Randolph Bourne Quotes (1886-1918)

“The President is an elected king, but the fact that he is elected has proved to be of far less significance in the course of political evolution than the fact that he is pragmatically a king.  …  Kings have often been selected this way in European history, and the Roman Emperor was regularly chosen by election.”

“The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion.  It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end.  All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations.”

“In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your definite action and ideas.”

“The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break with the State ideal.  The Declaration of Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also with the Divine Right of the State.  …  If revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in resisting its own extinction.”

“The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit should never be lost.  Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate—a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing.  It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience.  To keep one's reactions warm and true, is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.”

“The members of the working-classes... live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a system of a machine-production, the implements of which they do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest voice... From such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the military enterprise they go...with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.”

“In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why?  What is this thing good for?  And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.”

“Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating stale dogmas of Marxism.  It should not mean the study of socialism.  It had better mean a restless, controversial criticism of current ideas, and a hammering out of some clear-sighted philosophy that shall be this pillar of fire.  The young radical today is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader.  So far as the official radicals deprecate such an enterprise they make their movement sterile.  Yet how often when attempts are made to group radicals on an intellectual basis does not some orthodox elder of the socialist church arise and solemnly denounce such intellectual snobbishness.”

“All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  War is the health of the State.  Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover.  …  How unregenerate the ancient State may be…is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the Government's unreformed attitude on foreign policy.”

“Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world.  If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay.  It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist.  But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same.  Youth is the drastic antiseptic.  It will not let the elders cry peace, where there is no peace.  By its fierce sarcasms it keeps issues alive in the world until they are settled right.  It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained.  No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger.  Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail.”

“War is the health of the State.  It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.  The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties.  …  [I]n general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war.  Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.”

“The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one’s relation towards it is conceived in terms of family affection... in Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have 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, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort... the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily...”

“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.  We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State.  And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form.  …  [W]ith the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.  …  No one wlil 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 very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing process of the national life.”

“Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation.  It is taken as axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention.  …  The nation had to be strong to repel invasion, strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of the propertied and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied and improvident from ever using the government to secure their own prosperity at the expense of moneyed capital.  …  No one suggests that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of the Articles and labored so weightily over a new instrument not because the nation was failing under the Articles, but because it was succeeding only too well.  Without intervention from the leaders, reconstruction threatened in time to turn the new nation into an agrarian and proletarian democracy.  …  All we know is that at a time when the current of political progress was in the direction of agrarian and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation and imposed upon it a powerful form against which it was never to succeed in doing more than blindly struggle.  The liberating virus of the Revolution was definitely expunged, and henceforth if it worked at all it had to work against the State, in opposition to the armed and respectable power of the nation.”