Paul Goodman, INDIVIDUO E COMUNITÀ, 2014

“Our system should include civil disobedience that watches over authority, crowds on the streets and revolt if the provocation is serious. I am a Jeffersonian because it seems to me that only a libertarian and pluralist political structure can make citizens in the modern world today. ”
Paul Goodman

Starting from a sophisticated reworking of the American political tradition, in which individualist tensions and community instances merge, the “Jeffersonian” Goodman already addresses some of the crucial problems of late-industrial societies in the mid-twentieth century, the same we deal with still today: crisis of representative democracy, urban decay, marginalization of young people, growth of bureaucracy, massification of needs, consumption and values, crisis of reason. And it does so by resorting to the analytical paraphernalia of libertarian thought, with solutions rooted in the here and now based on decentralization, deschooling, civil disobedience, personality development, the enhancement of community values, sexual and family experimentation …

Paul Goodman (New York, 1911-1972) was one of the most listened to voices in the counterculture of the 1960s.