Who Was Randolph Bourne?
Randolph Bourne was the most searching and prophetic critic of American liberal intellectuals’ support for the First World War — a writer whose brief career produced some of the most penetrating political and cultural criticism in American letters. Born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with a severe spinal deformity that left him physically disabled, he attended Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey, and became a contributor to The New Republic and The Seven Arts.
His 1917 essays attacking the intellectual class’s capitulation to the war effort — culminating in the unfinished essay “The State” and its famous formulation “War is the health of the state” — cost him his platform and his income. He died in the influenza pandemic of December 1918 at the age of thirty-two, leaving behind a body of essays that anticipated the critiques of American liberal imperialism that would not be fully articulated for another fifty years.
Bourne is significant for TLA because his analysis of the relationship between state power, war, and intellectual capitulation raises questions about the proper relationship between the Christian intellectual and political power that the church has consistently failed to answer well.
In Their Own Words
“War is the health of the state.”
— The State, 1918“The significant classes, those whose conceptions of their own function make them in any way lights and leaders, are met on every side with nothing but apparent intellectual sycophancy.”
— The War and the Intellectuals“If the war is too strong for you to prevent, how is it possible for you to control it?”
— The War and the IntellectualsSelected Bibliography
- Youth and Life — 1913 — essays
- The Gary Schools — 1916
- War and the Intellectuals — 1917 — essay
- The State — 1918 — unfinished essay, posthumous
- The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918 — 1977 — collected essays
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