The society I live in is mine

the long version

Published the same year (1962) as the Port Huron Statement, both book and manifesto are concerned with the project of civic renewal. These are letters to editors, companies, politicians, bureaucrats and other professionals adopting as their subject the citizen, or as Goodman would have it (taking the word in its French sense), "society maker," the letters themselves a society that's made, sometimes, too, not a particularly happy one. Goodman hectors, teaches, points out obvious outrages, argues and persuades. He is modeling a Thoreauvian commitment to writing as an act in which one finds one's life. He is telling us that there's more to our secular project than showing up at the voting booth every year. When all hell breaks loose, this will be one of the first books to go.