Litany of Affliction

...Its effect does not argue for general adoption in the North...

...Indeed this is a less a well-organized and well-argued tract than it is a collection of essays which originally appeared in such places as Liberation, the Village Voice, and Commentary...

...I should be better pleased if Goodman had supplied more persuasive arguments for the validity of the decentralist approach to political, economic, educational, and cultural activity...

...Much of the writing and analysis is either slapdash or dogmatic...

...Before accepting it, I should like to know a great deal more about Goodman's proposal for neighborhood control of police forces...

...Control of this kind appears to exist in much of the South...

...Much of the evidence suggests the more dispiriting generalization that the growth of complex governmental organizations parallels the increasing failure of voluntary associations and local agencies of government to minister to our needs or protect...

...Lincoln Center is a cultural monster gone berserk...

...Unless one's income is large enough to finance residence in the gilded ghetto of Manhattan's East Side, New York is a splendid city to leave—a conclusion which so many middle-class families have reached that only 22 per cent of pupils in Manhattan public schools are now white...

...One means by which they may do so is in the voluntary introduction of decentralist forms in their own operations—a suggestion which Goodman himself makes...

...In volume after volume—Communitas, Growing Up Absurd, The Community of Scholars, Compulsory Miseducation— Goodman has preached decentralist remedies for the problems of overcentralization...

...As the litany of affliction continues, it becomes no less doleful because of its familiarity...

...The Populists, whom Goodman admires, tried without lasting success to substitute local cooperation for nationwide commercial organization, but it was a last gasp...

...How long will it be before the citizens of Selma and Bogalusa voluntarily embrace the precepts of the Civil Rights Act...

...What remedy for local oppression and neglect exists in our system except recourse to national agencies, national standards, and a national judiciary...

...The educational administration of the New York public schools has all but frustrated the teaching purposes it is supposed to serve...

...essential liberties...

...The richest city in the world houses its citizens miserably, educates them at cut rates, hospitalizes them in antique structures, and incarcerates them in odious pens like the Women's House of Detention...

...The ineffable Joseph Mitchell was thwarted in the application of his police theory of public welfare in Newburgh not by the outraged local citizenry but by prosaic officials of the state and the Federal government...

...It would be pleasant to believe that people are good and only organization is bad—somewhat to exaggerate a tendency in Goodman's writings...

...In the last generation, state and local governments with few exceptions have been not only less efficient but also less libertarian than the Federal government...

...Berkeley is a fair enough symbol of a university too large to be human...

...Nor does he ever deliver the promised and crucial distinctions between activities which must be centrally organized and those susceptible to small group management and control...

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Professor of Economics Barnard College What is there left to say about this latest book by Paul Goodman...

...Such notions raise an issue with which any advocate of local management must grapple...

...If the Federal government is acquiring a larger role in education and social welfare, it is because the states and localities have preferred on the whole to skimp on social services rather than raise taxes...

...Our most eloquent prophet of the impromptu, he admires cultural enterprises like Pacifica Radio and the Living Theater, student uprisings against their elders, neighborhood school boards, and local combinations against urban renewal...

...The prospects for social improvement and even for increased individual initiative depend essentially upon our success in persuading large organizations to become more humane...

...The fact is that Goodman assists belief rather less in this book than in some of his other work...

...I do not speculate on the prospects of success and I am not happy in my conclusion...

...In the present book Goodman argues that the country took an early wrong turn when it junked the decentralist Articles of Confederation and substituted a centralist Constitution...

...President Kennedy's housing order was necessary only because communities, North and South, pursued discriminatory policies in lending and renting...

...The general opinion that New York City is ungovernable derives in part from the demonstrated incapacity of the city's apparently permanent chief executive actually to cope with municipal problems, but even an efficient mayor would face find New York too large and cumbersome to handle effectively...

...It is hard to take Goodman very seriously on industrial economics, the history of European railroads, the role of the Populists, or the American constitutional experience, to pick four of the many topics on which he speaks decisively...

...The New Freedom and the New Deal simply applied bureaucratic remedies to such problems as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were willing to identify...

...As he argues, bureaucracy does afflict not only our government but also our foundations, our universities, and our cultural institutions...

...I wish that I could believe in the plausibility of Goodman's suggestions for the restoration of local initiative to government, meaning to education, and excitement to the jobs with which most people bore themselves...

...At this late date it is hard to deny either that Goodman's heart is in the right place or that his eye is on some real issues of social organization...

...When the Jacksonian revolt of the common man fizzled out, our fate was very nearly sealed...