Randolph Bourne

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Randolph Silliman Bourne (May 30, 1886 – December 22, 1918) was a progressive writer and public intellectual born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially "War is the Health of the State," which remained unfinished when found after his death.

Bourne's articles appeared in the magazine, The Seven Arts and The New Republic, among other journals of the day.

During World War I, American progressives, Bourne included, found themselves split and pitted against each other. The two factions that emerged were the pro-war faction, led by John Dewey, and the anti-war faction, of which both Bourne and other famous progressives like Jane Addams were a part. Bourne was a student of the educational theorist John Dewey at Columbia, but he took issue with Dewey's idea of using the war as a tool with which to spread democracy, and in his pointedly-titled 1918 essay "Twilight of Idols", while invoking the progressive pragmatism of Dewey's contemporary William James, Bourne argued that America was using democracy as an ends to justify the war, but that democracy itself was never examined. While he was a follower of Dewey originally, he felt that Dewey had betrayed his democratic ideals by focusing only on the facade of a democratic government, rather than on the ideas behind democracy that Dewey had professed to respect.

Bourne was also a follower of American intellectual Horace Kallen, and argued, like Kallen, that Americanism ought not to be associated with Anglo-Saxonism. In his 1916 article "Trans-National America," Bourne argued that the US should accommodate immigrant cultures into a "cosmopolitan America," instead of forcing immigrants to assimilate to Anglophilic culture.

Bourne died in the Spanish flu epidemic shortly after the Armistice of World War I. His ideas have been influential in the shaping of postmodern ideas of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, and recent intellectuals such as David Hollinger have written extensively on Bourne's ideology.

Contents

[edit] Quote

"One keeps healthy in wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that something good is coming out of it all, but by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part."

[edit] Bibliography

  • Abrahams, Edward (1986). The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-1080-3. 
  • Blake, Casey Nelson (1990). Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1935-2. 
  • Hansen, Olaf (ed.) (1977). Randolph Bourne: The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918. New York: Urizen Books. ISBN 0-916354-00-8. 
  • Hollinger, David A. (1995). Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 0-465-05991-0. 
  • Lasch, Christopher (1986, 1965). The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual As a Social Type, paperback, New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-30319-5. 
  • Paul, Sherman (1966). Randolph Bourne. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 
  • Sandeen, Eric J. (ed.) (1981). The Letters of Randolph Bourne: A Comprehensive Edition. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub. Co.. ISBN 0-87875-190-4. 
  • Bourne, Randolph (1964). War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919. NY: Harper Torchbook. 

[edit] Writing Online

[edit] External links

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