Important are the delinquents, who, like the junior executives, take short cuts to glamour, and help staff "the integral whole of politics-and-rackets," thus forming an alliance against "the good boys who naively try to make something of themselves." Also in the room are the flunk-outs (the "ambivalently wished-for station of Bums"), the Beat Generation whose "onslaughts on the Air-Conditioned nightmare...sound very much like the griping of soldiers who do not intend to mutiny"), the Angry Young Men (who attack the machine itself), French "existential youth" (saying "no exit"), and finally, the hipster (who "contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested").

From this zoo, Goodman selects the Beats as a pilot study in the uses of leisure. "Their rejection of the popular culture, Broadway theatre, status commodities, bespeaks robust mental health." On the other hand, Beat art, says Goodman, is parochial, hopelessly parochial. Discussing Beat words--"make it," "like," "man," "cool" --Goodman finds a paucity of vocabulary and syntax expressive of the Best withdrawal from standard civilization and its learning. "In a Best group it is bad form to assert or deny a preposition as trus or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning. The aim of conversation is for each one to be able, by speech, to know that he is existing and belonging."

Similarly, Beat novels lack structure and thus interpretation, character and thus causality. The point, it appears, is simply to insist that something happened, always on the road, on the move.

Beside the early-resigned there are the early-fatalistic, who put together gangs more readily than novels. Here Goodman offers perhaps his best insight: a view of a delinquent as powerlessly struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. We are reminded of Dostoevski. As Goodman puts it, "On the streets, they feel worthless and abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home." This is "delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught," or less clumsily, crime for the sake of punishment that implies 'belonging.'

The gangs are formed, and what Freud called the "narcissism of small differences" begins to operate. "Turfs" or gang territories are established. "Points of honor" become the meaning in life. And so, into insults--the formal insult, say, of invading rival "turf"--is poured all the accumulated frustration endemic in our society. As Goodman puts it, "It is inevitable that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks..."

A successful revolution establishes a new community, but a missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. Goodman then lists some revolutions we have missed, or started, but compromised: technocracy, garden city, new deal syndicalism, class struggle, democracy, freedom of speech, liberalism, agrarianism, fraternity, brotherhood of races, pacifism, enlightenment, popular culture, sexual revolution (which Goodman refers to again and again), and of course, progressive education. Even this partial list hints at the scope of Goodman's approach.

And so, for that matter, does his "clear but exaggerated picture of our American society: slums of engineering, boondoggling production, chaotic congestion, tribes of middlemen . . . no patriotism, an empty nationalism bound for a cataclysmically disastrous fnish, wise opinion swamped . . . youth idle and truant, youth sexually suffering and sexually obsessed, youth without goals. . . ."

In all, Goodman judges our society as not outrageously bad, but far from adequate. Near the end of the book, he suggests one program that would make growing up less absurd--and that is decentralization, so that men could get back a sense of personal involvement in meaningful decisions, political and economic. Unfortunately, this issue is raised only vaguely and without much consideration of the politics involved.