Paul Goodman, one of America's most original social engineers, a man whose influence needs an immediate revival, was once accorded "Father of the New Left" status. He died suddenly in 1972 before his much deserved fame could die before him. Because he did die, and because he was every inch a contrary but inventive builder, his solutions and city-planning suggestions have been given little attention by a civilization that should have listened carefully to every wise word he said. There were many in his time who acknowledged his genius. He was a man of letters. He was the foremost neo-anarchist theorist of his day. He wrote with a no-holds-barred practicalism, an unanswerable trademark style.

Murray Kempton called Paul Goodman America's most creative social thinker. John Kenneth Gailbraith wrote that he deserves more attention than other less conscientious objectors. Sir Herbert Read announced that Goodman was responsible for having written the best analysis he'd seen of the spiritual emptiness of our technological paradise. Paul Goodman was homosexually-inclined too, and didn't keep it a secret. He was, in fact, bi-sexual.

To listen to Goodman lecture on ecological imbalances and technological mis-means, was to hear a thinker who never belabored his thoughts. He was a revolutionary who said that it is in "the missed revolutions" of our troubled era--the areas in which we fail to keep up with our potential--and where, ecologically and otherwise, we compromise for cash, that we make it difficult for youth to mature in our society.

He explained that society was changing so rapidly that "we have no recourse to going back, there is nothing to go back to."

If we are to make an environment in which it is possible for the young to grow, it becomes necessary to perfect our revolutionary tradition. The radical dimension, Goodman recognizes, is actually a conservative proposition, but conservatives, he knew, wouldn't stand behind it. He was talking about catching up with and restoring the right proportions. He would have gone along with E.F. Schumacher and the not-big-enough "small is beautiful" crowd. But no doubt, he wrote, "in our runaway, one-sided way of life, the proposal to conserve human resources and develop human capacities has become a radical innovation."

Goodman knew that the increase in population and crowding and the number and variety of human services increasing disproportionately meant the end of free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky laissez-faire dominions. Goodman pushed--forty years ago--for smaller units of human service, such as school classes or the clientele of a physician. He hated the thought of "mass teaching, mass medicine, mass psychotherapy, mass penology, mass politics." He knew long ago that schools--including medical schools--would not be able to cope with the arithmetic of increased populations.

His perspective demanded a "reversing" of the goal in vocational guidance, from fitting the man to the machine and chopping him down to fit, "to finding the opportunity in the economy that brings out the man, and if you can't find such an opportunity, make it. This involves encouraging new small enterprises and unblocking and perhaps underwriting invention."

Goodman said that present production is "inhuman and stupid," and that workmen need more voice in production and the kind of training to make that voice wise."

Unfortunately, as a telephone operator at a large hotel explained recently, new companies are now repeatedly buying the hotel at which she works. Each new owner and even each new manager fails to pass along training that encourages a telephone style and etiquette for serving hotel guests engagingly but quickly. When the decisions about what should be said are given, they come--and Paul Goodman would have sneered at such origins--from central headquarters and from high-level bureaucrats who have never answered a phone or hardly know how to do so. Callers and guests, as a result, suffer.

If workers with on-the-spot knowledge were to help shape effective method-uses of the hotel's telephone system, and if low-level entry jobs were accorded an importance on par with the superstructure that rises overhead, the entire system would be far less vulnerable to collapse. But the bureaucrats tend to sit high up instead, on dark clouds made unihabitably smoky by the burning business edifices beneath. Paul Goodman continues to have some choice words for these jokers.