RANDOLPH BOURNE'S THEORY OF THE STATE​

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The central antinomy of Randolph Bourne’s cultural criticism was his defence of the radical individual, on the one hand, and his hope that these same radicals might create a “beloved community” on the other. This led Bourne to announce himself at times a socialist and a Nietzschean, a defender of German city-planning and a prophet of democratic pluralism. His writing, of course, was so often aphoristic that it was hard to discern how he aimed programmatically to overcome these oppositions. His sympathetic followers see them to be mediated dialectically, that is, the community functioned best when open-ended and receptive to the greatest diversity of solitary voices. Bourne, exceptionally for the time, understood the “multiple affiliations” of identity as the actual experience of real pluralism.

 

His originality also lay in his effort to link culture with sociology. As a student at Columbia, he was a keen student of the latter, drawn, as many American sociologists were at the time, to the social-psychology of Gustave Le Bon’s theory of crowds and Gabriel Tarde’s concept of imitation. This led him in turn to E.A. Ross’s “social control”, and (his Columbia teacher) Franklin Giddings’ “like-mindedness.” These affinities famously came apart during the First World War. Social control, which Ross called an ethical instrument of the judgment, sentiment, and will of public opinion, destroyed the balance between opposites that Bourne craved. The war, in other words, unmasked liberalism’s need for a “social aristocracy” that ruled through public opinion. Bourne used the war’s patriotism to conclude that most people “live a life which is little more than a series of quasi-official acts. Their conduct is a network of representations of the various codes and institutions of society.”

 

My paper reexamines the extent to which Bourne had come to articulate the importance of perpetual international insecurity as the mechanism of liberal rule. Deprived of the mechanisms of overt political repression, “the object of all government,” Lyman Abbott wrote in 1901, “is to destroy the necessity of any government, by developing such a public conscience that no other force but that conscience will be needed to protect the rights of man.” To Bourne, American liberalism had to harness the centrifugal elements of its own liberality through the socialization of conduct, best achieved under conditions of perpetual insecurity.