The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne (on the 128th anniversary of his birth)

[Occam's Banana]

"War is the health of the State, and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution." - Randolph Bourne

On The 128th Anniversary of Randolph Bourne's Birth
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/on-the-128th-anniversary-of-randolph-bournes-birth/
Ryan McMaken (30 May 2014)

Randolph Bourne, the antiwar intellectual who contended that “war is the health of the state” was born today, May 30, in 1886.

Bourne’s monograph The State, published posthumously, is available here at Mises.org. Bourne authored several other insightful pieces as well, [...] collected in the 1964 [book] War and the Intellectuals.

Wendy McElroy examines Bourne’s legacy here, and Jeff Riggenbach provides additional details [audio version]:

The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne
http://mises.org/daily/5308/The-Brilliance-of-Randolph-Bourne
Jeff Riggenbach (27 May 2011)

[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Randolph Bourne (1886–1918)"]

[emphasis added - OB]

Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century — in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic — until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired.

He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The New Republic and one less well suited to Bourne's particular talents and interests, since its primary focus was the arts, rather than social and political issues. He was able to publish only six antiwar articles in The Seven Arts before its doors were closed by an owner fearful of the Wilson administration and its Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the Constitution, the government, the military, or the flag.

Only a few months after The Seven Arts ceased publication, Randolph Bourne died, a victim of the flu epidemic that killed more than 25 million people in 1918 and 1919, nearly a million of them in the United States. That was 1 percent of the population 90 years ago. One percent of the present US population would be more than 3 million Americans. Imagine what it would be like to live through a flu epidemic that killed more than 3 million people in the space of little more than a year. That's what it was like for Americans living 90 years ago, at the end of World War I.

Most of the people that flu virus killed have long been forgotten — except, of course, by members of their own families. But Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely. People are still reading his work. They're still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases. The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote or said it: "War is the health of the State."

Randolph Silliman Bourne first emerged into the light of day on May 30, 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a small town fewer than 20 miles from Manhattan. His family was comfortably middle-class, and he was the grandson of a respected Congregational minister. But he seems to have been born unlucky all the same. First, his head and face were deformed at birth in a bungled forceps delivery. Then, at the age of four, after a battle with spinal tuberculosis, he became a hunchback. Then, when he was seven, his parents lost everything in the Panic of 1893, and he and his mother were abandoned by his father and left to live in genteel poverty on the charity of his mother's prosperous (if somewhat tightfisted) brother. Meanwhile, his growth had been permanently stunted by the spinal tuberculosis of a few years before, so that by the time he graduated from high school at the age of 17, in 1903, he had attained his full adult height of five feet.

Bourne was an exemplary student. His academic record in high school earned him a place in the class of 1907 at Princeton, but by the time he was supposed to appear on campus to register for classes in the fall of 1903, it was evident that he couldn't afford to attend. He could barely afford books. He was flat broke. And his mother needed his financial help if she was going to go on living the decent, middle-class lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. So Bourne postponed college and went to work. He knew his way around a piano, so for the next six years he worked as a piano teacher, a piano tuner, and a piano player (accompanying singers in a recording studio in Carnegie Hall). He also cut piano rolls. On the side he freelanced for book publishers as a proofreader. Now and then, when musical work was harder to find, he did secretarial work.

By 1909, when he was 23 years old, Bourne had saved enough to cut back on his working hours and try to catch up on the college experience he'd been putting off. He enrolled at Columbia, where he fell under the sway of historian and political scientist Charles Beard and philosopher John Dewey, and began publishing essays in the Dial, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. His first book, Youth and Life, a collection of his magazine essays, was published the year he graduated from Columbia, 1913. And that fall, the now 27-year-old Bourne set out for Europe. In his senior year he had been awarded the Gilder Fellowship for travel abroad, which the historian Louis Filler has called "Columbia's most distinguished honor" during that period. Bourne spent a year travelling around Europe and pursuing such independent study as interested him.

Then, in August 1914, he returned to America, took up residence in Greenwich Village, and resumed writing for the Dial and the Atlantic Monthly, along with a new, upstart weekly called The New Republic. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Bourne fled Europe in August 1914 than to say that he merely "returned to America" at that time. For it was in late July and early August of 1914 that Europe — virtually all of Europe — embarked upon the conflict we know today as World War I. Bourne opposed this conflict, and he was especially worried that his own country, the United States, would choose to enter it before long.

Bourne wrote about many subjects over the next four years; he wrote enough about education, for example, that he was able to fill two books with his magazine pieces on the subject — The Gary Schools in 1916 and Education and Living in 1917. But his main subject during the last four years of his life was the new world war and the urgent need that the United States stay out of it.

Bourne made few friends by adopting this stance. It brought him, as the journalist Ben Reiner later put it, "into sharp conflict with the rising pro-war hysteria that preceded America's entry into World War I." In the view of yet another journalistic commentator, Christopher Phelps,

few 20th-century American dissenters have … suffered the wrath of their targets as greatly as Bourne did. By 1917, The New Republic stopped publishing his political pieces. The Seven Arts … collapsed when its financial angel refused further support because of Bourne's antiwar articles.​

According to Reiner, the problem was that once Bourne's "biting attacks on government repression began to appear in The Seven Arts," this gave "birth to rumors that the publisher … was supporting a pro-German magazine. She … withdrew her support, which closed the magazine down."

Nor was the demise of The Seven Arts the end of the punishment Bourne had to bear for speaking his mind. Phelps notes that "even at the Dial … he was stripped from editorial power in 1918 — the result of an uncharacteristically underhanded intervention by his former mentor John Dewey, one of the objects of Bourne's disillusioned antiwar pen." Phelps quotes a letter Bourne sent to a friend shortly thereafter, in which he laments that "I feel very much secluded from the world, very much out of touch with my times. … The magazines I write for die violent deaths, and all my thoughts are unprintable." The historian Robert Westbrook put the matter as memorably and eloquently as anyone when he said in 2004 that "Bourne disturbed the peace of John Dewey and other intellectuals supporting Woodrow Wilson's crusade to make the world safe for democracy, and they made him pay for it."

Yet the ruination of his career was far from the only price he had to pay. Westbrook quotes John Dos Passos's claim, from his novel 1919, that, in addition to his professional setbacks, "friends didn't like to be seen with Bourne," and that "his father" — who had walked out of his life a quarter-century before — "wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name." A few weeks later, he was dead. Several friends, going through his apartment after his death, found an unpublished manuscript in the wastebasket next to his desk. It was entitled "The State."

"War is the health of the State," Randolph Bourne wrote in that discarded essay, which he probably died believing would never see print, "and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution." For

it cannot be too firmly realized that war is … the chief function of States. … War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined.
​

Moreover, Bourne argued,

it is not too much to say that the normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are recuperating from conflicts in which they have exhausted themselves. It is the wheedling and the bargaining of the worn-out bullies as they rise from the ground and slowly restore their strength to begin fighting again.​

Randolph Bourne believed that informed citizens needed to realize the implications of what he was saying. For

if the State's chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the State's chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the … calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.​

Randolph Bourne believed that "we cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect … to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form." Bourne had reason to be wary when writing sentences like those in 1918. People were being imprisoned and, in some cases, deported for writing things like that. There was a particular prejudice against anarchists and against people who sounded as though they might be anarchists. Perhaps this is why Bourne added the following caveat to his call for ending the State: "The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated."

Randolph Bourne was an idealist. He hoped for a world free of war, a world in which what he called "the productive and life-enhancing processes" were the dominant processes in our national life. It is appropriate, then, that in the Internet age, he is perhaps best known to the general public, not only for his immortal phrase "War is the health of the State," but also as the namesake of a nonprofit foundation that runs a popular website. The nonprofit foundation is the Randolph Bourne Institute. And the website is Antiwar.com. The folks who run Antiwar.com would have us believe that their site should not be construed as libertarian in its essence. As Development Director Angela Keaton put it recently, "Antiwar.com is not a libertarian site. Antiwar.com is a foreign policy site operated by libertarians which seeks a broad based coalition in educating about the dangers of Empire."

I'm inclined to think Randolph Bourne cut through to the heart of the matter more effectively, however, when he wrote that "we cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State." In effect, you can't be consistently and intelligently antiwar, unless you're libertarian. The folks at Antiwar.com are, of course, aware of this. They quote that very same sentence of Bourne's on the "Who We Are" page on their website and state further that their own "dedication to libertarian principles" is "inspired in large part by the works and example of the late Murray N. Rothbard." The work that's being done 24/7 at Antiwar.com not only honors Randolph Bourne's contribution to the libertarian tradition; it also helps to assure that that tradition will continue and grow.

"The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne" by Jeff Riggenback is licensed under CC BY 3.0

 

[Henry Rogue]

Bookmarked for later.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Bourne of War
http://mises.org/daily/5748/Bourne-of-War
Wendy McElroy (05 October 2011)

[emphasis added - OB]

"War is the health of the State."

The famous seven words appeared in an unfinished manuscript written by the progressive essayist Randolph Silliman Bourne (1886-1918) during World War I. In a collection of Bourne's essays entitled War and the Intellectuals (1964), editor Carl Resek explained the phrase's meaning. Resek wrote, "In its proper place it [the saying] meant that mindless power thrived on war because war corrupted a nation's moral fabric and especially corrupted its intellectuals." The seven words contain a complexity of meaning that is often overlooked by those who use it.

America has been at war for over a decade now and hostilities are not abating. Quite the opposite. American troops and clout have spread across the Arab world and the Middle East, leaving casualties heaped and enemies gathering. If economic emergencies usher in conflict, then more war is coming. The complexity of Bourne's insights needs to be explored in order to deprive the state of as much health as possible.

The State, Government, and Society

In times of peace, Bourne believed the majority of people pursued their own interests according to their own values. They worked and cooperated with each other, married and raised children without paying much attention to the state. Instead, they dealt with the government. Bourne defined government as

a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men.​

Government was the practical day-to-day "offices and functions" of a state such as the post office or the public school system, with which people came into contact as they simply pursued life. There was no ritual and no singing of national anthems as postage stamps were purchased. The civil servants whose jobs make government function had no sense of sanctity about them. Indeed, Bourne described them as "common and unsanctified men." He believed this was a salutary situation and a reflection of America's egalitarianism.

Meanwhile, the average person rarely dealt with the state — that is, with institutions that were sanctified and expressed the "enduring" state, such as the Supreme Court. Thus in times of peace, Bourne wrote, "the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men."

In other words, the state is more of a concept than a physical reality. In the United States, it is the political structure established after the American Revolution that is embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It claims a chain of legitimacy that dates back to President George Washington. While governments come and go with elections, the state remains essentially the same — only growing stronger with time. It is the state rather than government that inspires emotions such as awe or patriotism. It is to the concept of the American state — not to any particular government, Republican or Democratic — to which people pledge allegiance with hands placed over their hearts.

Meanwhile, "society" functions differently from the state, government, or the self-interested individual. Society, which Bourne refers to as "nation" or "country," is the collection of factors that constitute American life. They include characteristic attitudes, common lore and literature, religious convictions, a shared history, and the prevailing cultural norms. They are the nonpolitical factors that make American society different from Chinese or French societies. In times of peace, Bourne believed most people identified more closely with society than they did with government. For example, most people defined themselves most closely in relationship to a community, religion, or ethnic heritage rather than to a political party.

Unlike government, society is not an expression of the state, nor can it peacefully coexist with the state; the two concepts are antagonistic. In an essay entitled The State in which the first section is entitled "War is the health of the State," Bourne observes,

Country [society] is a concept of peace, tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition; it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.​

To sum up Bourne's preceding argument: in times of peace, people pursue their own self-interest, identify with society, interact with government, and only occasionally encounter the sanctified state.

The Impact of War

Bourne defined war as the ultimate act of statehood, as the utmost act of "a group in its aggressive aspects." He wrote, "War is a function … of States," and it could not exist except in such a system.

Bourne argued further that war blurs or erases the lines that separate government from the state and both of them from society. The blurring happens largely within the individual himself. Stoked by emotion, the average person fills with patriotism and loses "all sense of the distinction between State, nation and government." Bourne described the process:

Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.​

In times of war, the government and state become virtually identical, so that to oppose the government becomes an act of disloyalty to the state. For example, although criticizing the president or military attitudes is a right regularly exercised by Americans in peace time, such criticism becomes an act of treason when war has just been declared. As Bourne explained,

objections to the war, luke-warm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes.​

Thus, in wartime, individuals who only casually interacted with the government now become fervid defenders of the state.

Every individual citizen who in peace times had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent … in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom.​

The activities of society — from the words spoken at pulpits to those written in newspapers, from economic exchanges to entertainment — begin to conform with the purposes of the state rather than the self-interest of individuals.

As society and government merge into the state, the individual begins to disappear. The individual becomes part of what Bourne called "the herd." He described the term: "The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized."

Bourne acknowledged that the herd was not an emotional or intellectual whole but included a wide range of reactions to events and to war itself. Nevertheless, "by an ingenious mixture of cajolery, agitation, intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into an effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole."

Moreover, the state used powerful inducements to convince people to "choose" to enlist or otherwise support the war effort. Individuals usually agreed, reluctantly or not, because in "a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification."

But if an individual refused, then the state revealed that choice was never a real issue.

Men are told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of their own volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their country's welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and punished with the most horrid penalties.​

And, so, individuals obey wartime measures even to the point of risking their lives on battlefields. People cease to be individuals acting in self-interest and become citizens of the state acting in concert. The man who dissents and remains an individual feels "forlorn and helpless," while those who think and feel collectively have "the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection."

Bourne concluded, "people at war become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them."

What he referred to as "this great herd-machine" functioned under "a most indescribable confusion of democratic pride and personal fear" that makes the individuals who constitute the herd "submit to the destruction of their livelihood if not their lives, in a way that would formerly have seemed to them so obnoxious as to be incredible."

The individual became a "child on the back of a mad elephant" that he could neither control nor abandon but was compelled to ride until the elephant decided to halt.

This is the theoretical meaning of "War is the health of the State." In times of peace, people are largely defined by self-interest and by society; they interact casually with government, giving little thought to the state. In times of war, everything reverses to the benefit of the state. As for the impact on the individual, if war is the health of the state, then war is also the death of individualism.

Conclusion

Bourne's essays are not typical of antiwar literature in that they provide little critique of specific policies. He does not dwell upon the "Butcher's Bill" of dead soldiers and civilians. He does not rail against the profits reaped by the military-industrial complex, which were then collectively known as "the munitions makers." Bourne's essays attack the sanctity of war by showing how it leads to the moral collapse of society by destroying the peaceful interactions and principles on which society rests.

Bourne eloquently argued that postwar America would be morally, intellectually, and psychologically impoverished. By this observation, Bourne did not mean that peacetime America would struggle under an increased bureaucracy that never seems to roll back to prewar levels. Many historians have made this point. Again, he was addressing less tangible, though arguably more lasting, costs of war. For example, post-1918 America would be burdened by intellectuals who had "forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany." In converting WWI into the equivalent of a holy war, the intellectual and psychological groundwork was laid for a future filled with what he termed "the sport of the upper class" — global conflict. But, then, the impact of war on intellectuals is the theme for a future article and it was addressed by Bourne in his second most acclaimed essay "The War and the Intellectuals."

"Bourne of War" by Wendy McElroy is licensed under CC BY 3.0