Forgotten Prophet

...In the seven short years between the publication of his first essay in the Atlantic, while he was still an undergraduate at Columbia, and his death in the influenza epidemic of the winter of 1918, Bourne explored the changing nature of politics, culture, and personality in industrial societies...

...Those essays radiate with the passion of a mind drunk with ideas, and with the emotional energy of a real person engaged in concrete efforts to live according to his principles...

...Bourne's eclecticism has bewildered his biographers and historians ever since...

...As he put it in "Trans-national America," "All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of the personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community...

...Even on the left, few thinkers have taken seriously Bourne's proposition that modern militarism is something more man the product of economic imperialism or nationalist hysteria...

...There, they'll find what Bourne himself described as the essence of friendship — "a unique, exhaustless personality, with his own absorbing little cosmos of interests round him...

...Lewis Mumford and Dwight Macdonald both invoked Bourne's spirit in their opposing positions on American policy in the Second World War...

...The thinker dances with reality...

...modern nations need war...

...In his letters and essays, Bourne scrutinized his own predicament as a way of reaching out to other "malcontents" Commonweal: 218 who shared his ideals and his feeling of isolation...

...And both men echoed him after that war, when they admitted that the battle against Nazism had made democratic societies more totalitarian...

...Bourne's writings do, indeed, reveal a restless mind in search of a supportive environment...

...His steadfast opposition to American intervention in the First World War has made him a symbol of the political promise of unflinching intellectual integrity...

...What could the haunting, personal theme of' 'The Handicapped" have in common with Bourne's essay on patriotism, "Trans-national America," or with his repudiation of Dewey's pragmatism in "Twilight of Idols...

...His "forgotten prophet" is one always struggling to "fit in" somewhere, whether in the activist milieu of radical politics or the genteel surroundings of the New Republic's editorial offices...

...Bourne's goal united "personality" and politics by keeping the two in constant tension...

...Industrialization had undermined the very love 5 April 1985...

...Official commentators may feel compelled to offer their own benedictions, but, as Bourne recognized long ago, military force has become its own justification...

...In 1917, Bourne condemned an intellectual class that had given up the creation of new values for the ' 'easy rationalization of what is actually going on or what is about to happen inevitably tomorrow...

...Dorothy Day borrowed Bourne's refrain, "War is the health of the State," for the title of a chapter of her autobiography, and Bourne's idealism inspired many of the major documents of the New Left, from the "Port Huron Statement" to Noam Chomsky's tirades against the "new mandarins" who helped plan the Vietnam War, Bourne's continuing fascination for later radicals owes much to his posthumous transformation into a cultural hero and political martyr...

...Once weapons are designed and built — in the name of peace, of course — they must be deployed...

...The image of a solitary writer resisting the wartime impressment of thought is surely the stuff of romance...

...Bruce Clayton attempts to address this very issue in his biography, but his clumsy treatment of Bourne's "personal politics" makes one wish he had never raised the subject at all...

...Bourne was no prophet of an emerging therapeutic culture, as Clayton argues, nor a seeker of psychic health at the expense of social reconstruction...

...For an author who claims "to take Bourne's rational thought as seriously as possible," Clayton seems to go out of his way to attribute Bourne's radicalism to a sense of inadequacy rooted in his handicap...

...So do his letters, which have been recently collected by Eric J. Sandeen and reprinted in a handsome edition by a small press in Troy, New York...

...Bourne's essays have so captivated later radicals because of their moral passion and their relentless assaults on the assumptions of the modern state...

...The government of a modern organized plutocracy does not have to ask whether the people want to fight or understand what they are fighting for," Bourne wrote, "but only whether they will tolerate fighting...

...And those interests are real and vital and in some way interwoven with one's own cosmos...

...Mobilization of an enthusiastic mass of patriots was unnecessary, Bourne recognized in 1917...

...Those who take the time to look up his essays, which have lapsed out of print along with the New Left manifestos they inspired, won't have any such doubts...

...Bourne wrote in a self-consciously "personal" style, blending autobiography with cultural criticism in such a convincing way that he emerged as the spokesperson for a whole generation of young intellectuals...

...Almost seventy years later, the successors to Croly and company — liberals all — congratulate the Reagan administration for dispelling ' 'the post-Vietnam jinx on the successful use of American military force" by invading the tiny island of Grenada...

...Bourne deliberately chose an autobiographical style in order to impress his audience with the personal implications of contemporary politics and culture...

...217 of place that had made patriotism a real, living force in the hearts of citizens...

...Their economies depend on war, and the people depend on the economy...

...Long before the notion became a trite slogan, Bourne understood that "the personal is political...

...How Bourne himself would have detested such condescension...

...A reader unfamiliar with Bourne's actual work will wonder what all the fuss was about...

...I know my destiny," Nietzsche wrote...

...War is the health of a state that views its citizens as passive subjects who may be called on to test new weapons in diverse military theaters...

...Bourne spent so much time thinking and worrying about friendship because he saw its qualities of mutuality and shared interests as essential to the creation of a participatory democracy...

...Where in mainstream political and intellectual debates is Bourne's voice heard today...

...The young critic who excoriated the pro-war liberals of 1917, and whose ghost haunted the pages of John Dos Pas-sos's 1919, has periodically returned to-inspire later generations of American thinkers...

...They are riveting for another reason, as well...

...For Clayton, all that links the author of "The Excitement of Friendship" to the later antiwar polemicist is naive hope, optimism, and innocence — that and Bourne's persistent quest for acceptance...

...Clayton misses the point entirely when he tries to identify Bourne's vision of "personality" with the affable conformism of therapeutic jargon...

...Rather, Bourne identified his own sense of displacement with the growing rootlessness of contemporary life...

...But his use of such terms as "personality," "self-expression," and "the soul" in his essays on youth culture never suggested that personal fulfillment could be achieved solely in individual terms...

...Clayton's biography may remind us of Bourne's significance as a thinker, but it never captures the spirit of his public and private writings...

...Yet the very connections that Bourne made between personality and politics have eluded historians, who have tended to separate the cultural radical of Youth and Life (1913) from the antiwar critic of 1917...

...I am dynamite.'' The same could be said of Randolph Bourne...

...Reading Bourne brings to mind those exhilarating moments of intense, enthusiastic conversation when a good friend reveals convictions that seemed only to inhabit one's own lonely soul...

...Anyone who thinks that Bourne's indictment of pro-war liberalism applied only to men like Herbert Croly, John Dewey, and Walter Lippmann should consult the "new realism" of intellectuals and policy analysts in the 1980s...

...Instead, each new wave of American radicals has had to rediscover Bourne for itself, as if his writings constituted the fragmentary gospels of a lost, obscure faith...

...Yet, for all that, Bruce Clayton is right to call Bourne a "forgotten prophet.*' His crucial insights into the nature of politics and culture in an age of total war have inspired no coherent intellectual tradition for later thinkers to build on...

...I am not a man...

...Add to that the picture of a disfigured, hunchbacked dwarf confronting genteel liberals with unpopular truths, and one has crossed the border into myth...

...As Clayton observes, Bourne "came to see that...

...Bourne both longed for a "Beloved Community'' and helped give it shape by bravely examining his own experiences in friendship, love, and politics in his essays...

...Bourne-again" radicalism has flourished again and again, only to pass on into a predictable Marxism or total obscurity...

...The bureaucratic state could not fabricate a substitute...

...The factory system and the wartime state had transformed Emerson's self-reliant individual into an absurd joke, but that was no reason to look to the ideal of the happily-adjusted "organization man" as a promising alternative...

...A demoralized, depoliticized populace with no alternatives to the values of the powerful would serve equally well as conscripts in a total war...