The May Pamphlet
The pamphlet was originally published piecemeal in small, New York anarchist journals and was first compiled as a set among literary essays in Art and Social Nature (1946).
The essays were not well known before Goodman's 1960 book Growing Up Absurd led to a resurgence of interest in his oeuvre, including the pamphlet's republication in Drawing the Line (1962).
[4][5] Having been dismissed from the war-supporting Partisan Review and influential New York literary circles for refusing to jettison his pacifism, Goodman turned to the city's marginal, bohemian communities.
Katz bought the book's unsold copies in purchasing Vinco, which he renamed the Arts and Science Press when establishing his own one-man imprint in the late 1940s.
[16] In The May Pamphlet, Goodman discusses the problems of living within a society that impedes individual initiative and imposes on personal liberties, i.e., coercive societal conditions.
The exact meaning of "free" and "natural" is imprecise in this context yet generally refers to the ability to work in mutual aid without coercive legal pressure to do otherwise.
His examples of coercive restrictions include industrial labor's restraints on time and specialty, and adult "lack of encouragement" towards childhood sexuality.
[28] He praises marginalized personal behavior ("acts of liberty") as "our strongest propaganda"[27] and contends that most jailable offenses are political non-crimes: free expressions whose repression encourages timidity.
[27] In discussing American societal structure, Goodman proposes reliance on small, communitarian groups based in mutual aid in lieu of large states and corporations.
[30] Those external institutions, with their narrow focus on socioeconomic progress, he wrote, are weak substitutes for small sets of individuals working in mutuality and decentralized syndicalism to realize their personal desires.
[31] The immediate creation of these small communities would produce individual fulfillment through meaningful work and direct participation in decision-making, like "sane men in a madhouse", undoing a society that had grown big, anonymous, oriented towards mass consumption, and whose decisions and design were increasingly made externally from those affected.
[34] The major themes of The May Pamphlet include how individuals can resist coercive societal conditions and invent solutions to social dilemmas by realizing their natural abilities.
[13] Goodman believed that individual initiative—sociobiological drives and animal instinct in defiance of norms—and the everyday conflict it created to be the purpose of living, the foundation for communities, and a trait to nurture.
[37] Goodman prefers this anarchist system of self-identifying and adjusting one's own prejudices so as to permit a loose worldview that can afford multiple contradictory views.
The Party of Eros, an intellectual history of the New Left, remarked that The May Pamphlet had more in common with writings on Ancient Greek direct democracy than those on Marxist or Syndicalist working-class radicalism.
Group,[8] who were disenchanted with traditional anarchism, alienated from rising pro-war fervor, and excited by politics that put gradual, individual change before millenarian, collective conflict.
[41] The essays outlined the conceptual positions and convictions that would undergird Goodman's entire career,[21] namely that his contemporaneous American society deprived its people of vital, human needs, leading their animal desires to be sublimated into war spirit, materialistic consumption, and racism.
[42] This created what Goodman called "The Dilemma", that one could either conform to society and be sick for deprivation of basic needs, or not confirm and become demented as an exile from vital societal connection.
[36] Goodman would sustain The May Pamphlet's anarchist social critique for the rest of his life[13] and continued to refine its ideas in works including Growing Up Absurd,[36] the 1960 study of alienated youth in America that established his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist and pillar of leftist thought during the counterculture.
