Goodman's central ideas, but it also appealed as entertainment, to witness Goodman's "indignant, sardonic, and often devastatingly accurate assaults", for example, his commentary on cultural absurdities like a preschool television program lacking the spontaneity of childhood, or a school of science running a shelter drill that provided no actual shelter to children in event of a bombing. The New Yorker agreed that Goodman was funnier than he realized. Goodman is readable, said Hentoff, because all his years of fervent opposition have not turned him "chronically self-righteous or humorless".