The Arboretum

Paul Goodman

3 min read

Paul Goodman

1911–1972

Goodman is the intellectual connective tissue between the American anarchist tradition and the practical critiques that Illich, the appropriate technology movement, and a generation of educational reformers would later develop more systematically. He worked on everything: city planning, psychotherapy, education theory, poetry, political philosophy. The coherence isn’t methodological — it’s the persistence of a single question: what conditions allow people to grow into themselves?

Communitas

Communitas (1947), written with his architect brother Percival, is a taxonomy of what cities could be designed for. The book presents three paradigms: the city of efficient consumption, the city designed for “the elimination of the difference between production and consumption” — where the distinction between working and living becomes less sharp because the things people do to sustain themselves are things they would choose to do anyway — and a city of planned security with minimum regulation.

The second paradigm is the one they’re most interested in. It’s not utopian in the sense of blueprint-for-perfection; it’s a question about what urban design is actually trying to achieve. Alexander’s A Pattern Language is doing related work — how do design decisions aggregate into conditions for human life, rather than conditions for efficient use?

Goodman’s insistence on naming the implicit goal of design is still useful. Faced with any infrastructure, “infrastructure for what?” is the question Goodman would force. Not what does it enable, but what life does it make possible?

Growing Up Absurd

Growing Up Absurd (1960) looked at the crisis of American youth — the drop-outs, the delinquents, the disengaged — and made the unpopular argument that their response was rational. There was nothing meaningful to do. The organizations they were being invited to join required adjusting to purposes they had no part in setting. The “absurdity” was systemic, not personal.

Goodman was not nostalgic. He wasn’t proposing a return to an earlier order. He was observing that growth requires something to grow toward — some sense that what you do matters, that your participation changes things, that your specific gifts are needed. Industrial society had gotten very good at producing consumers and very bad at producing the conditions for meaningful participation.

The Illich Connection

Goodman and Illich knew each other at CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the late 1960s. CIDOC was a meeting point for thinkers critical of development orthodoxy; Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) and Tools for Conviviality (1973) emerged in that context.

Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-education (1964) anticipated the deschooling argument: that schools were not primarily about education but about credential sorting and behavioral conditioning, and that this often actively interfered with learning. The student who learns best may be the one who doesn’t go — a provocation Goodman meant seriously.

The lineage runs from Dewey (learning through doing) through Goodman (institutions that prevent learning) to Illich (systems that substitute for capability). Each inherits and sharpens.

Key Works

  • Communitas (1947, with Percival Goodman) — city planning
  • Growing Up Absurd (1960) — social criticism
  • Compulsory Mis-education (1964) — education
  • People or Personnel (1965) — decentralization
  • New Reformation (1970) — late political essays

Connections

The problem with growing up was never the young people. It was the absence of anything worth growing toward.

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