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MAN WITH A GHOST: RANDOLPH BOURNE’S RADICAL CULTURAL IDEALISM
Kevin T. Higashikubo
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
May 2021
Committee:
Jolie Sheffer, Advisor
Andrew Schocket
iii
ABSTRACT
Jolie Sheffer, Advisor
Though not obscure as a figure in American intellectual history, Randolph Bourne has
largely been overlooked by American culture studies. My main argument is that Bourne’s
cultural writings show a distinctly American approach to the complications of modernity that
show the early 20th century as worthwhile grounds for more contemporary consideration within
cultural studies. I explore the foundations of Randolph Bourne's cultural idealism, beginning
with an analysis of philosophical pragmatism. Bourne radical understanding of pragmatism was
a framework to reimagine two important cultural concepts: youth and national identity. I proceed
to examine the role of irony in Randolph Bourne's cultural idealism. I show how Bourne drew
from the history of irony to create a cultural concept that served two purposes. First, it was a
companion to philosophical pragmatism that would help resolve some of the philosophy's
shortcomings in dealing with social values. Second, it was a means to a creative, social empathy
needed to fulfill the promises of American democracy in an increasingly complicated world.
Finally, I examine Bourne’s cultural idealism through his social aesthetics, which was his way
for the individual to, through cultivation of personal taste, regain agency and subjectivity in
modernity. This is largely framed through Bourne’s essays arguing against the hierarchical and
undemocratic cultural idealism of English poet and critic, Matthew Arnold. Finally, I look at
Bourne’s idealism as expressed through the function and power of taste. This project, by looking
closely at Bourne’s radical cultural idealism, posits that he had a considered theory of culture
meant to answer social problems posed by modernity to early twentieth-century American life.
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I need to thank my advisor, Jolie Sheffer, not only for her advice but for her
patience during this long process. Next would be Andrew Schocket, who had to endure much of
the same. This project would not have been possible without their input and guidance. Beka
Patterson deserves mention for her incredible ability to keep things organized in ways I never
could have. I would also like to thank all of my friends, classmates, and colleagues at Bowling
Green State University, who made that time and place not only an experience of deep and
rewarding academic study, but also a community that I will forever miss. Finally, I need to give
special thanks to two individuals: the first is my brother, Bryan, who put up with countless hours
of conversations and digressions these past few years, but did so without complaint and was my
regular sounding board. The second is Prof. Krister Knapp, who so many years ago introduced
me to Randolph Bourne and thus set me down this path.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page
INTRODUCTION: IN-BUT-NOT-OF-THE-WORLD ............................................................ 1
Methodology ................................................................................................................. 10
Structure ........................................................................................................................ 13
CHAPTER ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF RANDOLPH BOURNE’S IDEALISM .......... 18
A Brief History of Pragmatism ..................................................................................... 23
Pragmatism’s Radical Potential .................................................................................... 27
Youth: How to Live Creatively ..................................................................................... 35
Trans-Nationalism ......................................................................................................... 47
Trans-Nationalism and Cultural Idealism ..................................................................... 51
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 59
CHAPTER TWO: IRONY ....................................................................................................... 64
The Origins of Bourne’s Irony ...................................................................................... 68
Three Moments in the Life of Irony ............................................................................. 77
1. The Life Ironic, with Randolph Bourne ........................................................ 78
2. Irony and Pragmatism .................................................................................. 83
3. Irony and Democracy as Social Philosophy ................................................. 89
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 95
CHAPTER THREE: THE AESTHETICS OF TASTE ............................................................ 100
The Philosophy of Taste in Kant and Nietzsche ........................................................... 106
Culture Versus Anarchy ................................................................................................ 117
Arnold and Cultural Stability ........................................................................................ 120
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The Canon ............................................................................................................... 125
The Cult of the Best ...................................................................................................... 128
Life as an Aesthetic Challenge ..................................................................................... 135
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 139
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 143
History as an Echo ........................................................................................................ 143
A Death, Premature ....................................................................................................... 144
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 151
1
INTRODUCTION: IN-BUT-NOT-OF-THE-WORLD
“What are the seeds of American promise?” Randolph Bourne asked in 1917.1 In that
moment, he was writing the question as part of a larger condemnation of the American
intelligentsia that had so quickly acquiesced to America’s entry into World War I. Bourne saw
this eager acceptance of a war mentality as a total betrayal of all the liberal and progressive
ideals that the American intelligentsia had so fervently claimed to hold dear in the years leading
up to that horrific conflict. And so, by asking that question in 1917, he was, in effect, accusing
the American intelligentsia of, in their desire for international power or influence, salting the soil
where the seeds of promise had previously been sown.
This Master’s thesis is about Randolph Bourne’s radical cultural idealism. Most of the
work he did on this was written about in the decade before the World War I. And yet, that single
sentence – “what are the seeds of American promise?” – though written later on, was really the
central question on his mind throughout his entire career. Randolph Bourne was a man possessed
by thoughts of the fate and future of American culture. Every topic he turned his mind to,
whether it was the nascent youth culture of his generation, the dominant philosophies of his time,
the theory behind education, musing on art or literature, or finally the venom he spat at American
militarization – all of it ultimately centered around that single question: what are the seeds of
American promise? And from that question, Bourne wondered, how could we, as a nation, best
those seeds the chance to bloom and flourish? As America entered World War I, Bourne’s
cultural idealism faded; it turned into cynicism and despair. But before that, his idealism was a
verdant critical landscape full of democratic possibilities and the means for people to navigate
1 Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 53.
2
the social fractures of modernity. This thesis is an account of that landscape, of Bourne’s cultural
idealism.
Bourne’s cultural writings, which were written between 1911 and 1916, have never been
as popular than the ones that came later. And even when his cultural writings are the subject of
scholarship, they often are dealt with in isolation with each other: an analysis of Bourne’s
concept of irony here, a reframing of his “trans-nationalism” there. My project with this thesis is
to take these pre-war, cultural essays and put their ideas in conversation with one another. From
this approach, I argue, we can see that Bourne had a clear vision behind his cultural idealism – a
project to strengthen democratic thinking, promote social empathy, and empower people to
cultural creativity and new expressions of human agency in the chaos of modernity. Or, as he
would probably call it: American “spiritual” rejuvenation.
“Spiritual” is a term that Bourne used frequently – I am pretty sure I have seen the term
appear more than once in practically every essay of his I have read – but it was used
idiosyncratically; he did not mean it the sense we usually understand it today, which would be
something like “vaguely or informally religious or amenable to religious ideas” or
ironically/hyperbolically to mean “amazing, incredible.” In the former, one might say, “I’m not
religious but my visit to the Sistine Chapel was quite spiritual;” in the later one remarks, “That
tiramisu was so good it was a spiritual experience.” Neither had anything to do with Bourne’s
usage.
But then, figuring out what Bourne meant by it is not immediate because, though he
employed the term regularly, he never clearly defined what he meant by it. I want to be upfront –
this is not some grand mystery in which the absence of a clear conclusion renders Bourne’s work
indecipherable. Honestly, I think that most readers would be able to get the gist of his meaning
3
after reading a couple of his essays. As I understand it, by spiritual Bourne meant something
along the lines of “socially moral and creative.” “The spiritual world,” he wrote, was “ever
creative” and that which gave “the zest of perpetual adventure to mortal life.”2 He would
continue that part of this “spiritual life” was in holding moral courage in a world that had small
use for it.3 It is also helpful to look how Bourne described a lack of “spiritual” life. Those
without a developed spiritual sense – “spiritual parasites” he called them – “have lost the faculty
of being surprised” and could life their entire lives with vacuity “without ever making a really
individual response.”4 Thus, to live “spiritually” meant to not be alive in just the rote, biological
sense but alive and open to all the poetry and wonder and challenges that life contained.
Randolph Bourne is probably best described as a minor figure in American intellectual
history and cultural criticism. Not minor in the sense that his output and contributions are less
important or notable than other figures, but in the sense that he is usually written about in the
scholarship as a side character in a larger story; a deuteragonist in the grand drama of early
twentieth-century American thought. But Randolph Bourne, albeit a minor figure, has never been
an outright obscure one. He is a re-occurring character in survey-style books, such as Christopher
Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, Michael Walzer’s The Company of Critics, and
Matthew Stratton’s The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, each of which is an excellent
and notable exploration of a specific topic in the annuls of modern American intellectual and
cultural history. And in each, Bourne is given a chapter, a vignette that shows the importance of
his essays and thought to that particular subject. Similarly, Bourne shows up in some thoroughly
2 Randolph Bourne, “The Experimental Life,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 156. 3 Bourne, 156. 4 Randolph Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 139.
4
researched histories of certain movements: for example, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical
Club, which might be the definitive monograph on the development of American philosophy –
namely pragmatism – during the course of the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century. Or else
there is Casey Nelson Blake’s Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne,
Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, which is a history of the community of
young American intellectuals, of which Bourne was a part. In both of these texts, Bourne is less
the focus of a chapter, but more organically mentioned as a person who drops in and out of the
larger narrative, depending on his relevance to specific contexts or chronologies.
Randolph Bourne is also a regular feature in readers of American intellectual history,
those heavily curated compilations of “essential” writings intended to give students a scholarly
foundation upon which to build their own understanding – a kind of academic canon, as it were.
This designation that ends up being pretty ironic, given Bourne’s opinion on the practice (as will
be explored in Chapter Three). Which is not to imply that his presence in such collections is
wrong. Depending on the context, Bourne naturally deserves such a place. As will be examined
in Chapter One, he was one of the few intellectuals to consider multinationalism in ways that
were, even for his own time, deeply progressive, often in ways that resemble contemporary
thinking on the matter.
When it comes to anti-war rhetoric as a reaction to America’s entry into World War I,
there was probably no more vociferous or articulate writer than Bourne – in fact, outside of
academia, Bourne is probably best known as a for his anti-war essays and the persona they
created, as immortalized by John Dos Passos’s short poem:
“If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost
5
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the State.”5
While I am not focusing on Bourne’s anti-war writings in this thesis, it is important to note that
part of his legacy is that as the occasional patron saint of many American anti-war movements.
Noam Chomsky used Bourne to frame his opposition to the Vietnam War in American Power
and the New Mandarins. Chomsky drew from Bourne’s seminal anti-war essay, “Twilight of the
Idols.” Comparing the capitulation of so-called liberals to pro-war belligerence in the late 1960s
to Bourne’s lamentations of the same in 1917, Chomsky grimly noted that where Bourne saw a
“twilight” of liberal and intellectual integrity, “with the Vietnam war, twilight has turned to
midnight.”6 Bourne biographer Bruce Clayton also connects Bourne to the anti-Vietnam
movement and touches upon his mercurial legacy, writing:
“Randolph Bourne Lives,” an anonymous enthusiast chalked high on an American
wall during the heyday of the uprising against the Vietnam War. In those tie-dyed
days, one did not have to go far on any university campus to find a well-thumbed
paperback edition of Randolph Bourne’s paeans to youthful radicalism or his
searing dissents against American involvement in World War I. 7
5 John Dos Passos, U.S.A, Library of America 85 (New York: Library of America ; Distributed to the trade in the U.S. by Penguin Books, 1996), 449. Original emphasis. 6 Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, NY: The New Press, 2002), 7. 7 Bruce Clayton, review of Review of Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, by Leslie J. Vaughan, The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1712, https://doi.org/10.2307/2650143.
6
But fate is partial to repetitions. Christopher Lasch noted that “a legend in the twenties,
Bourne was quickly forgotten in the thirties.”8 Clayton observes, himself writing roughly
a decade-and-a-half after the high-water mark of the Vietnam War protests, that back
then, “reading Bourne…was de rigeur both in the classroom and the coffeehouses. But
today?”9 But today, indeed.
Today, Randolph Bourne remains a minor figure, despite so many of the things he deeply
obsessed about burning as hot as ever in the American conscious. Consider the massive
experiential divides that seem to demarcate today’s generational categories – every other week, it
seems, comes some published lament about how “millennials are killing X.” Well, as I will touch
on in the first chapter, the idea that different generations have totally different experiences, and
thus social outlooks and priorities, was a realization Bourne was one of the earliest American
thinkers to touch upon. Then there is the way in which various kinds of social resentments –
whether they be racial, political, or cultural (and usually a combination of all of them) – have
lead Americans to think of each other less as fellow citizens, equally invested in the American
future, but as enemies who can only coexist in increasingly separate communities, if they believe
they can coexist at all. This fraught and divided civil status was exactly the sort of problem
Bourne’s ideal of irony, the subject of Chapter Two, was meant to either prevent or at least
ameliorate. Another pressing issue is the way in which pop culture has become more and more,
for better or worse, the primary site of an individual’s self-identification and social
understanding; the major pop culture institutions – for example, Star Wars, video games, comic
books, Young Adult fiction, pop stars – and the fan communities, sometimes accepting of
8 Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, Norton Paperback (New York: Norton, 1997), 75. 9 Clayton, “Review of Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism,” 1712.
7
difference and other times aggressively opposed to it, that agglomerate around them have
become primary lenses through which one interprets the world. Bourne, as will be discussed in
Chapter Three, may have been one of the first American thinkers to understand this kind of
relationship between the individual and they culture they live within and choose to embrace.
Everyone knows that Randolph Bourne, having lived in the early twentieth century, was
not a postmodernist. And while I do not aim to suggest that maybe he was, I do find he often
resembled contemporary cultural theorists and critics more than he did many of his peers.
Bourne’s thinking was the product of cross-disciplinary interests, combining literary theory, a
comprehensive education in the history Western philosophy, aesthetics and art criticism, and
cultural progressivism. It was also the product of a highly unconventional and deeply personal
social experience: Bourne occupied a distinctly liminal space between rubbing elbows with the
intellectual elite, while at the same time always already outside of them due to, as he called it, his
“handicap.”
“Some to Misery are Born,” wrote William Blake and this may have well described the
early life of Randolph Bourne. The very first moments of his life started with a scarring of his
face, resulting from the slip of the doctor’s forceps. Then, a few years later, came the spinal
tuberculosis that would hunch his back and forever stunt his growth. Casey Nelson Blake writes,
“with his disfigured face, his dwarfed and twisted body, Bourne felt himself ‘truly in the world,
but not of the world.’”10 In many ways, the intellectual elite Bourne circled validated this belief.
Bruce Clayton recounts an anecdote in which Bourne had just been published in the Atlantic and
had been invited to the elite Century Club by that magazine’s editor, Ellery Sedgwick. Meeting
10 Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford, Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 73.
8
in the club’s “little room” – a modest foyer where non-members would await whomever had
invited for them – the two had a delightful conversation, with Sedgwick being duly impressed by
the then-twenty-six year old. But all the same, the celebrated editor of an august magazine could
not bring himself to the next, traditional step: invite the young man into the club for lunch.
Bourne’s appearance and stature – facially scarred and back crooked, standing barely five feet
tall – was simply too unseemly to welcome, even if only for an hour or so, into the company of
the socially elite men that comprised the club’s membership.11
Now I am by no means a scholar of Disability Studies and otherwise Bourne’s
“handicap” does not figure throughout this thesis, but as Bourne himself identified it as
formative to his thinking, it is worthwhile to pay it some consideration. Because of his
“handicap,” he wrote, “Of one thing I am sure of, however: that life will have little meaning for
me except as I am able to contribute toward some ideal of social betterment, if not in deed, then
in word.”12 On one hand, he had the kind of background and pedigree that more or less
guaranteed a man (and only a man) success in life: a middle-class upbringing; an Ivy-League
education; numerous affiliations or friendships with many of the other intellectual heavyweights
of his era; a regular opportunity to be published in magazines like the New Republic and the
aforementioned Atlantic Monthly. On the other, there was a lot in life he had experienced
exclusion from – such as invitations or memberships to elite social clubs – or else assumed he
would miss out on – such as getting married and having a family. Bourne lived his entire adult
life right up on the edge of a world that would only admit him halfway. For all the democratic
11 Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 1–3. 12 Randolph Bourne, “The Handicapped,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 80.
9
ideals it held, America was only partially open to people like Bourne, and countless other
minorities – all those who were in-but-not-of the world.
Again, my project here is not to psychoanalyze Bourne or do a deep-dive into how his
“handicap” directly influenced his thought. But one recurring theme throughout this thesis is the
ways in which Bourne, as Ross Posnock puts it, “sought to explore and promote new forms of
human agency.”13 This need for new kinds of human agency was a continuation of Bourne’s
conviction that “twentieth-century Americans would have to invent new modes of thought, a new
politics, a new literature, a new culture, and new aesthetics. Modern American would need ideas
consistent with current and social and cultural realities…”14
All of this, I believe, positions Bourne as relevant beyond the field of American
intellectual history and into the broader discipline of cultural studies. In this regard, Bourne’s
thinking had more in common with the developments of academic cultural theory of the later
twentieth century than those of his own era. Each chapter of this thesis examines ways in which
Bourne tried to redefine the terms of the world around him and imagine new ways for people to
live in it. As Matthew Stratton observes, Bourne believed that “the notion that mental concepts
themselves were not only produced but dynamically altered by encounters with new formulations
of sensory data.”15 Concepts, for Bourne, were not static, inert things, but rather in constant flux,
as they only existed in the lived experience of people in the world – a notion that is extremely
familiar to readers of contemporary cultural studies.
13 Ross Posnock, “The Politics of Nonidentity: A Genealogy,” Boundary 2 19, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 36. 14 Paul K. Longmore and Paul Steven Miller, “‘A Philosophy of Handicap’: The Origins of Randolph Bourne’s Radicalism,” Radical History Review, no. 94 (Winter 2006): 60. 15 Matthew Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, First edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 29.
10
While his methods have a postmodern flavor to them, his idealistic vision remained
imbedded in modernity and its problems. Bourne wanted to reconceptualize cultural ideas in
ways that would make the world less chaotic and hostile; and people more empathetic, more
open-minded. He did not want to drift along intellectual currents; he wanted to take control of
them and from that work toward a new vision of American promise, based in a true democratic
spirit of communal good will and creative collaboration.
Methodology
In general, I have approached this project as a series of close readings of Randolph
Bourne’s essays. While his most famous and written about essays are his anti-war ones, this
thesis focuses on the lesser-known works regarding his cultural idealism and theory. As I
mentioned above, Bourne typically appears as a side character in broader historical projects:
often histories about early twentieth-century intellectual communities or socio-intellectual
movements. Otherwise, aside from a couple of biographies, he mostly appears in scholarship
through journal articles, which focus on and seek to reframe or reexamine specific features of his
thought. My project is an attempt to bridge those two approaches: I examine Bourne by focusing
on a few key elements of his cultural writings and I try to reframe them as a kind of pre-political
social radicalism, built out of the intellectual currents of his time, but directed systematically and
cohesively toward a vision of American promise that has largely been overlooked in the
scholarship.
The general plan for this project has always been to take pieces of Bourne’s pre-war
cultural thought and put them in conversation with each other in order to shake out a clearer
image of his cultural idealism than is often depicted. Originally, I had conceived of this thesis as
proceeding chronologically through the selected essays, with the intention of showing how
11
Bourne’s thought developed over time and culminated in a cohesive cultural idealism. The first
chapter was going to focus on the cultural foundations of pragmatism, youth, and irony; the
second chapter would have continued to his philosophy of taste; and the third chapter would
have concluded with an argument for his “trans-nationalism” as a summation of those two earlier
chapter – “trans-nationalism” as the machine for which they supplied the ghost.
A skeleton of that earlier sketch for this thesis certainly remains. But as my thinking
developed, I became increasingly intrigued with the way Bourne reimagined certain cultural
concepts. I have retuned this project to reflect that. Chapter One still begins with pragmatism, but
now with youth and “trans-nationalism” as examples of how he used a radical understanding of
pragmatism to reconceptualize ideas as a foundation for his cultural radicalism. Irony has been
split off into its own chapter – the more I thought about irony, the more I realized how important
and central it was to his vision of truly democratic society, from a pre-political position of
cultural idealism. Bourne’s philosophy of taste has come to be the subject of the final chapter:
where the previous chapters were about his intellectual project to enable people to create a better
society, taste was his ideal for how individuals could empower themselves to become active and
creative agents against the cultural institutions that would seek to moderate their subjectivity.
There are limitations to my approach, of course. Randolph Bourne was a highly prolific
writer and throughout his career he would constantly write on a great number of topics, whether
it be designing a pragmatic method for education, literary and philosophical criticism, or the
function of art and architecture in modern America. Many, if not all, of these topics certainly
intersect with his radical cultural idealism, but simply cannot be duly taken into account in the
course of this thesis. So too with his best known anti-war writings, which depict – in real time –
the breakdown of his idealism against the forces of cultural closure and political oppression. But
12
in order to make this project feasible, I have had to limit the number of essays I focus on to only
a couple per chapter. There is a silver-lining to this however: it means that scholarship on
Bourne’s cultural idealism and its implications for cultural studies continues to be open for
further research and consideration.
I have approached this thesis through a few different lenses. The first is from a
perspective on the history of philosophy. Randolph Bourne’s thinking, coming from a place deep
fondness for the discipline stemming from his undergraduate years, was distinctly entwined with
the academic philosophy of his era. Thus, I have sought to position Bourne not merely as an
adherent of certain philosophies, but also as a figure who adapted them throughout the course of
his broader cultural project. Whether it was pragmatism, Kantianism, or Nietzscheanism, I have
sought to establish Bourne as not just a philosophically inclined or inflected thinker, but as one
who additionally reveals certain avenues or potentials in those philosophies at the turn of the
twentieth century. Following from Bourne’s place in the history of philosophy I examine how he
drew from certain philosophies to adapt, reimagine, or otherwise produce new concepts. In each
chapter, I emphasize certain concepts that Bourne adapted or refigured to fit within his cultural
radicalism which, despite his usage of common terminology, he intended to help solve or
ameliorate the social and intellectual problems of his time.
Next, and obviously given that all of this has been written within an American Cultural
Studies program, I have approached Bourne’s thought through the lens of cultural theory and
criticism. I spend a good deal of time putting Bourne’s cultural ideas and idealism in
conversation with the broader cultural thinking of his contemporaries, in order to highlight the
ways in which his thinking frequently stood beyond his particular intellectual context. From that,
13
I also consider Bourne from a perspective of contemporary cultural studies, and investigate the
ways in which Bourne often prefigured the shape of thought that emerged decades after he lived.
Structure
This thesis has been written as three chapters, each of which is meant to highlight and
illuminate a quality of Bourne’s thought that has elsewise been overlooked or at least
underestimated. To support this project, each chapter includes a discussion of the intellectual
frameworks Bourne was working in or against: pragmatism in the first chapter; irony in the
second; the philosophy of taste in the third. As a major part of my argument revolves around the
ways in which Bourne reconceptualized certain cultural ideas, I have attempted to show how his
thinking came out of, and then diverged from the context of his intellectual era.
The first chapter is about philosophical pragmatism and how Bourne, realizing the radical
potential of the philosophy, used it as a foundation upon which to reimagine social concepts in
radically efficacious ways. The first was his reconceptualization of “youth,” which he wrote
about in the essay so aptly titled “Youth.” This essay was Bourne’s articulation that the dawn of
modernity carried with it novel generational divides. Not only were there new cultural
possibilities to explore, but entirely new perspectives from which to explore them. “Youth” was
his vision of an experimental disposition towards new experiences for the sake of developing a
more exciting and vital apprehension of the world. The chapter continues with “trans-
nationalism.” Writing at a time of unsurpassed immigration, which brought with it calls for more
rigid Americanization of the newcomers and rising nativism bent on oppressing them. Writing
against the “melting pot” or, given America’s increasing militarization toward World War I and
thus building concern of how the national allegiance of immigrants would fall, Bourne proposed
14
an ideal of a new kind of national identity; one that drew strength from diversity and difference
and produced national power instead of fracture.
The second chapter takes a close look at Bourne’s essay “The Life of Irony” in which he
articulated a new concept of “irony,” which, I argue, while not being entirely disconnected from
the broader understanding of the word, was ultimately an idiosyncratic concept through which he
envisioned a social ideal of creative empathy. This ideal may have been original to Bourne, but it
is perhaps most familiar to contemporary readers through late and famed (and recently
problematic) American author, David Foster Wallace and his 2005 Kenyon College
commencement address that has since lived on simply known as “This Is Water.” Wallace
adjured his audience to try to exert some measure of control in how we interpret the world. The
point, he said, was to have the realization that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities
are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”16 Because, he warned, so much of our
understanding of the world was done through a kind of autopilot, which was inevitably
impatient, uncompassionate, and self-centered. Throughout the speech he gave several examples
to illustrate this paradigm, such as waiting in line at the supermarket, or the petty frustrations of
driving the daily commute to work. Try to train yourself, Wallace, adjured, to not automatically
lock on to the most base or despicable behaviors or motivations of all the people we happen to
come across during the ins and outs of daily life, but instead to give them the benefit of doubt –
that most people, most of the time, are not acting maliciously but are simply just like us –
desperately trying to manage the profound mental and emotional difficulties of simply living in
16 David Foster Wallace and Kenyon College, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York, NY: Little, Brown & Co., 2009), 8, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=763281.
15
the world, day in and day out. Bourne, however, was thinking on a national level, where the scale
of effect was not so narrowly constrained to an individual’s mental well-adaptedness to a
complicated world, but a democratic society’s very feasibility in a complicated world.
Finally, in the third chapter I explore Bourne’s “aesthetics of taste” as developed in the
essays “Our Cultural Humility” and “The Cult of the Best.” In these essays, he argued for a
cultural idealism conceived in opposition to that of Matthew Arnold. Bourne prioritized the
individual’s potential for social discovery and subjectivity in face of the burgeoning power of
cultural hierarchies designed to define the distinction between “good” or “right” or “proper”
cultural thinking. Against the currents of institutional power, Bourne, I argue, sought to create a
space for individual creativity and self-determination that could defy the established cultural
authorities. There are distinct ways in which Bourne’s opposition to Arnoldian cultural theory
resembles the cultural criticism of Pierre Bourdieu, even though the two men were separated by
seven decades. Bourdieu wrote that cultural consumption is “an act of deciphering, decoding,
which presupposes practical or explicit master of a cipher or code…a work of art has meaning an
interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it
is decoded.”17 Bourne’s “aesthetics of taste” were, in my argument, a means for individuals to
develop this “cultural competence” but reclaiming their cultural agency from institutionally
designed cultural hierarchies. Both Bourne and Bourdieu were writing about the objectification
of the individual through the cultural status quo. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier,”
Bourdieu wrote, echoing Bourne’s concern that the “cult of the best” objectified the individual.18
17 Pierre Bourdieu, “Distinction and The Aristocracy of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 4th ed (Harlow, England ; New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 499. 18 Bourdieu, 502.
16
But Bourdieu, writing from a sociological point of view, was a descriptivist chronicler of extant
social structures; Bourne, meanwhile, was writing from the position of radical prescriptivism,
actively trying to change how culture was understood through his oppositional cultural theory:
Bourdieu wanted an account, while Bourne wanted a way out. The “aesthetics of taste” would
provide that escape.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote English writer L.P
Hartley.19 But that point wherein the past becomes “the past” is always a dicey question. Are the
1960’s a “past” beyond the event horizon of understanding for those of us born thirty years later,
simply because we grew up with the Internet and our parents did not? Are my students, who are
half my age, from an essentially different world because their Internet and social media is all-
encompassing in ways totally foreign to my own experience? These aren’t questions that can be
answered with certainty or objectivity. But at least in my opinion, the early twentieth century,
while the past, is not quite “the past” from the today of 2021, despite it being a century behind
us. The problems and issues stemming one hundred years (if not a few decades longer), it seems
to me, have largely persisted and have continued to define many of the dominant issues of
American social, cultural, and political life. Problems concerning the questions of ethnicity and
American identity; of the new and radical ways in which we can understand cultural ideas and
products; of how we adopt and adapt to technologies that seem poised to utterly rewrite the way
we experience sociality in the first place. The minutia and particulars of those questions have
changed immensely in the century between Randolph Bourne’s America and the one in which I
am writing today: but the essential substance of those questions has not. Therefore, we might
19 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London, Great Britain: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1913), 9.
17
consider those writing a century ago – Bourne especially – and view them not as being of the
“past” but as constructive to our understanding of the present.
The general absence of early American modernism in the historiography of cultural
studies is an oversight. The fragmentary nature of modernism and its attendant social
disorientation, as evident in Randolph Bourne’s writings, seems to have produced a social
experience productive of cultural theories typically associated with the post-modern intellectual
world almost half a century later. The socio-cultural conditions of turn-of-the-century American
thought, this suggests, it ripe for scholarly reevaluation and new investigations by the fields of
cultural studies and cultural theory, as many of Bourne’s contemporaries were trying to grapple
with the same social conditions. A new critical appraisal of thinkers from this period, I suggest,
is long overdue. Second, Bourne, in particular, ought to warrant more attention, as his thinking
preempts that of seminal figures in those same fields. Bourne’s unique biography – his
contradictory position as being a member of the cultural elite (as a white, educated, Anglo-Saxon
male) while also socially outcast and marginalized (by his “handicap”) was one that few others
occupied as a public intellectual. I also hope to establish that Randolph Bourne was thinking in a
way that stood unique in his own time, and echoes ours as well. As such, he warrants some
degree of consideration from contemporary cultural studies that has largely been ignored.
Bourne’s cultural idealism, while certainly a product of the early decades of the twentieth
century, touched on concerns far beyond his era.
18
CHAPTER ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF RANDOLPH BOURNE’S IDEALISM
The history of turn-of-the-century radicalism in America is usually a political history. Or
a history of labor. It is a history filled with figures like the notable socialists Eugene V. Debs and
Upton Sinclair. Or anarchists ranging from the intellectual Emma Goldman, to the militants
Luigi Galleani and Leon Czolgosz. But to frame that period’s radicalism only as political or
economic radicalisms is to miss out on another, major constituent in the history of American
radicalism: cultural radicalism.
Randolph Bourne was arguably the most underrated cultural radical of the time.
Intellectual historian Christopher Lasch locates Bourne within the “new radicalism,” the shift in
reformist tradition that happened during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth
century, caused by changing attitudes towards government, increasing trust in bureaucracies and
corporations, and the embrace of more scientific ways of thinking. All of this culminates,
according to Lasch, in new radicals seeing “the end of social and political reform to be the
improvement of the quality of American culture as a whole, rather than simply a way of
equalizing the opportunities for economic self-advancement.”20 No doubt this was partially true
for Bourne: his focus, at least in the pre-war years, was on the cultural life of America, not so
much its politics; and despite his socialist sympathies, his ideals were far more oriented toward
the realm of intellectual possibilities than economics. But there is an important way in which
Lasch misunderstands Bourne’s radicalism: Bourne’s radical ideal would never settle for mere
“improvement.” What Lasch fails to appreciate with Bourne is the crucial way in which he stood
outside of the context of a “reform tradition.” Bourne saw American culture as being reimagined
or remade, not simply reformed. Louis Menand understands Bourne better when he writes that
20 Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, xiv.
19
“[Bourne] believed that American society must be transformed, and that the site of that
transformation must be the culture…He was not a reformer. He wanted a movement.”21
This more extreme understanding of radicalism was not in and of itself anomalous to
Bourne – it was also the purview of the aforementioned socialists and anarchists who wanted to
see the wholesale replacement of American political institutions. But unlike socialism or
anarchism, Bourne’s radicalism had no use for marches; it was not the kind of movement that
happened on the street but within the soul. It did not need agitation or bomb tossing, nor
revolution or even ideology. His was, again, not a political radicalism, but a cultural one; he did
not want to see a new system of government, but rather a new foundation for democratic
American social life. For Bourne, this was, first and foremost, a philosophical problem.
It started with pragmatism, the homegrown American philosophy fathered by Charles
Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism was Bourne’s first love, intellectually
speaking, and it played an essential role in shaping his thinking; although he rarely wrote about it
directly, it was a constant presence behind practically every word he wrote. I argue that
pragmatism was a philosophy with radical implications, though not intended as such by its
creators. Bourne, however, tapped into this potential. The power of pragmatism was in its central
claim that the truth of an idea was determined by its social value; that is an idea was “true”
insofar as it was useful or meaningful. Whereas many practitioners of pragmatism used it as a
method for incremental reform, I argue that Bourne took advantage of its innate ability to
radically reframe and reformulate and revise existing cultural concepts such that they would
serve to scaffold his radical cultural idealism. These concepts, as discussed in this chapter, were
21 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 1st ed (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 402.
20
“youth” and “nationalism” – which Bourne refigured as “trans-nationalism.” Irony was a third
member of this radical trinity, and will be the focus of the next chapter. Each of these three
concepts was, more or less, commonly used in Bourne’s world, and much in the same way they
are used today: “youth” was, as is now, a typical designation of age and its attendant experiences
and expectations; “nationalism” was a shorthand of “true Americanness,” though often
interpreted in a way Bourne despised; irony was used to denote either a rhetorical or literary
modality, typically wherein what was said or done was not what was meant. None of these
concepts were invented by Bourne: he used ordinary language to articulate new ideas.
Bourne endeavored upon this conceptual reframing because his radical idealism needed it
to proceed, even though, prima facie, the terms themselves perhaps seem ill-suited for such a
project. Much of the political radicalism of the early twentieth-century, after all, was the product
of activism, or the violent rebellion against the powers that were, not the products of academic
philosophy, or subsequently intellectualized terminology. But Bourne’s radicalism, in my
argument, was not political in nature but cultural. And as such, it had to world on a different
conceptual paradigm – that of culture. That “youth” was a non-political, cultural concept is
probably easy to accept, but “nationalism” likely less so. But in the chapter that follows, I aim to
justify that “nationalism” – better understood as national identity (the terminology here gets
complicated, as “nationalism” now implies a degree of white supremacist ideology or a quality
of “real Americanness” that exists above and beyond the American demographic itself) – was
essentially cultural to Bourne’s thinking as well.
Both “youth” and “trans-nationalism” qua national identity appear as the subject of their
own essays in Bourne’s pre-war period, which ranged from 1911 to 1916. (This definition of pre-
war, if not obvious, relates to when the US entered into the conflict, not when hostilities began
21
on the European continent.) These writings were Bourne at his most idealistic and optimistic.
Youth was his ideal of an open-mindedly scientific and eager approach to life, where new
experiences were to be celebrated and new social possibilities explored. This lived creativity was
needed to thrive in the fractured conditions of modernity. “Trans-nationalism,” as oppose to the
standard, established “nationalism,” was Bourne’s counter to the growing assimilationist and
nativist arguments of his time, brought about by the immigration boom of the turn of the century.
Instead of either oppressing or erasing multiculturalism, Bourne sought to embrace it. By
confronting a vulgar understanding of “nationalism” with a more open-minded concept of “trans-
nationalism,” Bourne hoped to reinterpret the core ideal of American identity such that it stood in
favor of the better angels of America and democratic promise. As America grew into the
twentieth century, it, unlike any other nation in the world, seemed capable of adopting the
potential of a true multicultural existence, and from that unique site of power, in turn create a
democratic, national engine able to make the entire world in a certain image – not along the
terms of brutish, colonial-minded European myopia, but rather that of a spiritually benevolent,
democratic cultural idealism.
These cultural concepts, in Bourne’s thought, worked together to generate a new kind of
radical cultural idealism, which would pull people towards the creative behaviors and
dispositions that would reimagine the possibilities of American culture. Here, I draw upon
Herbert Marcuse’s definition of “concept” as, “the mental representation of something that is
understood, comprehended, known as the result of a process of reflection.”22 Part of what made
Bourne unique in his use of concepts was his canny and prescient addition of self-reflexivity to
22 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 105.
22
it. Though pragmatically derived, it was considerably ahead of its time: whereas concepts like
“youth” and “nationality” would have had generally stable and banal definitions, Bourne was
able to reconceive them as radical cultural agents. These new concepts would build up the
spiritual creativity needed to both push against the stagnating or calcifying effects of tradition
and the status quo as well as power the cultural rejuvenation of America. The cultural concepts
of youth and trans-nationalism would aid America in navigating the perilous seas of modernity.
In a time marked by fracture and social uncertainty, the pragmatically derived cultural ideals of
youth and trans-nationalism could provide a measure of creativity and social stability; the
foundation, along with the next chapter’s topic of irony, of Bourne’s cultural idealism. This
idealism, in Bourne’s imagination, would foster a nation of open, democratic discourse;
intellectual and cultural camaraderie, and a creative and empathetic social life.
In this chapter, I do a close reading of two of Bourne’s pre-war essays, “Youth” and
“Trans-National America.” I look at how Bourne treats each of these concepts and how each of
them was seen as a solution to the problems of modern America. First, however, I do a quick
survey of pragmatism, as some familiarity with it is necessary to understand why Bourne’s use of
it was both novel and radical. I begin by looking at the ways pragmatism offered a major
disruption to the intellectual status quo, though its radical potential was either unnoticed or
neglected. The most common tenet of pragmatism was that “truth” was a function of “usage” –
that it, something was “true” in so far as it was useful or helpful in one’s experience. I show how
pragmatism, in challenging the stability of epistemic truth, opened up the possibility for Bourne
to rethink cultural concepts along grounds that were more socially desirable and valuable.
Furthermore, Bourne’s understanding of pragmatism and his subsequent creation of these
concepts, I suggest, showed him working in an intellectual mode that is surprisingly
23
contemporary and has far more in common with current practices of cultural theory than
previously understood.
A Brief History of Pragmatism
Pragmatism, though developed in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and only
hitting its highpoint in the American intellectual mainstream of the mid-twentieth century – was
inherently a profoundly radical philosophy. Personally, I am always a bit disappointed but not
exactly surprised by the fact that this is rarely brought up. There are a good number of reasons
why pragmatism hasn’t received much attention to its radical qualities. For starters, there is the
simple matter of terminological drift. Since at least the mid-twentieth century, with the decline of
pragmatism as a mainstream philosophy, the word itself has predominantly come to mean
“practical” or “sensible,” both of which mean just about the opposite of “radical” in everyday
language. It is safe to say that today when “pragmatism” is uttered it has nothing to do with the
philosophy and instead is used to describe someone or some idea as pleasingly level-headed; to
be pragmatic, these days, would imply that one is focused on practical, tangible results over all
else. And as approached by its prime formulators and evangelists, philosophical pragmatism did
not exactly do a whole lot to separate itself from that appraisal. Whether it was William James,
John Dewey, Jane Addams, and so on, it is true that a lot of the power put behind pragmatism
was in its assumed or proposed efficaciousness in getting results. But pragmatism’s identity as a
philosophy contrasted against its identity as a system to accomplish social ends were not one and
the same. Arguing for this distinction is part of my present project. But for the time being, from
here on out, when I write about “pragmatism,” I am talking about the philosophical definition
and not the common understanding, unless otherwise noted.
24
Another reason pragmatism does not have a reputation as a radical philosophy is that the
men who invented it did not design it for explicitly radical ends, at least not at first. Considering
that I am arguing that pragmatism is a far more radical philosophy than has been acknowledged,
it is at least curious the degree to which its creators handled it with relative modesty, even if they
occasionally spoke of it in grand terms (“The future of our civilization depends upon the
widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind,” wrote John Dewey.23) So
let’s talk for a moment about how pragmatism came to be in the first place, and then how its
intellectual etiology ultimately failed to capitalize on its greater potential concerning the
reimagination of American modernity.
To talk about pragmatism commonly casts it as being the shared brainchild of Charles
Peirce, William James, and John Dewey; yet to do this would be misleading as none of them
meant quite the same thing by it – in fact Louis Menand suggests that we talk not about
pragmatism but pragmatisms to account for the differentiation between the philosophical
systems as imagined by each man (itself an appropriately pragmatic distinction). Each individual
version shared a good amount of common intellectual DNA, however. David A. Hollinger neatly
summarizes this shared central intellectual goal as “the desire for a way of life consistent with
what they and their contemporaries variously perceived as the implications of modern science.”24
The scientific developments stemming from the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the
early twentieth drastically changed how the world was understood. From the position of
contemporary scientism, where we commonly conflate scientific theories with sheer facts about
23 Quoted from: David A. Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas, Johns Hopkins paperbacks ed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 30. 24 Hollinger, 29.
25
the world, it might be surprising that for Peirce, James, and Dewey, the discoveries of modern
science challenged a static and stable view of the universe. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, for
example, depicted a natural world in constant change, where the teleology of design was driven
by the randomness of adaptation instead of a preordained purpose. For Dewey especially,
philosophy had proceeded as if ideas where somehow ontologically special. But following the
Theory of Evolution, which held that one finch’s beak was no more metaphysically significant
than any other – one was not more lovingly designed by a Creator – pragmatism likewise held
that no idea had “greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork.”25 Pragmatism was an attempt to
makes sense of “the role of scientific method in a universe of change and uncertainty,”26 and to
put philosophy more in line with the implications of this new understanding of the universe.
The short history of pragmatism goes something as follows: Charles Peirce developed
pragmatism as a means to give more scientific clarity to how ideas were used. Peirce’s
pragmatism, or pragmaticism as he would later call his philosophy (to distinguish it from what
James and Dewey were doing with the word), did not have any of the social aspirations of the
later versions, and it does not really intersect with Randolph Bourne’s usage of the concept, so I
will not linger much on it here. The important thing to know is that Peirce’s foundational idea
was “to take account of the practical consequences an object might have is the way to form a
clear idea of it.”27 What an idea did was just as important as what the idea was. William James
took this starting point and from it built a broader philosophy.
James essentially codified pragmatism into the elevator-pitch form currently found in
philosophy textbooks: that the “truth” of an idea was a result of its usefulness in guiding inquiry
25 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 361. 26 Hollinger, In the American Province, 30. 27 Hollinger, 32.
26
or making sense of experience, or in the Jamesian parlance, its “cash value.” Most of the
Western philosophical tradition had been, historically, prefaced on a belief-to-world
supervention. This meant that whether or not a belief was true was a matter of its correspondence
to the actual structure of the actual world, which was always already external to most beliefs
regarding said world. And yet, in the face of philosophical tradition, James asserted in 1907,
“Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is, in fact, an event,
a process: the process namely of verifying itself.”28 The apparent circularity of truth verifying
truth is helpfully explained by Louis Menand who summarizes, “No belief, James thought, is
justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of
having minds.”29 As a psychologist, Menand implies, James was concerned with how mental
objects related to other mental objects. Ideas only connected to other ideas; the mental could only
be plugged into the mental. James, due to health problems, wasn’t able to fully elucidate his
principles of pragmatism, and passed away a few years later in 1910. Yet the Jamesian version of
pragmatism still matters for Bourne scholars because it was the first and foundational version of
that philosophical perspective Bourne encountered and later developed upon.
To say that John Dewey took up the mantle of pragmatism probably is not fair to Peirce
or James, but John Dewey basically took up the mantle of pragmatism and shaped it into what
would become the dominant American philosophy for half a century. If James was interested in
how the idea of truth intersected with lived experience, Dewey directed pragmatism into a
concrete, socially oriented approach to living. This was a process, as he literally spent the rest of
his life amending, defending, developing, and clarifying pragmatism as a valid socio-
28 William James, The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), 97. Emphasis original. 29 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 356.
27
philosophical system. And his contributions to the philosophy produced in it a lot of its
untapped, radical potential.
Pragmatism’s Radical Potential
So what made pragmatism potentially radical? First, it was radical in a metaphilosophical
sense, so much so that it would not be out of line to call it a kind of anti-philosophy. It did away
with the traditional pairing of metaphysics and epistemology in philosophy. Absolutes and ideas
that stood beyond the pale of human experience, the pragmatists proclaimed, simply were not
features of the universe. There were no Capital-T Truths floating safe and secure in a Platonic
metaphysical ether. Following from this, if there were no absolute Truths, then philosophical
investigations into them – i.e. epistemology – were no more productive of knowledge than a
zoologist describing a unicorn. “Philosophers, Dewey argued, had mistakenly insisted on making
a problem of the relation between the mind and the world, an obsession that had given rise to
what he called ‘the alleged discipline of epistemology.’”30 Needless to say, this rankled more
than a few, primarily European, philosophers. As Bertrand Russell sardonically concluded of
Dewey’s pragmatism, “ironclads and Maxim guns become the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical
truth.”31 Russell was concerned with the idea that if metaphysical truth could be reduced to
functionality or apparent consequence, then the end result would be a metaphysics of sheer
power: because in the lay world, what is functional is always what works.
Russell’s critique, however, takes as a given the very thing that pragmatism was trying to
do away with: that philosophical inquiry was about mapping correspondence between the mind
and an ontologically static world. The pragmatists started from an entirely different position –
30 Menand, 360. 31 Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 123–24.
28
that of a world in constant flux, as informed by modern science – and as such set out to make
sense and navigate that understanding of the universe. The stakes were not meager; it was a
matter of whether philosophy could be socially relevant in any way shape or form. Robert
Westbrook writes: “Philosophy… had two choices. It could become an active participant in the
‘living struggles and issues of its own age and times’ or it could stick to its traditions of
epistemological conundrums and thereby ‘maintain an immune monastic impeccability without
relevancy and bearing in the generating ideas of its contemporary present.’”32 From the
pragmatists’ point of view, philosophy was like a motorcycle with the rear wheel suspended off
the ground: it could continue to rev the throttle and get the wheel spinning ever more powerfully,
yet ineffectively, in the air (which would not, it should be noted, be a gross violation of the
purpose of the motor); or it could put rubber to asphalt, grind out some smoke, and actually get
somewhere by the end of the day. Or, as John Dewey wrote in his famous “The Need for the
Recovery of Philosophy,” “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing
with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing
with the problems of men.”33 In order to preserve the value of philosophy, pragmatism, in turn,
had to change its long established, traditional function. It was precisely this kind of egalitarian
functionality that made Randolph Bourne fall in love with the philosophy, though as we shall
see, for him it did not go far enough in this direction.
By reframing the philosophical project as such, pragmatism was radical in a meta-
philosophical sense: it aimed to pull philosophy away from being the lofty, transcendental
32 Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991), 137. 33 John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 1993), 8.
29
pursuit of cloistered academics and into the everyday world of philosophically lay people.
Because, as Cornell West points out, pragmatism made philosophy “a mode of cultural critical
action that focuses on the ways and means by which human beings have, do, and can overcome
obstacles, dispose of predicaments, and settle problematic situations.”34 Pragmatism was about
figuring out the best way for people to navigate an increasingly complicated world. Because with
modernity came an increasingly messy life, replete with unforeseen obstacles and series after
series of situations, each more difficult and problematic than the last. And collectively the largest
number of obstacles and problematic situations – and thus the place pragmatism would have the
most practical value – were outside the halls of Yale or Harvard. “In a complicated and perverse
world,” Dewey continued, “action which is not informed with vision, imagination, and
reflection, is more likely to increase confusion and conflict than to straighten things out.”35 With
Pragmatism, philosophy was now for the people, of the people, by the people, to phrase it in the
famous language of American democracy. Pragmatism would help ordinary people make better
decisions – of, for, and by themselves – which would ultimately percolate up into better social
outcomes for the nation at large. And this system was certainly democratic in the egalitarian
sense – the pragmatic method, designed for “dealing with the problems of men” became a
philosophy available to all people. Pragmatism was supposed to be the end of democratic
philosophy, the system-of-all-systems that was both a summation and a conclusion of that great,
American project. Yet, Bourne feared that if all pragmatism could do was provide a scientific
methodology for rational living, it would fail to provide the creative and poetic substance that
34 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, The Wisconsin Project on American Writers (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 86. 35 Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 7.
30
made life worth living in the first place. Bourne’s concept of youth, which comes later in this
chapter, was one way he saw to fix this problem. Irony, which is the focus of the next chapter,
was another.
But like so many products of modernism, pragmatism was something of a contradiction:
it was a radical metaphilosophy locked together with a decidedly non-radical social functionality.
Sure, it sought to tear down the faulty scaffolding of traditional philosophy and hurry the fire of
radical philosophy, Prometheus-like, into the hands common people. But threaten the political
and social foundations of American life? Certainly not. It wasn’t meant to do that, at least by its
greatest advocates. Dewey, who was pretty much the patron saint of American liberalism in his
time, wanted no part of revolution. And not because he was ignorant of social problems or
satisfied with the status quo. Actually, he was far from it. As West explains, “The social misery
upon which Dewey opened his eyes in the late nineteenth century was principally that of
economic deprivation, cultural dislocation, and personal disorientation… In short, industrial
capitalist America was a ‘distended’ society – a society without a core, a society unhinged, a
nation in a pathological state.”36 This is a pretty dire picture, and as West shows, Dewey was not
ignorant of it. But in the face of this pathology, Dewey saw a patient far from terminal condition.
What American society needed to start recovering was not an infusion of revolutionary fervor,
but moderate reform. Dewey saw pragmatism as being the primary vessel of this kind of
reasonable, progressive change.
Pragmatism was also resistant to radicalism because it was inherently incompatible with
ideological thinking. Ideology requires an absolute belief about things as they truly are, not just
how they seem; a moral certitude in how things ought to be; and complete faith that in
36 West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 79.
31
understanding the former and the latter, an ideal social paradigm can be achieved. Capitalism,
writ broadly, holds: A) that the forces of supply and demand combined with the universal desire
for personal gain are the foundations of society, B) that the free market is the system that
promotes the greatest amount of competition and thus innovation, and C) that the ideal society is
one in which government or institutions don’t impede on the natural order of economics, thus
creating a society of ever escalating wealth (the downstream exploitation of people is an
unavoidable but temporary misfortune, if seen as a “misfortune” at all). Socialism, meanwhile,
states something like: A) the engine of the world (thus far) has been historical materialism and
labor exploitation, B) the means and yields of production ought to be more evenly distributed,
and C) that such in such a world, people would be free from the tyranny of work and thus
capable of achieving true, individual fulfillment (and the force needed enact this system is
likewise a possibly unavoidable, but temporary misfortune, if it seen as a “misfortune” at all). In
either case, with ideology there is an unflappable certainty in its convictions: capitalism does not
fail, it is just that the market is insufficiently free; socialism is not flawed, but it can be
improperly incubated in the corpse of capitalism. Neither species of absolutism could be
embraced by pragmatism.
An important realization regarding Randolph Bourne was in his ability to fold
pragmatism not just into a radical project, but doing so without violating its commitments to
democracy or falling into the quagmire of ideology. Ideology was a problem for Bourne because
it made critical thinking inflexible, if not outright verboten; it foreclosed upon spiritual
creativity, which was perhaps the highest value in his pantheon of cultural idealism. Though
himself a socialist, or at least sympathetic to socialism (again, his aversion to explicit politics
make this hard to parse out), he wrote of it, “Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating
32
the 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…”37 A common concern for Bourne was that of authority over critical and creative
thought. As we will see in Chapter Three, he vociferously levied this concern against the high
cultural institutions of the museum and academy. But here, we see him doing pretty much the
same against a political movement he liked. Because regardless of how he felt about fine art, or
socialism, or even pragmatism, if there was a risk that it would fall into the complacence of
intellectual laziness or dogma, it then had to be fought against. This was why he was wary, if not
outright hostile, towards any form of ideology, whether or not it was productive of what he
wanted: ideology always already implied certainty, and certainty was the death of creativity. And
creativity, for Bourne, was one of the most important human qualities; another, corollary quality
was social self-determination – that possibility of “being” one’s self in the world – which will
feature both later in this chapter when I discuss Bourne’s ideal of “trans-nationalism” and again
in Chapter Three with how he imagined taste as a form of social power.
Randolph Bourne imagined in pragmatism something different, something far more
effective and efficacious of new social possibilities. He saw in pragmatism not a method of
incremental reform and a scientifically informed, systematic progressivism, but a means by
which to produce new cultural concepts productive of a radical reimagining of American social
life. He may have been a pragmatist down to his bones, but in his heart he was always first and
foremost a radical humanist cultural critic. As Louis Menand identifies, Bourne “believed that
American society must be transformed, and that the site of that transformation must be the
37 Randolph Bourne, “The Price of Radicalism,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 140.
33
culture. And he thought pragmatism supplied the method.” But unlike many of his fellow
pragmatists, such as Dewey or Jane Addams, Menand continues, “He was not a reformer. He
wanted a movement.”38
Menand is correct in that Bourne’s interest was primarily in culture, but saying that he
wanted a movement is somewhat misleading, because in the context of social reform, a
movement is usually taken to be a form of political organizing. Two of the twentieth century’s
most famous and effective examples of movements – suffrage and civil rights – were political in
orientation, or at least organization. This is not to suggest for a second that they lacked a
philosophical dimension – again, these things cannot be separated – but as a social force their
victories were the product of activism. Bourne’s radical vision however, in my argument, was
not exactly the kind that could be accomplished through marches or demonstrations. Bourne
believed that the locus for social change was not to be developed through politics, but culture,
and the philosophy of culture. Bourne’s idealism was pre-political; its locus was “below the
battle” of politics to reference the title of another of Bourne’s essays. Though this essay was part
of his anti-war collection, the overarching trends of his thought persist as he wrote of a friend39
facing military service, “He has ideals but cannot see their realization through a desperate
struggle…”40 Politics, like war, was a struggle; a clash of opposing wills and worldviews that
always implicitly desired for the eradication of the opposition. Culture, for Bourne however, was
38 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 1st ed (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 402. 39 When Bourne was writing about a “friend” it was usually a means to express his own thoughts and anxieties about an issue. So even though there was no chance that he himself would be conscripted, he, ironically (see: next chapter) imagined that experience as the basis for developing his opinions. He would use this same tactic when writing about a character called Miro, who will appear in the third chapter. 40 Randolph Bourne, “Below the Battle,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 18.
34
not like politics or war. It was the product of community, of the assumed mutual partnership of
people in a society. Changing culture was never to be brought about through violence, but open-
minded discourse and good faith in one’s neighbors. This meant that changing, or a fortiori,
reimagining culture had to happen along different, non-violent means. In particular, it was
prefaced on change through new cultural concepts. Cultural change was pre-activist; an
intellectual foundation prior to any explicit political platform. Randolph Bourne did not want a
movement so much as he wanted a far more fundamental, common and collective, understanding
amongst fellow citizens; and as such he wanted, rather than politics, a means by which for
neighbors to view each other as, well, simply that. His battle was not a political one, but a
spiritual one.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, this made Bourne something of an anomaly.
For those of us involved with contemporary cultural studies, however, it begins to look
surprisingly familiar. So much of cultural theory’s influence on the latter half of the twentieth
century, up to the current moment, has been how it reframed or redefined the terms of discourse.
It is almost impossible to imagine how contemporary LGBTQIA+ academics and activism could
exist without Judith Butler’s monumental, conceptual reframing of gender as a set of social
behaviors beyond mere biological definitions. Likewise, an entire sub-discipline of everyday
studies scholars have been inspired by Michel de Certeau’s reimagining of what can be
considered to be culture at all.
Concepts matter. How we think about, define, approach, and deal with concepts matters.
Concepts are the building blocks upon which we create and understanding, well, everything. And
Pragmatism, far before the deconstructionist free-for-all of the mid-century, understood this. But
it never capitalized upon it; it never took it to the far ends of its potential. Well, at least before
35
Randolph Bourne. Because pragmatism opened up the world for new apprehensions in particular
ways: the re-conception of youth was the earliest one to spark an ember in his mind.
Youth: How to Live Creatively
It is a truism – a tired one, but a truism all the same – that each generation bemoans the
next. The Baby Boomers looked with contempt upon Generation X, just as they both now
bellyache about Millennials. Things weren’t any different a century ago. In February of 1911, a
woman named Cordelia A.P. Comer wrote a breathtakingly venomous rebuke of the younger
generation that would put the vitriol of contemporary critics to shame. She looked at the
American youth and saw nothing worth liking. “You,” she spat, “are markedly inferior to your
old grandfather in every way, — shallower, feebler, more flippant, less efficient physically and
even mentally, though your work is with books, and his was with flocks and herds. Frankly, I
find in you nothing essential to a man. God knows what life can make of such as you. I do not.”41
And while she admitted that no generation can be held responsible for the world in which they
come of age, there was no excuse for what she perceived to be this generation’s astonishing
deficit of social responsibility, lack of integrity, and profound failings of character.
When this essay appeared in The Atlantic, Bourne was 25 and in his second year at
Columbia University. Due to financial hardships, he had been unable to attend college until
Columbia offered him a full ride in 1909, meaning he entered college at the age most of his
classmates were preparing to leave it. But he did not mind. Being surrounded by youth suited
him. (In fact, situating himself in the youthful community would remain a constant for Bourne,
as he lived until the end of his life in that eternal enclave of youth, Greenwich Village.) And he,
41 Cornelia A.P. Comer, “A Letter to the Rising Generation,” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1911, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1911/02/a-letter-to-the-rising-generation/536931/.
36
like Ms. Comer, saw in the classmates around him, and in himself, a major shift in American life
that had happened roughly sometime between 1880 and 1890. “The two generations
misunderstand each other as they never did before,” he wrote in his reply to Ms. Comer’s essay.
The misunderstanding was the result of an unprecedented cultural rupture: modernity. And what
Ms. Comer had failed to grasp, Bourne argued, was that the young generation was rising in a
world in many ways disconnected from the one of their forefathers. “The elder generation,” he
wrote of what was to be expected in life, “should remember that it is no longer the charted sea
that it was to our grandfathers.”42
This rupture was experienced in primarily two ways. The first was economic. Prior to the
end of the nineteenth century, how an ambitious youth went about making a living in America
was a straightforward affair. “The man of fifty years ago, if he was intellectually inclined, was
able to get his professional training at small expense…if commercially inclined, he could go into
a small, settled, self-respecting business house…If he had a broader outlook, there was the
developing West, or the growing industrialism of the East,” Bourne pointed out.43 But the rising
generation of 1911 had “a very real feeling of coming straight up against a wall of diminishing
opportunity.”44 Apprenticeships had been replaced with increasingly specialized degrees and
their attendant investments. Independent businesses were requiring more and more initial capital
before they could open their doors. And the West was gone: the frontier had been declared
closed by the Superintendent of the Census in 1890. “The only choice for the vast majority of the
young men of to-day,” he wrote:
42 Randolph Bourne, “The Two Generations,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1911, 594. 43 Bourne, 594. 44 Ibid.
37
is between being swallowed up in the routine of a big corporation, and experiencing
the vicissitudes of a small business, which is now an uncertain, rickety affair,
usually living by its wits, in the hands of men who are forced to subordinate
everything to self-preservation, and in which the employee’s livelihood is in
constant jeopardy. The growing consciousness of this situation explains many of
the peculiar characteristics of our generation.45
The problem was not just the kinds of places the youth could get jobs, but also the consequences
that these kinds of jobs had on the workers. Subtly evoking his socialist sympathies, he lamented,
“The only kind of responsibility that this can possibly breed is the responsibility for one’s own
subsistence. In the big business, the employee is simply a small part of a big machine; his work
counts for so little that he can rarely be made to feel any intimate responsibility for it.”46 With
the modern economy, there was no longer any ownership of labor, no passion or even sense of
place within it. This, however, was ultimately a good thing, Bourne understood, because with the
vanishing of the traditional kinds of labor, so too vanished the ways it had previously produced
one’s sense of self. It was the realization that one’s identity was not produced through work, but
instead through life and its attendant experiences. That one did not discover the world through
work, but through everything except that.
This tied into the second major way modernity changed things for the rising youth: it
opened up a completely different vision for what was important in life. And while it would seem
that Bourne was conceding that the young generation, in rejecting meaning as work in favor of
meaning as life, was thus becoming self-centered; it turned out that the opposite was true. The
45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 595.
38
older generation, Bourne agreed, held “service and sacrifice” as the highest nobilities. But he
flipped the common assumption that service meant selflessness, writing, “These ideals…are
utterly selfish because they take account only of the satisfaction and moral consolidation of the
doer.”47 Where Ms. Comer accused to youth of subscribing to a “culte de moi,” Bourne turned
the tables and alleged that it was actually the older generation that was obsessed with
themselves. The older generation performed acts of service and sacrifice not for the sake of other
people but to satisfy their own sense of duty. In effect, their “morals” were about patting
themselves on the back. Meanwhile, the youth was becoming the first generation truly capable of
getting outside of themselves. “It is true that we do not fuss and fume about our souls, or tend to
our characters like a hot-house plant,” he wrote with a sly dismissiveness that would have
probably made Ms. Comer spontaneously combust. Instead, he continued, “This is a changing,
transitional age, and our view is outward rather than inward.” Why? Because the technological,
intellectual, and media landscape, combined with the desire for life experiences, made possible a
new way to be in the world:
In an age of newspapers, free libraries, and cheap magazines, we necessarily get a
broader horizon than the passing generation had. We see what is going on in the
world, and we get a clash of different points of view, to an extent which was
impossible for our fathers. We cannot be blamed for acquiring a suspicion of ideals,
which, however powerful their appeal once was, seem singularly impotent now, or
if we seek motive forces to replace them, or for new terms in which to restate the
world. We have an eagerness to understand the world in which we live that amounts
47 Randolph Bourne, “The Older Generation,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 162.
39
almost to a passion. We want to get behind the scenes, to see how the machinery of
the modern world actually works. We are curious to learn what other people are
thinking, and to get at the forces that have produced their point of view...we have a
passion to understand why people act as they do.48
It simply made no sense to hold on to the ideals of the older generation because the world had
outpaced and outgrown them. The younger generation, through mass media and technology, had
access to the rest of the world that had never existed before. The rate of incoming information
was unprecedented and it made the younger generation hungry for kinds of knowledge and
experience that had previously been literally unimaginable. Modernity had washed away the
world of the older generation and in its place stood a vast, uncharted ocean. The only things
certain about it were that it was unpredictable and turbulent. But this new ocean, like all oceans,
was also a place of creation and evolution, and from it would emerge a new and modern ideal of
“youth”.
Youth as Cultural Idealism
But if Bourne’s conception of youth was a product of modern conditions, it was also the
mode of living that was best suited to dealing with them. For Bourne, what was most important
for being in the modern world was for one to retain intellectual creativity and spiritual openness.
Youth was many things, but most importantly it was an approach to living that prioritized new
experiences and intellectual adventures. In this way, it would be needed to keep pragmatism on
track, because, as discussed above, there was a worrying way in which the kind of pragmatism
48 Bourne, “The Two Generations,” 596.
40
championed by John Dewey, for all its good intentions, threatened to amount to nothing greater
than a scientific methodology for daily life; a solid system without a soul; a complex machine
without a ghost. Science, if it were to be truly valuable to lived human experience, needed more
that a competent, rote methodology – it needed poetry as well. Leslie Vaughan writes that with
‘youth,’ “Bourne proposed…a ‘post-scientific’ philosophy, a remarkably postmodern alterative
to scientism and ideology, which would restore to the scientific spirit the creativity of the poetic
imagination.”49
So how did Bourne understand youth? First and foremost, it was not synonymous with
being young, nor was it simply a transitional solar phase that one went through. As Vaughan,
again, notes, “The significance of generational thinking, particularly as it developed in the early
twentieth century, lay in its political potential as an organizing concept and a source of
identity.”50 Youth, for Bourne, mean more than belonging to a certain bracketed age group
whom largely would have gone through the same general experiences that helped solidify one’s
identity. Instead, as Bourne biographer James Vitelli summarizes, “it was for him a state of
being, a state of consciousness of being alive.” This does not seem to be so far off from how our
idioms today capture the term: we regularly speak of people being “young at heart,” “wise
beyond their years,” or “having an old soul.” We are all (hopefully) acquainted with at least one
of those supremely cool, older people who remains sprightly, hip, and open-minded, or else we
might have that one precociously curmudgeonly friends whom, we sigh, “was born 50 years
old.” As such, Vitelli continues, “youth” had a way of “melting and merging with other
49 Leslie J. Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, American Political Thought (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 61. 50 Vaughan, 63.
41
concepts: life, reality, change.”51 “Youth” was, Bourne wrote, “a great, rich rush and flood of
energy.”52 It was a lust for life that wanted “to be everything, to do everything, and to have
everything that is presented to its imagination.”53 And, as touched on above, it was the impulse
that put “the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established – Why: What is this
thing good for?”54 Modern youth was energetic, romantic, idealistic, and rebellious. So ,while it
was likely that most people possessed by youth were young, it was by no means an age-exclusive
club. Youth was a source of identity, but importantly a self-reflexive one that could break free
from mere political organizing and instead lead one to embrace any number of new and exciting
experiences. There was no such thing as “being too old” for something new. (The non-
exclusivity of Bourne’s driving ideals will reappear in the next section).
Youth was a necessary partner to pragmatism, in Bourne’s conception. The youthful
drive for new and exciting experiences was not only individually illuminating, but also an
essential partner to “the experimental spirit of scientific modernism,” meaning pragmatism.55
The scientific methodology, as undeniably powerful and useful as it was, could only be as
productive as the diversity of what was put into it. Science requires the introduction of new
variables; a new solvent is only as valuable as the number of things it can breakdown; the most
promising algorithm only as useful as the number of problems it can be tested to resolve.
Pragmatism may have supplied the scientific outlook, but it was youth that sought out the
experiential material to keep its fire hot. Thus, when Bourne wrote, “Youth’s attitude is really the
51 James R. Vitelli, Randolph Bourne, Twayne’s United States Authors Series ; TUSAS 408 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 66-67. 52 Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 92. 53 Ibid., 95. 54 Ibid., 99. 55 Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, 190.
42
scientific attitude. Do not be afraid to make experiments, it says. You cannot tell how anything
will work until you have tried it,” his choice of language was highly intentional. Youth was an
important force in keeping pragmatism from stagnating; youth kept the engine of pragmatism
running.
Dewey’s pragmatism was a philosophy for social efficacy and as such it oriented
knowledge “as an instrument for action rather than an object of disinterested belief.”56 As I
mentioned earlier in this chapter, pragmatism was supposed to help people make better choices
individually, which would end up resulting in better social and political outcomes. Broad social
benefits would be produced by the aggregation of individual experiences through a system of
democratic populism. But the concern Bourne had was what would happen if pragmatism was
efficient to the point where it devalued experimentation. To help illustrate this, imagine a website
where people could write reviews of restaurants, post photos, and even be in contact with the
restaurant’s management. Let’s imagine Perfect-World-Yelp.57 This would surely be a valuable
resource whenever we found ourselves both hungry and adventurous. Assuming for the sake of
argument that the system worked ideally (that is, people behaved honestly and in good faith,
instead of like petty or entitled human monsters as is wont for the Internet), it is easy to see how
this website could benefit everyone involved. Regulars could support and promote their favorite
establishments. Restaurants could access a database of diner preferences and thereby improve
their own appeal (say, with all sorts of metadata on what level of ambient lighting was most
56 R. Ormerod, “The History and Ideas of Pragmatism,” The Journal of the Operational Research Society 57, no. 8 (2006): 893. 57 The problem with real world Yelp is that, as a monetized online community, it ends up having a lot of issues. Bad faith one-star reviews; one-star reviews as petty revenge, accusations that Yelp boosts good reviews for establishments that pay for the service, etc. Regardless of how much any of these factors compromises Yelp’s ultimate utility is difficult, if not impossible, to settle, so it’s much easier just to use assume an ideal world in this thought experiment.
43
preferred or whether abstract impressionism on the walls make a place feel classy or pretentious,
and on and on). And most importantly, when diners felt in the mood for something specific or
something new, all they would have to do is pull up a list of the peoples’ top choices, thereby
largely alleviating the risk of being disappointed. When I think of a world in which I will never
again be let down by a soggy margherita pizza or bland lamb vindaloo, I find my mood
immediately brightens.
And yet this pragmatic culinary paradigm would hardly be perfect. For starters, it might
end up that my tastes don’t particularly line up with the rest of my dining community’s. Maybe
what I really want are the intensely pungent and spicy flavors of Sichuan food, whereas everyone
else likes to sup on more modestly spiced American-Chinese staples of General Tso’s chicken or
beef and broccoli. In this case, Perfect-World-Yelp wouldn’t be all that useful to me. But a more
germane issue, as far as Bourne would have been concerned, involves how such a website might
change the entire experience of going to a restaurant. (Bourne’s preferences in Chinese food are
currently unknown). Perfect-World-Yelp would fundamentally change the way I behave when it
comes to dining out by making the “rational” choice extremely straightforward: feeling hungry
for some Peking duck? Well, simply choose the restaurant that balances out the highest rating
with the most convenience. Of course, doing so would also be one of the least interesting choices
you could make.
The point is not that an interesting experience is inherently superior to a good one –
sometimes the most memorable dinners end up having little to do with the quality of food and
sometimes we just relish a great meal with no frills – but to acknowledge that if we choose solely
based on what seems “rational” – i.e. whatever is deemed consistently good by the community of
diners – we risk ending up not valuing an interesting experience at all. Because what is great
44
about an interesting experience is almost too personal and specific to be replicable no matter
what. Great dining experiences are not the same as great plates of food. Context matters.
Environment matters. Other people, from time to time, matter. And all of them, in some
unpredictable way, play a huge role in whether or not your dinner was merely satisfactory or
worth recounting to friends. The problem with Dewey’s pragmatism, Bourne realized, was that
in its elevation of social efficacy over all else, it lost the joy of experience for experience’s sake,
instead favoring the safe yet the droll calculus of ends and means. At its best, pragmatism, as a
philosophy of adjustment, was exactly what was needed in a chaotic and uncertain world. It
could help one shift left or shimmy right, depending on the situation. But there was a real risk,
Bourne feared, that in dedicating itself too completely over to “mastery” of the world,
pragmatism would cease to be sufficiently experimental. It would stop being an impetus to
curiosity, a spark to wonder. It would cease to be a philosophy of possibilities, and instead, as
Bertrand Russell critiqued, become the philosophical equivalent to “a bricklayer transforming a
heap of bricks into a house.”58 Rational, utilitarian, but fundamentally unalive.
Pragmatism, to remain spiritually meaningful, needed a sense of elation, a sense of
poetry, to accompany experience; it needed a persistent feeling of jubilation in the new, the
unknown, the unexplored. And yes, sometimes the experiences would not be so pleasant: with
the new and the unknown also came anxiety, restlessness, confusion, and fear. But such things
were always already elements of human existence; such feelings were always going to happen.
The question then became: how much control could one have? How much subjectivity could one
muster against the numerous, fractious complications of modernity (this question especially is
58 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, A Touchstone Book (New York u.a: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 823.
45
important for Chapter Three)? Youth provided, if nothing else, a semi-scientific, partially
moderated base for these experiences. Because even while it was a corrective to pragmatic over-
rationalization, it remained constrained by reasonable considerations. Youth, in Bourne’s
thinking, would certainly encourage the novel and experimental, but not the reckless or
destructive. It would be the voice in one’s head encouraging one to take a swing dance class or
go to a burlesque show, not the impulse to shoot up a slug of heroin or play chicken with an
oncoming train. In a different essay written around the same time, he wrote of various “dangers,”
“which come to youth from family, business, church, society, state…they force him [the youth]
to perpetuate old errors, to keep alive dying customs, to breath new life into vicious prejudices,
to take his stand against the saving new. They kill his soul…”59 Bourne’s ideal of youth was one
directed towards a fullness of life, not self-destruction, and against such dangerous forces he
warned, “the youth’s only salvation lies, then, in dodging these pressures.”60 Such were not the
words written by one who would have seen a brazen and careless rush to the grave as
commendable.
“It is good to be reasonable, but too much rationality puts the soul at odds with life,”
Bourne warned.61 Life was unpredictable, and from time to time it was good to embrace that
because “life is not a campaign of battle, but a laboratory where its possibilities for the
enhancement of happiness and the realization of ideals are to be tested and observed.”62
Crucially, it was in such testing that youth was also perpetuated. The experimental life was a
rejuvenating one, and it was needed in a world that could be spiritually exhausting. Youth
59 Randolph Bourne, “The Dodging of Pressure,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 116. 60 Bourne, 117. 61 Bourne, “The Experimental Life,” 149. 62 Ibid., 151.
46
needed novelty and excitement, it needed to be regularly thrown into situations that would cause
one to declare that they “had never felt so alive!” You needed renewal because youth, though
powerful, was not infinite or invincible in Bourne’s view. Youth could atrophy, as Bourne saw in
those childhood friends who, in starting families and settling down, had given up their radicalism
and “somehow gotten ten years beyond [him] in day.”63 Or else, youth could be deceived by any
number of social pressures – family, religion, business, take your pick – and forced to
“perpetuate old errors, to keep alive dying customs, to breathe new life into old prejudices,
to…stand against the saving new.”64 In either case, the currents of energy that sustained youth
would seize up, freeze over, leaving the radical youth spiritually emptied. This was, by and large,
what the hegemonic forces in society wanted: it yearned to see the radical youth succumb to
conformity, or to be worn out and made exhausted. It wanted to take a person, as Bourne
described with poetic grace and, “kill his soul, and then use the carcass as a barricade against the
advancing hosts of light.”65 Fortunately, the radical youth had a powerful ally at their disposal:
all ideas and cultural possibilities came from people and so new cultural ideas would naturally be
found among those newly brought into a foreign society. From the late nineteenth to the early
twentieth century, America had increasingly become the global center of immigration, and thus
the center multicultural experience. More people, from different places, of different
backgrounds, were arriving day by day upon American shores than in any society at any point in
human history. For the most xenophobic Americans (in a grim display of the future present), this
became a call to arms, a rallying cry for violence and terrorism. For progressive thinkers, it was a
concern to be dealt with through the means of moderate, benevolent administration. And for
63 Bourne, “Youth,” 94. 64 Bourne, “The Dodging of Pressure,” 116. 65 Ibid.
47
Randolph Bourne, it was not a social problem but cultural possibility; this “trans-nationalism,” as
Bourne called it, was a cause of celebration and a font of inexhaustible cultural potential.
Trans-Nationalism
Of all Bourne’s essays, other than “The State,” which I discuss briefly in the conclusion
to this thesis, “Trans-National America” is probably the most widely featured in readers or edited
collections, and therefore the most familiar to readers. Unlike “Youth” and “The Life of Irony,”
which were written during a comparatively calm period of American history, “Trans-National
America” was written in a time of modernist upheaval. By 1916, World War I was already
devastating the European continent, and in America, though officially neutral, militarization was
in the air. America was already selling arms to the Allies and between the various atrocities
committed by the Central Powers and their non-democratic governments, it seemed obvious
which side America would be on if it were to join the fray. One problem was that there were a lot
of German Americans. In fact, there were a lot of Americans, only a generation or two removed
– if that – from all over the very continent now consumed by war. If America were to commit
itself to the Allied cause militarily, how would those people – whose very status as American
was not widely agreed upon – react? Which national interests would they align with? What
country would they be fighting for? Militarization is like a cough on a crowded train: it does not
matter how far from you it happens, it will still make you nervous and it can still end up infecting
you. It is both the fear of contagion and contagion itself. And the dying fields of Europe only
exacerbated a problem long simmering in the American psyche: what was to be done with the
surge of immigrants that had come to its shores in the past few decades? Could they even be
considered Americans to begin with?
48
Bourne realized this dilemma this upfront, opening “Trans-National America” with an
acknowledgement of the nation’s changing attitude toward immigration. He wrote that “No
reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than
the failure of our ‘melting-pot.’”66 The impact of the massive surge in immigration starting
around the 1880s had long been a major social question for America, and for a while many
hoped to see an eventual kind of assimilation among the immigrants – given enough time they
would become American enough. This simply was not happening, at least not reliably or quickly
enough, especially with the looming specter of war on the horizon. There were still proponents
of assimilationist theories, such as Jane Addams and other like-minded activists, but their voices
were being drowned out by the louder and louder Nativist demands that immigrant cultures be
suppressed or obliterated, often in the name of war preparedness. Bourne’s solution was to
reconceptualize “national identity” as a multiculturalist ideal of self-determination and as a new
source of national power. Or as he called it, “trans-nationalism.”
The scholarship on this topic is incredibly thorough. With a few exceptions, most who
write about Bourne end up writing about trans-nationalism. However, though it is usually
understood as the kind of prescient pro-multiculturalism part and parcel with his vision of
cultural idealism, it is less frequently seen as a natural partner of Bourne’s radical cultural
theory. Christopher Lasch, for example, despite authoring one of the definitive explorations of
Bourne’s radicalism, does not mention “trans-nationalism” at all, as if it existed in a separate
plane of Bourne’s thought. Lasch is hardly alone here – when reading about trans-nationalism
there is often the feeling of a kind of hard shift, as if Bourne dropped all of his other interests in
66 Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107.
49
order to focus exclusively on the most relevant problem at hand. This oversight, I believe, fails to
make clear that trans-nationalism was not just a prescient form of multicultural idealism, but a
natural and important development for his vision of American promise.
In some ways, I am building off of Christopher McKnight Nichols’s work on how
Bourne wanted to rethink the meaning of citizenship in modern America. He notes, “For Bourne,
ever the pragmatist, the transnational would be the conceptual locus where pragmatic evaluation
of means and ends helped shape the role the nation ought to take in the world and would redefine
commitments to citizenship at home.”67 Citizenship, like the previous discussed “youth,” needed
to be reconsidered self-consciously and pragmatically; the questions “what is this for and what
can it do?” needed to be asked. Nichols writes that Bourne saw that “The country needed a new
structure for citizenship and social relations to avoid violence.”68 The violence in question was
the rising threat of violent nativism. The prospect of war contributed greatly to this domestic
climate. President Wilson himself painted immigrants as potential enemies of the state, declaring
before Congress that the foreign born were “‘creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy,’ who,
he warned, must be ‘crushed out.’”69 This sentiment would only grow. Historian David M.
Kennedy elaborates, “That kind of rank nativism, tinged often with anti-radicalism, seeped
deeper and deeper into the American mind as the war progressed, carried by the current of a
newly fashioned phrase: ‘100 percent Americanism.’ The 100 percenters aimed to stamp out all
traces of Old World identity among immigrants.”70
67 Christopher McKnight Nichols, “Citizenship and Transnationalism in Randolph Bourne’s America,” Peace Review 20, no. 3 (September 2008): 355, https://doi.org/10.1080/10402650802330212. My emphasis. 68 Quoted from Nichols, 350. 69 Quoted from David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 65. 70 Kennedy, 65.
50
Bourne’s rethinking of the concept of citizenship – which fits neatly into my argument of
Bourne as pursuing a project of conceptual renewal – is, in Nichol’s view, one of the ways
Bourne hoped to prevent violence against immigrants by those who saw them as not truly
“American.” Nichols writes, “For the United States to fulfill its democratic promises, [Bourne]
said, the nation had to extend rights to all those we were owed them and to make demands of
citizens to build the nation up by embracing a federation of cultures within its citizenry and
across national boundaries.”
My argument is that Bourne did not just stop at citizenship, but interrogated the far
larger concepts of nationalism and national identity: because the concept of citizenship was a
socio-political one, an outward and public constituent of national identity, but not the same thing
as national identity in and of itself. For Bourne, citizenship concerned the two-way street
between an individual and the political rights bestowed by and obligations to the country; it was
an objective status that one either had or did not. But citizenship is not the same thing as national
identity: one can have the legal designation of citizenship in a country and all the rights that
entails, but have ambivalent or even negative feelings about the country all the same. For
Bourne, the inverse of this was true as well: one could be “American,” regardless of their legal
standing. Citizenship was an external designation; it was what happened to someone, as decided
by the socio-political institutions that existed outside of them. This was connected to Bourne’s
complaints about the melting-pot or any other kind of assimilationist thinking: “We act as if we
wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the
governed,” he wrote.71 Assimilation and all other versions of top-down Americanization were
71 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 108.
51
fundamentally misguided because they sought to determine one’s identity regardless of their
individual needs and wants. (Note that this mistrust of institutional authority over the
individual’s capacity for self-determination will appear again in Chapter Three, when I examine
Bourne’s attacks on cultural institutions that sought to assert the cultural control over taste).
For Bourne, national identity, unlike citizenship, was an internal, self-determined
understanding. It was how one understood their own place in their society, no matter what rights
they may have had or lacked. It was not about external, public validation, but one’s personal,
spiritual convictions. As such, one could be American regardless of their right to vote, or their
ability to speak English, or their desire to watch baseball while eating Cracker Jacks. All that
truly mattered was that viewed themselves as American. This conceptual shift in understanding
national identity was what Bourne was seeking in “Trans-National America” – a radical
reconception of what nationalism meant in and of itself. And for Bourne, this was a question
suited for radical cultural idealism, not utilitarian political organization.
Trans-Nationalism and Cultural Idealism
The essay “Trans-national America” was a foil to the popular proposals of how to either
assimilate or coerce immigrants into the “American” way of life. In it, he outlined a vision of
America that could fully embrace its multi-cultural potential, arguing that America should grab
hold of this promise. Not as the “melting-pot,” which tended to take immigrants and “sentence
them to live on the most rudimentary planes of American life,” but as a grand conversation in
which all participants were equal and their potential contributions to culture equally valuable.72
America should celebrate its multi-culturalism in lieu of some bland, broad ideal of general
Americanness, he believed. “America is a unique sociological fabric,” he wrote, “and it bespeaks
72 Bourne, 114.
52
poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of
men.” It was not in the sanding down of multicultural edges, but in their exultation that Bourne
found the true form of American potential. Christopher McKnight Nichols summarizes:
[Bourne] called for an alternative to those Americanization programs that sought
to homogenize the population and for the institution of a ‘trans-national’
America…For the United States to fulfill its democratic promises, he said, the
nation had to extend rights to all those we were owed them and to make demands
of citizens to build the nation up by embracing a federation of cultures within its
citizenry and across national boundaries.73
The latent promise of America, Bourne believed, was that “there is no distinctly
American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures.”74 Unlike any other
nation in the early twentieth century, America stood as an intersection of cultures and ideas that
need not obscure themselves in order to participate in the greater national experience. Trans-
nationalism was, in effect, the same source of potential as the Experimental Life brought to
fruition by youth, only where youth was an individual disposition, trans-nationalism was a
national one. And unlike other nations which devoted themselves to past notions of greatness,
America was fundamentally a forward-looking country. Bourne was writing just a year prior to
America’s entry into WWI; Europe was already well underway into the madness. The various
nations of Europe were rallying being the call of national greatness (France), or destiny
(Germany), or honor (Britain). It was not working out in their favor. Bourne’s vision of America,
however, eschewed such backward-looking identity in favor of future-oriented values. “As long
73 Nichols, “Citizenship and Transnationalism in Randolph Bourne’s America,” 350. 74 Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 115.
53
as we thought of Americanism in terms of the ‘melting-pot,’” he wrote, “our American cultural
tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the Americans were to be moulded.” But, he
continued, “In light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetuate the paradox that
our American cultural tradition lies in the future.”75 That future held unspeakable potential and it
belonged to the younger generations. America’s trans-national makeup meant that it could serve
as a site for previously unseen collisions of cultures and ideas, which – if guided by pragmatism,
as I will argue in the next chapter, irony – would result in a discourse productive of modern
cultural modes and values. Pragmatism would evaluate the terms of culture, youth would provide
the vivacious open-mindedness for approaching new ideas, and irony would keep the discourse
fair and in good faith.
But there are a couple complications with terminology that need to be settled. Most
people who write about Bourne tend to use the terms “multiculturalism,” “cultural pluralism,”
and “cosmopolitanism” as interchangeable with “trans-nationalism.” And to be fair, I have used
the term “multiculturalism” many times above. This happens 1) for the sake of terminological
diversity and 2) to clearly identify “trans-nationalism” – a phrase which seems to have lived and
died with Bourne – with the terms in common usage today. Bourne, however, never used the
term “multiculturalism,” nor did he use “cultural pluralism.” He could not have, as they simply
did not exist at the time.
“Cosmopolitan” did. And Bourne used it quite a bit, including throughout “Trans-
National America” and “The Jew and Trans-National America.” So why did he feel the need to
create a new term, one which “cosmopolitan” supervened upon? The simple answer, I believe, is
that “cosmopolitan” as a concept, robust as it was in Bourne’s time, simply did not have the
75 Bourne, 115.
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connotation he was after – “cosmopolitan” described a degree of cultural diversity, but did not
counter the nativist associations the term “nationalism” had – and Bourne’s goal was very much
to counter, to redeem “nationalism” from anti-diversity sentiment.
Recalling “youth,” Bourne took the concept and broadened its intellectual and spiritual
meaning. Instead of being a denotation of age, “youth” became a kind of spiritual ethos, a
worldview that embraced the new and the creative, it was the impulse towards the “experimental
life.” Similarly, as I will argue in the next chapter, he expanded “irony” from the rhetorical mode
of “not meaning exactly what you say” into a discursive disposition that enabled empathy, good
faith, open-mindedness, and democratic social life. He was taking the same approach with the
concept of “nationalism,” and trying to make it clear that his idea of trans-nationalism was not
the same as “cosmopolitan,” and by extension was not synonymous with “multiculturalism” or
“cultural pluralism” either. Those three terms are descriptive. “Trans-nationalism,” on the other
hand, was also prescriptive. It was an idealized replacement for nationalism a way of saving it
from being a bastion term for some of the least democratic forces in American life.
Saving it meant reclaiming it from those who would use it for purposes of cultural
regression or oppression, “against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself ‘patriotism’ and
the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself ‘preparedness,’ he wrote.76 In Bourne’s time, as
today, the call for nationalism was almost exclusively deployed by those who wanted to restrict
or eliminate immigration, have forced assimilation, or deportation of immigrants, all for the sake
of protecting a perceived cultural purity. In this way, Bourne’s trans-nationalism was both
prescriptive and descriptive: it did not just outline his pluralistic idealism, but it also tried to
make a point that American nationalism was always already a trans-nationalism, despite the
76 Bourne, 119.
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dominance of Anglo-Saxonness obscuring this fact. Bourne was pragmatically trying to take the
term “nationalism” away from its reactionary base, and instead position it as a much more
inclusive principle behind the foundational American idealism. Bourne seemed to understand
that if the debate was framed as between “nationalism” and “pluralism” then the latter would
always be assumed to be the invader or the “unauthentic.” It is a tragically natural pitfall of
rhetoric. Because it assumes that the “nationalists” are somehow grounded in their stance that
there is an absolute idea of pure “Americanness” that “outsiders” or cultural enemies are pushing
against or trying to change. Instead, Bourne wanted to shift the entire grounds of the
conversation, to flip the proverbial board. Instead of the “nationalists” being the avatars of “real”
American tradition and society, they would suddenly be on the outside: nationalism was never
about Anglo-Saxonness-cum-Americanness, but always and already a trans-national foundation.
Reactionary nationalism was a farce because it was based on faulty assumptions: “nationalism”
could never refer to anything like “pure” ethnic stock and “rightful” ownership of American
culture was a myopic fallacy because there were never such cultural foundations to begin with.
There were only immigrants, a great number of whom clung to a version of Anglo-Saxon
identity. To repeat his oft-quoted line: “We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-
born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be of some other grounds
than indigenousness.”77 America could not have “nationalism” because it had never had the
foundations such a singular, monolithic understanding to begin with. The story of America was
not one of Anglo-American colonial independence. No, it was the story of immigrants and what
they could make of themselves. There could be no mere “nationalism” in America because the
soul of the country had always been “trans-national.” “Americanness,” was then not a question
77 Bourne, 109.
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of where someone was from, but where they saw themselves in the moment of identifying their
national identity.
Bourne wanted Americanness to be self-reflexively reconsidered. It needed to be, if
American promise was going to be achieved. He wrote:
It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation
of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has
been broad or narrow – whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher
ideal than the ‘melting-pot.’ Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy
when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and
democratic institutions, we fly into a panic at the first sign of their own will and
tendency.78
And it wasn’t solely a matter of American promise, but of social stability – a concern of
Bourne’s that will come again later in the next chapter. Now, bringing up the necessity of social
stability might seem weird given the topic of cultural radicalism, but remember, Bourne was not
a revolutionary – he did not want to see a violent overthrow of the social order, but a spiritually
aligned reimagining. Racial tensions were on the rise, after all, which meant American society
was increasingly becoming a powder keg of potential catastrophe. Nichols notes that Bourne
“saw the rising nationalism in Europe and saw a similar path for American nationalism or
nativism,” and considering the trench lines that stretched across Europe like knife wounds on a
victim from a slasher film, Bourne very much wanted to avoid this fate. Nichols explains that
“Instead, America should embrace its trans-nationalism by striving to be a more tolerant and
inclusive society. This would additionally provide a new social framework that would lessen the
78 Bourne, 108.
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potential for violence.”79 For Bourne, thus, trans-nationalism wasn’t just for the sake of
democratic idealism, but a matter of the very foundations of social cohesion. Which meant that
trans-nationalism had a lot of heavy lifting to do; it had to solve a lot of problems. And this was a
problem in and of itself, because there were no rules, no guidelines, and no examples to look at.
And so, another reason why Bourne’s trans-nationalism was a radical cultural ideal: the
American Experiment was, to Bourne, something entirely new among nations and as such
needed to be described in a suitably novel way. America could be different. The soul of
American idealism was inclusion and equality. And the promise of American culture was not to
be a colonial evolution of whomever had gotten there first, but a new one, emergent from the
diversity of all peoples that called America home. Because of this, Bourne believed, America
was never about the consolidation of the past, but the promises of what could be. “We must
perpetuate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lie in the future. It will be what we all
together make out of this incompatible opportunity of attacking the future with a new key,” he
wrote.80 Being shackled to the past or the colonial, Anglo-Saxon memory of identity was a
millstone around the neck of cultural progress. This was not an abstract metaphor for Bourne, but
something he saw happening below the Mason-Dixon line. “The South, in fact, while this vast
Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent,
having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era,” he wrote, “It is culturally
sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states.”81 The
79 Christopher McKnight Nichols, “Rethinking Randolph Bourne’s Trans-National America: How World War I Created an Isolationist Antiwar Pluralism,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8, no. 2 (2009): 219, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781400001158. 80 Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 115. 81 Bourne, 112.
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Northern states had greatly benefited from being cosmopolitan centers, as various immigrant
cultures rubbed against each other and the vestiges of Anglo-Saxonism.
Similar effects were also apparent in the Midwest: “What has happened in such states as
Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures haves stuck root in a new and fertile
soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social
energies have expanded to a new potency,” Bourne observed.82 If culture and social life was
more dynamic or exciting in Northern or Midwestern states compared to Southern ones, it was
only because they were able to embrace a degree of cultural fluidity between their various
populations. They were liberated from the empty weight of the past and in the process of forging
new cultural forms. They were not doing so fast enough or thoroughly enough for Bourne’s
liking – if they had, then there would have been little point in him writing the essay – but they
were at least modestly staking out what was possible. The South, deprived of such
cosmopolitanism, displayed no such promise. And for this reason, it stood as a kind of canary in
the coal mine: American culture, in Bourne’s imagination, could either embrace its multicultural
potential and as such produce a culture literally impossible anywhere else in the world, or it
could recede into the malignant safety of its Anglo-Saxon origins and end up being nothing more
than a footnote in the annals of unfulfilled human potential. “We have needed the new
peoples…to save us from our own stagnation,” he wrote.83 This concern of stagnation was a
persistent worry (see: Chapter Three). In the same way that youth needed a vast reservoir of new
experiences to achieve its radical ends, so too did the national promise require a vast reservoir of
new cultural ideas if it were to truly capitalize on its potential. And in the same way that an
82 Bourne, 112. 83 Bourne, 109.
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individual, through the ideal of youth, was bettered by the open-minded embrace of new
experiences, so too would the nation be bettered by its embrace of the multicultural possibilities
already within its shores.
The new cultural possibilities brought to American shores in the hearts and minds of
immigrants were part of a continuing discourse over what shape America could become, and
what new things it could produce. So long as American culture could accept this field of endless
human possibilities, the one thing that would be certain about American culture was that it would
never be stagnant. “Whatever American nationalism turns out to be,” Bourne wrote
optimistically, “we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal
has hitherto encompassed.”84 Of course, whether the nation would be worthy of such optimism
remained an unanswered question.
Conclusion
Biographer Bruce Clayton notes that, “[Bourne’s] idealism did not blind him to evil. Yet
his awareness of evil did not blind him to the possibility of good.”85 And Bourne was
exceptionally aware of evil. “Evil seems to be out of all proportion to the ability of its sufferers
to bear it,” he wrote in “The Adventure of Life,” “or of its chastening and corrective efficacy.”86
In fact, he thought that America in the early twentieth century was, perhaps, more in danger of it
than ever before, writing, “Our forefathers were more fortunate, and could contemplate evil more
philosophically and objectively. Their experience was happily limited to what the normal soul
could endure. Their evil was confined to their vicinity… Perhaps it was because they were more
84 Bourne, 117. 85 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 85. 86 Randolph Bourne, “For Radicals,” in Youth and Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 157.
60
concerned with personal sin than with objective evil.”87 Fortunately, coming to the rescue – or
maybe given that the topic was evil, salvation – was the younger generation. They understood
that the problem was “Not how evil came into the world, but how we are going to get it out.”88
They were also uniquely qualified to confront it:
But the youth of this modern generation are coming more and more to see that the
gloom and hysteria of this restless age, with all the other seemingly neurotic
symptoms of decay, are simply growing-pains. They signify a better spiritual health
that is to be. The soul is now learning to adjust itself to the new conditions, to
embrace the wide world that is its heritage, and not to reel and stagger before the
assaults of a malign power. Life will always be fraught with real peril, but it is peril
which gives us the sense of adventure. And as we gain in our command over the
resources, both material and spiritual, of the world, we shall see the adventure as
not so much the peril of evil as an opportunity of permanent achievement.89
The youth had the proper philosophy – pragmatism – to do so, through which “we shall find then
that we had no need of despair. We were on the right track… Not less science but more science
do we need in order that we may more and more get into our control the forces and properties of
nature, and guide them for our benefit.”90 Evil, even if it could not be extinguished, could be
accounted for and thus countered. It could be kept at bay, so long as the principles of pragmatism
87 Randolph Bourne, “The Adventure of Life,” in Youth and Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 159. One of Bourne’s best talents was his ability to punch back twofold at the older generations who grouched about the younger ones. 88 Bourne, 167. 89 Bourne, 160–61. 90 Bourne, 167.
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and ironic temperament remained at work. If Bourne’s vision was ultimately a utopian one then
it should hardly be a surprise; he was, before the war at least, and idealistic, radical thinker; and
utopia is the natural end for all such minds.
For Bourne, pragmatism, youth, and trans-nationalism were the ideals that together
enabled a kind of cultural radicalism. But not a revolutionary or militant radicalism. Nor a
political one. Those were the loci where the battle was to be fought. It was a radicalism in
culture, in ideas. And it was not one that needed militias or even organized movements. Instead,
it was radicalism seen as a force, something that had come to be through the vicissitudes of
history, economy, philosophy, technology. It was a force like gravity, pulling culture and society
toward itself. The young radicals – those that embraced a course of open-minded inquiry, a life
of adventure and ebullience, and an approach of creative sympathy – would move past the even
horizon of the force, allowing its pull to become even stronger. Sometimes, with gravity, all you
have to do is wait. “Towards himself,” Bourne wrote of the radical, “he finds gravitating the sort
of people that he would find in a regenerated social order.”91 The pull, once felt, no matter how
slight, will eventually be enough. And it will be irresistible to those that understand its beauty.
“In his camp,” Bourne continued, “he finds all those writers and leaders who sway men's minds
to-day and make their life, all unconscious as they are of the revolutionary character of the
message, more rich and dynamic.”92 Once the radical foundations of cultural idealism were
established, a whole new field of social possibilities opened up not only to the radical, but would
spill out into the world around them. “Let the social faith be in a youth, and it will leak out in
every activity of his life, it will permeate his words and color his deeds,” he wrote, “The belief
91 Bourne, “For Radicals,” 309. 92 Bourne, 309.
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and the vision are the essentials; these given, there is little need for him to worry how he may
count in society. He will count in spite of himself.”93
To “count in the world.” In Bourne’s lexicon there was almost no higher compliment. It
was the namesake of the ironist and of the radical.94 Not in the sense that it made them superior
or more morally valuable to their neighbors, but in the way it made someone more culturally
efficacious or influential. Someone who “counted” achieved such because they were part of the
radical mass that pulled culture – and thus society – to a better and more proper place; to utopia.
Utopia is a strange concept to talk about today. At least I think so. Because what could it
possibly describe? What is a “perfect” world, after all, when we are so far away from even a
“good” one? Then again, do we have the right to evaluate the idealism of the past from the
cynicism of the present? I think it is important to understand that Randolph Bourne saw the
promise of utopia in his own time – both for us to better understand Bourne and to better deal
with where we are now. It is important to study his failed dreams because in the ashes of those
failures we might come to find some better understanding of the trash fire of the present. Bourne
saw, at the fin-de-siècle, the fractures and fissures and frictions of modernity the potential for a
new American promise. All of the foundations of social life were irrevocably upended – there
was no turning back from factories, bureaucracies, specialization and marginalization. Those
disruptions, in turn, provided the idealistic platforms of pragmatism, youth, and trans-
nationalism – which together could create a force of cultural radicalism with the potential to
remake American society, and perhaps the world. Not in the fast or violent way of revolution –
there was no need for manifestos, the storming of forts, guillotines, or even the overthrow of
93 Bourne, 301. 94 See: Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 364; "The ironist is a person who counts in the world.".
63
governments. Simply the energy, the gravity would be enough. In the distance – slowly, though
steadily approached – was that event horizon, after which everything would be pulled into
something different, better.
Then again, such pronouncements are premature, because there is another element of
Bourne’s thought that has yet to be properly examined: an element that had equal importance to
youth and trans-nationalism in Bourne’s radical cultural idealism – irony. Pragmatism may have
been Bourne’s intellectual foundation, but irony was his primary way of expressing his idealism.
In the following chapter, I hope to examine his concept – pragmatically, radically reconceived –
of irony, and show why it is so crucial to understanding his cultural idealism. In a sense, it is
hard to pinpoint where to draw the line between this idealism and irony: what, after all, is the
difference between gravity and the laws that describe it? Irony, for Bourne, was a way of life, in
and of itself. And it was, in his mind, an essential disposition for the practice of democracy in a
complicated, modern world.
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CHAPTER TWO: IRONY
The argument I make in this chapter is that Randolph Bourne’s version of irony is
absolutely central to his cultural idealism. In the previous chapter, I examined how – from the
foundation of a radical understanding of pragmatism – he reimagined the cultural concepts of
“youth” and national identity as key elements in his project of making a cultural radicalism that
could confront the complexities of American social life as the country entered into modernity.
But where “youth” and “trans-nationalism” were products of pragmatism, made possible by the
philosophy’s challenge to established epistemology, irony, in his thinking, was something of a
different creature. In much the same way he reimagined those former concepts to fit his
particular cultural idealism, irony was to be a tertiary feature. Then again, irony, in my view, was
something far more fundamental – not exactly an intellectual possibility made such by
pragmatism, but a necessary partner to it; the two were connected irrevocably, two sides of the
same radically idealist coin. Irony, in my argument, was Bourne’s way of directing pragmatism,
as John Dewey wanted, “for dealing with the problems of men.”95 Dewey may have been vague
on exactly the kind of problems he was thinking of; Bourne was not. Bourne was thinking
explicitly about the types of social problems that arose from living in a diverse, complex, modern
democratic society. In this way, irony, for Bourne, was both an element of pragmatism, as well
as a means to repair its deficits; the two were not identical, but neither were they entirely
independent in his thinking.
In the introduction to this thesis, I brought up one of the rare noteworthy college
commencement speeches, “This is Water,” delivered by David Foster Wallace to Kenyon
College in 2005. While being widely celebrated, Wallace’s speech did not say anything Bourne
95 Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 7.
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hadn’t already a century earlier.96 But it remains a helpful signpost: Bourne, as Wallace proposed
much later, envisioned a social ideal based on morally imaginative – or in Bournean terms,
“spiritual” – empathy: the everyday, intentional practice of attempting to understand the
experience of others, embodying that experience to the best of one’s ability, and from that
position of imagined insight adjusting one’s social perspectives, beliefs, and behaviors.
Matthew Stratton provides an equally useful, if more academic, definition, writing that
Bourne expanded irony:
to subsume an essentially discursive practice among acquaintances and friends,
conducted with the express aim of expanding sociality, gaining new viewpoints on
the world and formulating new approaches to the truth, and trusting that the moral
category of the ‘good’ will emerge from such interactive inquiry.97
This was the heart of Bourne’s irony – inquiry, understanding, empathy – and why I am arguing
it is so essential to understanding his cultural idealism. In fact, I argue that irony was his means
of producing not just a vision of cultural idealism, but the way to establish a foundation for a
modern, authentic practice of democracy.
As far as the scholarship on Bourne goes, focusing on irony is an unconventional – or at
least uncommon – approach to take. Irony is completely absent from Christopher Lasch’s
discussion of Bourne’s role in the history of twentieth-century radicalism. Michael Walzer,
meanwhile, sums irony up as merely, Bourne’s “own name for critical-mindedness,”98 which
96 Has there ever been another commencement speech published for popular consumption, other than the 1997 Baz Luhrmann music video, “Wear Sunscreen,” which doesn’t actually count as the speech has long been misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut? That speech, by the way, was written by Mary Schmich, a Chicago Times columnist. 97 Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, 26. 98 Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 47.
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comes off as something of a dismissal, particularly as Walzer never mentions it again. I believe
that the overlooking/dismissal of irony elides a crucial element of Bourne’s radical idealism.
Part of the reason, I imagine, for the absence of irony in the work of these scholars is
because in the main essay in which Bourne wrote about it – a 1913 piece published in the
Atlantic, titled “The Life of Irony” – there is some obscurity as to what he meant by the word in
the first place. In that essay he defined irony numerous times, the first (and most mellifluous)
being:
this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this
sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of cosmic juxtapositions, of flaring
brilliances, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s
world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by
being translated into and defined in each other’s terms…99
Needless to say, this is a lot to digest. Even at the time of publication this was an issue. Bruce
Clayton notes that Ellery Sedgwick, the then-editor of the magazine, liked the piece “despite its
unremitting abstractness.” Sedgwick felt that, “The essay’s ‘lack of background’ was a serious
weakness, and it had a vagueness that resulted from a failure to define the irony precisely or use
it in one consistent way.”100 Yet, despite these notable flaws, he realized that the “piece was so
often illuminating and so highly suggestive that…it belonged in the Atlantic.”101 As an aside,
Clayton himself seems to agree with Sedgwick’s criticisms, writing, “The essay seems to be an
exercise in convoluted thought. Perhaps its only significance is its revelation that irony had
become existentially quite meaningful to Bourne.” It is precisely that revelation – irony being
99 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 134. 100 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 60. 101 Clayton, 60.
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“existentially meaningful” – that I intend to explore here. Because it wasn’t just existentially
meaningful, in my view, but absolutely necessary for Bourne’s idealism.
Not helping this project, however, is the fact that despite its centrality to his thinking, his
writing on irony is probably among his most convoluted. Not in the sense that it lacked poetry or
verve or passion – all of those elements were just as much present for this topic as any other he
wrote about – but in the sense that, at least in my opinion, it was so crucial to his vision of
modern American potential that it ended up being bloated, over-belabored, and thus too big and
unwieldly to consolidate into one essay: all you have to do is look at that block quote just above
to get at least the gist that Bourne’s ideal of irony was not the wieldiest of creatures. Sedgwick
was not totally wrong in his criticism: as written in the essay, did sometimes lack preciseness and
consistency. But only because irony was meant to do so much in Bourne’s imagination.
In light of that, here is my understanding of his concept of irony and what I am hoping to
establish by the end of this chapter: irony, for Bourne, was a furnace of socio-philosophical
combustion, a conceptual, benevolent space wherein the fission between differing or opposing
ideas, beliefs, and experiences, would come ignite, and in turn produce new socio-intellectual
possibilities, all of which embraced and expressed the possibilities of “youth” and “trans-
nationalism”; in this way, irony would be well-suited to meet the problems of modern American
society; and yet it was ultimately prior to either of those terms, as it was not a product of
pragmatism but a form of it acting in the world. Where pragmatism denied epistemic capital-T
Truth in favor of the truth of utility, irony sought to challenge closed, subjective certainty in
order to extend human understanding and compassion humanistically outwards towards one’s
neighbors. Along those lines, first, I will examine how Bourne’s ideal irony was pulled from the
broader history of the concept itself, and subsequently reshaped it to a modern functionality.
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Next, I will explore how the way he wrote about irony – which was as a manifesto – helps us
understand what he wanted out of the concept. Then, I will attempt to show that, despite the
flawed way he wrote about it, irony was a central component to his cultural radicalism as the
foundation for an idealistic vision of American democracy – not as politics but as the far more
essential foundation of society in the first place.
The Origins of Bourne’s Irony
Irony can be tricky to talk about because, in the same way Louis Menand earlier argued
that there is no pragmatism, but pragmatisms, there are several – equally valid and oft-used –
ways to understand it. Irony is what lexicographer and American English usage expert, Bryan
Garner, would consider to be a “skunked term”, which he defines as “When a word undergoes a
marked change from one use to another – a phase that might take ten years or a hundred – it is
likely to be the subject of some dispute.”102
Irony has had many faces since it first came into existence roughly 2500 years ago. But
generally speaking, it is usually regarded as the disjunction between what seems to be the case
and what actually is; or else in the more common usage today, a difference between what is said
or done and what is meant by the antecedent statement or action. The weft of such a linguistic,
epistemic, and rhetorical device has a wide range of permutations in its history, to which Claire
Colebrook’s book, Irony, provides a splendid and succinct reference that I draw on quite a bit.
Considering the shape of modern irony, there is a further complication: literary historian
Paul Fussell argues that “there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that
is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the
102 Bryan A. Garner and Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage, 2nd ed. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 728.
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events of the Great War.”103 Randolph Bourne’s irony, written about in 1913, clearly predated
WWI and its legacy, if only by a couple of years. Thus, his irony cannot be the kind of modern
irony that Fussell writes about. “But what to make,” asks Matthew Stratton, “of those years
before ‘everything’ putatively shattered into fragmented, disillusioned chaos”?104 This is where, I
believe, Bourne’s irony stands on its own as a separate kind of modern irony – equally deserving
of the name, though quite different in its shape and purpose.
At its heart, Bourne’s irony was an adaptation of the Classical, Socratic irony, which was
a discursive method for interrogating ideas and beliefs. As Colebrook puts it, “Either Socrates
uses irony to bring his interlocutors to ethical knowledge, or he uses irony to show that the
knowledge they thought they had was not so certain.”105 It is important to acknowledge that
Socratic irony had two distinct functions: it could be destructive – in the sense that it “[showed]
that it is always possible that what we take to be the self-evident sense of a context or culture is
far from obvious,”106 thus eliminating the epistemological presence of a formerly assumed
“given” in knowledge; or it could be creative, by leading the interlocutor to the definition of
whatever concept that obtained in the world. Justice, to again use that as an example, cannot be
X because of 1, 2, and 3, therefore it can only be Y. But underpinning this destructive/creative
binary is a commonality of distance: there is a gap created between what the interlocutor
believed before and after the conversation, as well as an erasure between what the interlocutor
held as true and what is actually true.
103 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25. Anniversary ed (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 35. 104 Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, 23. 105 Claire Colebrook, Irony, The New Critical Idiom (London ; New York: Routledge, 2004), 21. 106 Colebrook, 2.
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Bourne’s irony drew upon the essentials of this method as a discursive mode between
fellows in a society, but instead of creating distance, this form of irony was meant to manipulate
it or to collapse it. Rather than a binary winner-take-all endgame of “knowledge,” Bourne’s irony
was meant to foster a middle ground of mutual understanding, wherein each party would walk
away with a better understanding of each other. From a pragmatic standpoint, there could not be
any absolute resolution to what was “true,” and as such any immutable standard of “knowledge”
wasn’t possible. “Socrates made one mistake,” Bourne wrote, “knowledge is not goodness….
good judgment is the true goodness. For it is on judgment impelled by desire that we act. The
clearer and cleaner our judgments then, the more definite and correlated our actions.”107 Irony,
Bourne believed, was a pragmatic way, not for consolidating knowledge, but for honing the
means by which people could act rationally and spiritually. Irony was not meant for questioning
standard axioms of epistemology, but evaluating social values as a baseline of social judgment.
Bourne also drew from the Romantic understanding of irony as well in his creation of his
version. To refer again to Colebrook:
Romantic irony, broadly defined, regards irony as something like a human
condition or predicament…it is precisely because we are human and capable of
speaking, creating and engaging with others that human life has no fixed nature
…human life, as Bildung [culture and creation] is essentially capable of being other
than any fixed essence. This is why human life is ironic.108
107 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 135. 108 Colebrook, Irony, 47. Original emphasis.
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Romantic irony spoke to Bourne as confronting the modern contradiction between possibility and
objectivity (here meaning “the quality of being a stable object in the world,” and not “a position
of absolute or certain perspective on the truth of the world”). As Marshall Berman writes of
modernism, “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promise us adventure,
power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that
threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”109 Human
imagination was virtually boundless, yet any attempt to express its creativity inevitably objectified
it into a stable entity – a transfiguration that is contradictory to the very boundlessness of human
essence in the first place. Any affirmative statement of what “is” is always already an implicit
declaration of what “is not.” “For any idea we have of our selves or our world,” Colebrook writes
of the Romantic’s realization, “will be part of a process of creation and destruction that we can
neither delimit nor control.”110
Bourne understood that this oscillation between potential and destruction was inevitable –
in fact, he embraced it as I argued in the previous chapter, as the new possibilities of “youth” could
destroy the staid, generational view of social existence, or the way in which “trans-nationalism”
grasped the new possibilities of national identity to replace a detrimental understanding of
“nationalism.” But he believed this contradiction could be controlled. Pragmatism, after all, while
it destroyed “truth,” did not leave in its wake nihilism, but instead a new field of philosophical
understanding; universal “truth” may have been obliterated, but what was created was a far more
useful and meaningful understanding of “truth in/as action.”
109 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 30. pr (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 15. 110 Colebrook, Irony, 49.
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Irony, with its core essence of being “is but is not,” “said but not intended,” “potential
and destruction,” would seem to be only ever a form of distance between ideas, people,
intentions, or desires. This was what Fussell saw as borne from the wreckage of WWI – a world
in which trying to say anything meaningful at all was a fruitless endeavor, as the world had
clearly killed that human capacity on the blood-stained fields of Europe. And it is hardly a
revelation to see this bleakly ironic disposition at work in the years following the war. Bourne,
however, sought to reimagine irony in a way that was hopeful, in a way that was creative not just
aesthetically but existentially. But what Bourne realized was irony needed not be a thing that
pushed the experiences of people further apart, but could instead be the way by which people
could brought closer together – either as the good faith partners in a discourse, or as figures cast
into the complicated skein of modernity, equally unaccustomed to the chaos it brought about. He
did this not by disregarding the history of irony, but by from that history creating a concept that
could speak to the issues and needs he saw in his own time – a move which, while not common
in the early twentieth century, would become standard in the Theory-steeped world of the latter
half of the century. The conceptual tools were all present, so to speak; it only took a different
kind of craftsman to use them for a different purpose.
Bourne borrowed from the Socratically discursive origin of irony and embraced the
existential domain of its Romantic permutation. In this, I argue, we can see Bourne working
within the modern intellectual landscape – irony as a mode of pragmatism – as well as his
realization that irony would have to be adapted to solve distinctly American problems, especially
those of social empathy and the transvaluation of social values. Because, as I will argue later in
this chapter, pragmatism, as laid out by William James and John Dewey, being a method to add
the philosophical weight of reason to everyday decision making, failed to properly consider the
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human element that always existed beyond the promise of pure reason. This deficit is best
encapsulated by Louis Menand, who writes:
Turn-of-the-century pragmatism does have two large deficiencies as a school of
thought. One is that it takes interests for granted; it doesn’t provide for a way of
judging whether they are worth pursuing apart from the consequences of acting on
them…The second deficiency is…that wants and beliefs can lead people to act in
ways that are distinctly unpragmatic. There is a sense in which history is lit by the
deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of
adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person
would be willing to die for one.111
Bourne’s ideal of irony, I contend, was decidedly meant to meet this flaw – not just why
certain ideas mattered, but how any idea could come to matter in the first place. But in
order to grasp how irony was designed for this task, it is, I argue, essential to have a solid
understanding of how Bourne approached the subject to begin with.
In the introduction of this chapter, I remarked that Randolph Bourne’s concept of irony
has not been regarded as clear, or even coherent, both in his own time and in contemporary
evaluations. It was “an exercise in convoluted thought,” to repeat Bruce Clayton’s estimation. So
then, one must resolve whether Bourne’s irony was incoherent as a concept in and of itself or
the way he wrote about it lacked clarity, but the concept was fundamentally solid. Given that I’ve
just concluded a section outlining how Bourne’s irony fitted into the history of the idea, as well
as its potential as an alternative vision of a modern sort of irony, it should be obvious where my
sympathies lie. That being said, I think it is true that irony, as laid out in “The Life of Irony,”
111 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 375.
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does not rank as among the most lucid or easy to follow, as far as Bourne’s ouvre goes. Clayton,
despite his calling out of Bourne for his diaphanous handling of irony also notes that, “He did
tend to shout ‘eureka’ at every exciting idea his imagination touched upon.”112 And if there was
ever such a cut-and-dried “eureka” moment for Bourne, it was in this singular essay on irony.
“The Life of Irony,” regardless of its convolutedness, is an outlier among Bourne’s
essays. I will again look to Clayton, who observes, “The point of view is omniscient instead of
personal – as is the case in Bourne’s best writing.”113 As a cultural critic and essayist, Bourne
usually adopted either a first-person voice, the editorial “we,” or through an autobiographical
avatar – in some of his anti-war essays this took the presence of a conflicted “friend” in the face
of military service; or, as I will discuss in the following chapter, the persona of “Miro,” a
likewise conflicted character, only not about the war but the state of American literary culture.
Writing through an omniscient voice, “The Life of Irony” was far more declarative in
form than his other essays; instead of it being his opinions and his arguments for such, it read as
a series of brute-fact statements of how things were or how they ought to be. Thus, when reading
“The Life of Irony,” I see it as not being an essay, but rather a manifesto: a manifesto of irony.
In the modernist era of the early twentieth century, the manifesto was a fairly common
method of expressing a certain worldview or idealism. As art philosopher and critic Arthur C.
Danto describes them:
The manifesto defines a certain kind of movement, and a certain kind of style,
which the manifesto more or less proclaims as the only kind of art that matters…
Each of the movements was driven by a perception of the philosophical truth of art:
112 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 77. 113 Clayton, 61.
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that art is essentially X and that everything other than X is not – or is not essentially
– art.114
Though Danto was focused on the “artworld” – the discrete field of art production, criticism, and
philosophy – I find his thinking to be useful when trying to make sense of modernism in
general. When he writes, “Modernism, overall, was the Age of Manifestos,” I build upon that
understanding of modernism to a far broader application than merely talking about paintings and
such.115 Because a feature of modernism, as I see it, was a contradiction between a newly
confident understanding of the world, as well as a tacit uncertainty lurking behind it. A modern
artist could, through a manifesto perhaps, declare with the weight of modernism behind her that
“art is essentially X,” but the very fact that she had to make such a statement implied that art was
not obviously X to begin with. Manifestos, in many ways, were the zenith of modernist
declaration: they were founded upon an essentialist approach to certain concepts – “art as X” –
but it also put those proclaimed essences into a public discourse – a discourse that, of course,
could challenge their very status as essentialist. As such, manifestos were an admixture of
philosophy, prescriptive declaration – whether it be in the realm of arts, politics, society, etc. –
and organizational decree. They collapsed the “is” of ontology and the “ought” of a specific
socio-cultural-aesthetic vision into a discrete, formalized statement. The, arguably, most
infamous example of a manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto,
did this by importing historical materialism and class dynamics into a Hegelian narrative of
historic materialist understanding, coupled with a distinct ideal of where society had to end up.
114 Arthur C. Danto and Lydia Goehr, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, First Princeton classics edition, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1995 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 28. 115 Danto and Goehr, 29.
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Artistic manifestos, such as lobster-gloved poet Hugo Ball’s Dadaist Manifesto, or Albert
Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Cubist Manifesto (“Du Cubisme”), defined what art was by
declaring what it ought or had to be in order for art to be meaningful at all in the world.
As far as I can tell, I am the only Bourne scholar to think about “The Life of Irony” as a
manifesto. But, given that Bourne was a modernist in so many ways (again, part of my larger
argument that, though a modernist, he also acts as a bridge to contemporary forms of cultural
criticism), I find that reading “The Life of Irony” as a manifesto of sorts, is productive in
understanding what he wanted to accomplish with the essay: namely that irony was so important
to Bourne’s cultural idealism that it had to be treated with objectivity. Irony had to be understood
“as X” in order for it to function both as a companion to pragmatism and as a necessary element
for modern American democracy.
Of course, there is an immediate problematic with this reading, at least insofar as I have
laid out Bourne’s thinking thus far in this thesis: in the previous chapter, I argued that one of the
positive qualities of pragmatism, for Bourne, was its natural inoculation against ideological
thinking – all forms of absolute certainty, if epistemic “truth” were dethroned, would naturally
evaporate. But manifestos were, by their nature, grand statements about the “is or the ought to
be” regarding their subject matter, and thus seemingly, inescapably, ideological.
But then again, as I argued above with Bourne’s historical etiology of irony, he drew
primarily from the Socratic and Romantic permutations: the former being socially discursive in
practice; and the latter being located in friction between human potential cast against the cosmos.
What mattered to Bourne, as I read him, was the human experience over anything else. The
world, for Bourne, in a break from Fussell, was not ironic in and of itself – it could only be ironic
in the way it was understood and approached. God or the universe or whatever could very well
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be indifferent, or even cruel, but it was in how those living in a community of fellows conducted
their lives in the face of such indifference that truly mattered. And irony, for Bourne, was the
means through which such a life could be possible at all.
For Bourne, irony was the singular, essentially interpersonal discursive-unto-empathetic
social modality that alone could create a foundation for a modern American democratic society.
Not a political system, but a culture upon which such a politics would be given the possibility to
authentically exist in the first place. Because in a nation composed of so many people – one of
the topics of the previous chapter – people of so many differentiated backgrounds, beliefs, wants,
and desires, the only way to survive as a cohesive whole would require an idealism that could
bridge that myriad of differences. E Pluribus Unum, reads the lines across our paper money. But,
pragmatically speaking, that kind of statement was meaningless unless it had, well, cash value,
though not in the monetary sense. In the previous chapter, I discussed how legal equality, as
enfranchised through citizenship, was not the same thing as social belonging in the national
identity of America – a problem his ideal of “trans-nationalism” was meant to solve. Irony was
part of the same American intellectual program, albeit it directed at an even more socially
foundational locus.
Three Moments in the Life of Irony
“The Life of Irony” ran for twenty-four paragraphs and contained roughly thirty claims
about irony. I am going to focus on three that I think best encapsulate and best illustrate what
Randolph Bourne wanted and needed from irony. I view this essay as an essential piece of
Bourne’s democratic idealism, an idealism premised on cultural concepts, not political ones . I
argue that in “The Life of Irony,” Bourne laid out the heart of his social idealism, while also
attempting to articulate a vision of modern America that would be both “spiritual” and
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productive of his vision of modern American democracy, as imagined through his cultural
idealism. He wrote about irony as a series of disparate claims, and because there is not much
rhetorical tissues which connects one claim to the next, those individual claims Bourne wrote
about seem to stand more or less independently from one another. So I have opted to focus on
what I see as a few of his most notable passages. I believe doing so will be helpful, given that the
essay can be tricky to parse out and analyze as a whole – the scholars I mentioned above are not
wrong when they criticize it as being one of less digestible of his works. By approaching it
through what I consider to be the key passages, I hope to establish a clearer picture of how irony
was meant to function as a central concept in Bourne’s cultural idealism. The first passage
concerns how Bourne say irony as a way of life, more than a socio-intellectual method; the
second passage is a jumping-off point to a larger question of how Bourne saw the relationship
between irony, pragmatism, and the role of socio-cultural values; the final passage is about how,
through irony, Bourne imagined a cultural ideal build from a creative sort of social empathy.
1. The Life Ironic, with Randolph Bourne
“We should not speak of the Socratic method, but of the Socratic life. For irony is
a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken off and put on again at will; a
method can...The ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude toward life, this
delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an amusement. It is
something that colors every idea and every feeling of the man who is so happy as
to be endowed with it”116
116 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 134.
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The first important thing to note is the distinction made between “method” and “life,” as
the two seem to be distinct categories for Bourne. I think Bourne was conceiving of them as two
separate social modalities: that of a method, which was instrumental in nature – something that
could be used, but then just as easily ignored in whatever circumstance; and that of life, which
was inherent to the individual’s understanding of the world; it was fundamentally constructive of
how they approached being in the world. Thus, when he wrote that a method could be “taken
off” whereas a life could not, he was trying to position irony as prior to one’s unique social
experience. Furthermore, this is why he followed up with the distinction that with irony, one was
“born not made.”
At first glance, this statement might appear to be at odds with the entire project of
Bourne’s idealism, as being “born” an ironist seems to insist on a native, pre-determined essence
that was contrary his otherwise self-reflexive, self-determined ideals of identity, as explored in
the previous chapter with “youth” and “trans-nationalism.” In that chapter, I argued that for
Bourne, one was neither born “young,” nor born “American,” but rather these were dispositions
or terms of self-identification that could be adopted, either as a means to live life experientially
and thus to the fullest – as with “youth” – or as a means of finding a deep sense of belonging in
and belonging to America – as with “trans-nationalism.”
According to this interpretation, both “youth” and “trans-nationalism” were methods,
which, as I argued in the previous chapter, follows from them being cultural concepts made
possible through a radical approach to pragmatism. Irony, however, was prior to both of those
cultural concepts: it was not something adopted, but an existential approach one was “born” into.
Being “born” here, I suggest, was not in the literal sense for born, but more in the way we talk
about people being born-again in religion or another totalizing worldview. A less-heavy example
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comes from punk rock: it is not uncommon for adherents of punk rock to say something along
the lines of “I didn’t choose punk; punk chose me.” I don’t imagine anyone making this kind of
statement is explicitly maintaining a hard determinist view of the universe – i.e. I had no choice,
given the physical organization of the universe, other than to fall into punk rock – but rather it is
an emotional narrative meant to give highlight just how life-changing becoming “punk” was to
them. It is never a mere aesthetic choice – Mohawks, leather jackets, safety-pins-in-ears, and so
one, but the taking on of an entirely different world view than they held before; a new way of life
that could totally change how they lived – whether that be the clean-living straightedge idealism,
their politics, their understanding of the role of sub-communities struggling against the
mainstream.
Another example can be seen in the famous Andy Warhol quip that, “Once you 'got' Pop,
you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could
never see America the same way again.”117 If one was truly in the Pop mindset, then every cereal
box, every street sign – in fact, every object of human design – was automatically a moment of
aesthetic consideration, and this compulsion to experience the world along such lines could not
be turned off. If truly of the Pop persuasion, it would be impossible to look at a stack of, say,
Brillo boxes, and not instinctively think about their aesthetic nature or status.
Pragmatism itself contained such a possibility, which is why I argued in the previous
chapter that it was truly a radical philosophy. If you accept the ideal that truth is not a feature of
the world but a function of being in the world, then the epistemological consequences would be
absolutely transformative. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Bertrand Russell voices his
117 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, A Harvest Book (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 50.
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concerns about pragmatism in terms of its metaphysical consequences – “a danger of what might
be called cosmic impiety,” as he puts it, writing warily about the implications of pragmatism to
the stability of Western philosophy.118 But as I argued in that chapter, part of the pragmatic
project was to break apart Western philosophy in order to save it qua making philosophy useful
for the everyday needs of academically lay people. But in a sense, Russell was absolutely correct
in viewing the implications of pragmatism as cast upon a cosmic scale: for pragmatism, if truly
taken as the correct philosophical position, would take one forever out of the assumed
ontological hierarchy of facts and knowledge.
Bourne’s irony, I argue, was the same sort of socio-intellectual presence. Once “born”
into irony, one could never look at the world in another way – again it would “color every idea
and feeling.” And like Pop or pragmatism, it was not something that could be turned off; as he
wrote, “The ironist is always critically awake.” Viewing the world form the position of irony was
a totalizing perspective that could not be taken off. As such, Bourne’s version of irony is similar
to what we might today call “authenticity” or good faith.
The political institutions of American democracy, regardless of how well intentioned or
thoughtfully designed have often been turned to anti-democratic purposes. Often couched in the
language of “saving democracy” or strengthening it, the political and legal mechanisms of
America have a grim legacy of disempowering, of disenfranchising peoples that those in
positions of power wanted to see silenced and removed from the conversation creating the
American present and future. Politicians, intellectuals, media talking heads, and any other stripe
of public influence “take off,” as it were, their democratic ideals for the sake of political power.
118 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, A Touchstone Book (New York u.a: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 828.
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A truly democratic life, however, would not be susceptible to the trappings of mere, or
pure social power. The life of irony was, I believe, Randolph Bourne’s idealistic vision
productive of a fundamentally democratic culture that could not be corrupted. Because he
believed that a truly democratic life could not be “taken off;” one who truly viewed the world
ironically would automatically operate from a position of good faith; a position of social
benevolence, rather than domination. This kind of essential good faith, as idealized and utopian
as it may seem, does seem as necessary to the perseverance of a truly democratic society,
especially one that had to adapt to a massive influx of new people and cultural ideas, as America
did at the turn of the century. And still does today, of course.
By conceiving of irony as a “life” which could not be “taken off,” Bourne envisioned an
ideal kind of a genuinely democratic culture, one protected by the cynical possibilities of
politics; his ideal of irony was, as opposed to contemporary definitions, the means to the
sincerest social intellectualism. The very thing that provided a novel promise to American
culture – the surfeit of new people and ideas coming to its shores – was, in a characteristically
modern way, the very thing that threatened to undermine it. Again, with every new possibility in
American history comes and equal and opposite force seeking to destroy it. It was, from a distant
view, a battle of ideas over the American soul (a rhetorical framing that is, sadly, still very much
recent in its usage). In the early twentieth century, pragmatism would have appeared as an
obvious means to solve these socio-intellectual questions – that was, after all, the entire
presumed purpose of the philosophy. Then again, maybe not. There were certain features of
pragmatism, Bourne noticed, that compromised its ability to deal with the species of social
dilemmas based not in questions of epistemic knowledge, but in (spiritual) values. Where
pragmatism was epistemic in essence, irony was spiritual – meant to not deliberate between the
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terms of truth and knowledge, but rather social values and experiences. Which brings us to the
next important segment of “The Life of Irony:” namely how it was both a companion to, and
correction of, pragmatism.
2. Irony and Pragmatism
Knowledge is not goodness. But it is a step toward judging, and judgment is the
true goodness…Irony, the science of comparative experience, compares things not
with an established standard but with each other, and the values that slowly emerge
from the process, values that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly
revised, corrected, and refined by that same sense of contrast.119
The first part of this quote I discussed briefly above, but it warrants more evaluation.
As previously discussed, pragmatism asserted that social, everyday, and even (some) moral
truths were distinct from metaphysical ones, for the truth-function of such categories was
not based on any grand design of the universe, but instead in how they affected actions that
would lead to the desired consequences. Knowledge was, pragmatically speaking, a
position vis-à-vis an understanding of the world, not the world in and of itself; judgment,
however, was a basis for action within that world, i.e. “it is on judgment impelled by desire
that we act.” Thus, Bourne was stating that goodness was a product of action, and not one
of fidelity regarding the perception of the True Facts about the World. This might, prima
facie seem a bit abstract, but remember that during this time there was the early
confrontation between an objective, physics-based understanding of the universe, against
the modernistic debate over whether socio-cultural ideas were constructed or natural and
essentialist. The scientific understanding of the universe made many theoretical claims of
119 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 135–36.
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objective fact – the first decade or so of the twentieth century is a really interesting moment
in Western science, as it was just at that point when many of the great breakthroughs,
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, for example (published in 1916), were being developed,
but before they became widespread and accepted – and lots of socially minded intellectuals
wanted to play in the same methodological ballfield. Yet, at the same time, there was
always a friction inherent in a scientism of cultural concepts, as the terms of culture could
not be triturated or tested in the manner that physical or chemical concepts were; one could
at least theoretically measure the mass of an atom, but how would one go about measuring
the value of reading the morning paper?
Bourne himself referenced this debate, stating that the judgments of irony were “not
artificial but spring naturally out of life.” The judgments produced by irony could not be
“artificial” in the sense that they were arbitrary, because then they would have no social or
spiritual basis to stand on. Therefore, those judgments had to come from rigorously
examined experience. But those experiences, of course, could only be subjective, but a
subjectivity that itself was dependent on (arguably) socially objective categories, such as
race, class, gender, etc. Now any good student of the humanities will, at this point, excitedly
raise their hand and shout, “A-ha! But those very categories are socially constructed!”
Which, yes, as contemporary humanities scholars we would agree with – but the past is a
foreign country, early-twentieth-century America is far less alien than, say, medieval
Europe or Edo-era Japan. But it would be a mistake to assume that we can spread over it
our socio-ethical ideals, as if it were tracing paper on an immutable moral schematic. So,
Bourne had to work out this dilemma in a more definitively essentialist era of social
apprehension.
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This is what, I suggest, Bourne was after when he wrote that, “Irony, the science of
comparative experience, compares things not with an established standard but with each
other…values that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly revised, corrected, and
refined by that same sense of contrast.” On one hand, this shows he was deploying irony to work
within a pragmatic framework – irony as the “science of comparative experience” – but on the
other, it also emphasizes that, for him, irony was fundamentally distinct from philosophical
pragmatism in that it was about figuring out social values, not about the ontological status of
epistemology. Bourne understood that certain socio-cultural ideas were, by their nature, not
scientific in nature to begin with. Though, like the objects of science, socio-cultural ideas could
be – and ought to be, for Bourne – subjected to revision, correction, and refinement, they
remained categorically unlike the objects of science in that there was not final form of socio-
cultural ideas, at least not in the same consensus-seeking way the objects of science had.
Physical objects, by their (proposed) necessity within the laws of nature, had defined and
measurable qualities that were independent and self-contained: the mass of any given rock did
not change depending on the mass of a different rock. But values, for Bourne, only had value
insofar as existed in a society, and being within a society meant being connected to the whole
shebang. Values, then, meant nothing in a vacuum. Pragmatism, a philosophy constructed to
evaluate and guide ideas into action, would seem to have been a natural approach for a trans-
valuation of values, but where it was strong in honing rational thought, it was deficient in its
consideration of the emotional weight of values and culture.
This was, of course, not an errant consequence of pragmatism, but a feature baked in
from the beginning. If truth was what happened to an idea, then so to with the value of that idea.
Feeding ducks at the pond becomes a valuable action through my putting time and effort into it;
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my moral belief that ducks ought to be fed becomes a belief, subsequently, by my acting it out.
Moral value accrued to an idea not through some metaphysical preloading, but through behaviors
and actions. But what happens when my actions and my beliefs are out of sync? What if they are
not in conversation at all? Louis Menand summarizes this conundrum best, writing:
turn-of-the-century pragmatism does have two large deficiencies as a school of
thought. One is that it takes interests for granted; it doesn’t provide for a way of
judging whether they are worth pursuing apart from the consequences of acting on
them…The second deficiency is…that wants and beliefs can lead people to act in
ways that are distinctly unpragmatic. There is a sense in which history is lit by the
deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of
adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person
would be willing to die for one.120
Pragmatism did a lot of things right, as far as Randolph Bourne was concerned. It was, as
I have argued, one of the strongest intellectual influence in his thinking about the American
future, as the nation emerged into modernity. It not only provided a (seemingly) scientific
approach to the philosophical quandaries that ruled the day, but did so in a way that was also in
an explicitly, at least as laid out by John Dewey, democratic fashion.
The problem with pragmatism, at least by 1913, was that while it remained a thoroughly
democratic philosophy in spirit, it had not, could not, codify any definitive social axioms that
were fundamentally for the furthering of democracy. (Such axioms would end up being added,
though a good decade later.) In its early decades, pragmatism had a lot to say about
egalitarianism – which was a socio-existential consideration, i.e. all people were equal in their
120 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 2001, 375. My emphasis.
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status to comprehend and judge the world along their own experiences – but had less to
contribute to the discourse concerning the day-to-day issues of American democracy, which was
a socio-political paradigm in which only certain people had a de facto ability to contribute to
political outcomes. Under the earlier versions of pragmatism, all people were equally free,
ontologically speaking, to determine their own understanding of the world and then navigate the
consequences stemming from whatever understandings. But this was a very abstract way of
viewing the individual and their relationship with the world, and so often is the case that the
axioms of hardcore philosophy fail to speak meaningfully to the everyday concerns of regular
folk.
Bourne recognized this lack in pragmatism—that is, an inability to actively produce
values constitutive of democratic thinking in a significantly efficacious way. Pragmatism could
question or challenge Truth and, in turn, challenge one’s conception of the world, but that was
mainly along epistemic lines of belief and action, as built around discrete outcomes from
whatever beliefs and actions. A democratic society, Bourne understood, was always already
prefaced on values productive of democracy – values that could not be a product of philosophical
debate, but determined through a sincere dialectic among members of a community. Values, not
mere axioms, were what a functioning democratic society required. And pragmatism needed help
in that regard.
Pragmatism was excellent at creating actionable concepts, and it was valuable in
producing beneficial actions. But it was not always so clear when it came to understanding
the value of any of those – again, why would anyone die for rational thought? Pragmatism
worked exceptionally well on the judgment of means, but faltered when it came to judging
the ends to which those means were directed. The question of what made an idea good was
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not one that pragmatism was well equipped to answer. A few years after writing “The Life
of Irony,” Bourne would explicitly point out this flaw writing, “But there was always that
unhappy ambiguity in [Dewey’s] doctrine [i.e. pragmatism] as to just how values were
created.”121 Arriving at a destination does not mean that that place was ultimately worth
going to, no matter how quickly or efficiently one got there: pragmatism risked equated
the achieving of a goal with the value of a goal.
Bourne believed irony provided a basis for judging and producing values in a way
that was fundamentally pragmatic, but also not subjected to the flaws of pragmatism as
such. Irony, if properly conceived, plugged up a great big hole in pragmatism’s hull and
did so without compromising any of its principle axioms. Rather than a social ethics – a
spirituality – derived from the convictions of old Absolutes or outdated metaphysics,
Bourne’s irony posited a cultural idealism that emerged from the consensus of people
acting within an ideal of democratically derived good faith.
As such, Bourne’s ironic ideal, I suggest, was meant to emphasize that the spiritual
validity of socio-cultural values was to be found in how they held up against other socio-
cultural values; the debate was not between humanity and the universe, but instead one
within human society itself, along the lines of regular people and their beliefs as posited
against other, regular people; an prelude to his over-arching stance against socio-cultural
hierarchies that will become even more significant in the next chapter. Only human ideas,
Bourne contended – ideas produced from one’s “vivid reactions,” to be “revised, corrected,
and refined” – could rightfully judge human values, which, in turn, would need to be
“revised, corrected, and refined.” To proceed along those lines meant putting those values,
121 Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” 61.
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whatever they may have been, up against each other. Yet, the ultimate arbiter regarding
what was right or wrong was not some vague conviction of how those notions measured
up against some grand visions about what the universe decreed as right or wrong, but rather
a dialogue: a dialectic among those that lived in the world, and as such, had to figure out
the rules that they had to either adapt or acquiesce to. But this was a conversation as
envisioned through a foundational belief in good faith – the ultimate goal of such a
discourse was not political power or influence, but always and essentially an expression of
culturally situated democratic idealism. Then again, to phrase Bourne’s idealism as a goal
would be to fall into that pragmatic folly of a definitive endpoint, when really what was
important was the act of cultural conversation. Because when it came to democratic socio-
cultural values, there was no state of absolute certainty – there was only a conversation
over the kind of values that mattered, and a dialogue over the socially determined validity
of those ideas.
3. Irony and Democracy as Social Philosophy
But if irony destroys some ideals it builds up others. It tests ideals by their
social validity, by their general changeability among all sorts of people and
the world, but if it leaves the foundations of many in shaky condition and
renders more simply provisional, those that it does leave standing are
imperishably founded in the common democratic experience of all men.”122
122 Randolph Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, n.d., 138.
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Here was the first time in the essay that Bourne explicitly made reference to
democracy and its relationship with the ironic ideal, and he did so notably in the context of
ideals being either destroyed or strengthened. The democratic process, he suggested, was
inherently a dialectical one, in which ideals and values were not constants, but instead
concepts that existed in a constant state of conflict and flux: they were to be re-/de-/trans-
valued.
It is important to note that Bourne was not basing this dialectical approach on any
concrete notion of American ideology or experience – instead he framed the debate as
being between “all sorts of people and the world,” and the only commonality among these
different groups was “the common democratic experience.” I think that Bourne clearly had
in mind the cultural diversity that marked American social life in the early twentieth
century.
And yet, the specter of democracy Bourne was invoking here was not one residing
only upon American shores; this much he made clear in phrasing it as the domain of “all
men.” Herein lies the value of this passage: Bourne was in the moment acknowledging
democracy as not a political system but as a social philosophy. As I argued above with the
distinction between irony as a life or method, a true democracy would have to be one not
reliant on the democratic reliability of its political institutions, but one that was rooted in a
genuine belief that all members were equally valuable. By emphasizing the “common
democratic experience of all men,” Bourne was arguing that the thoughts and experiences
of anyone who lived in a democratic society where those thoughts and experiences must
fuel continual project of making a society. Democracy, for Bourne, was not a set of
particular political institutions, but a culture dependent on the transmutation of social
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difference to cultural creativity: differences of origins, differences beliefs, differences of
ideas, differences of behavior, etc., all of those would fuel the cultural potential of America.
Thus, for a democratic society to not just survive but thrive, it had to reach into that
multitude of differences, and create from that apparent chaos, something stronger and
better than what the sum of its parts would have seemed capable of.
In the previous chapter, I argued that Bourne envisioned “trans-nationalism” as a way to
open up a valid self-identification of “being American” to everyone who truly believed in the
American project, regardless of where they came from. The only thing that mattered was that
they believed in that American project, the potential it had, and their place in the nation. But,
where in the previous chapter I examined how the introduction of new ideas were a boon to
living life experimentally – through “youth” – and to the future of American culture – through
“trans-nationalism” – ethnic and cultural novelty have frequently been a source of social friction
as much as they have been a source of social inspiration. So, while the presence of many other
ethnic groups and cultural possibilities were embraced with open arms by Bourne and other
multiculturalists, there was no denying that the same font of social promise was also one of
social strife: for every new cultural idea or possibility introduced by the immigrant cultures
coming to American shores, there was a nativist desire to see that idea or possibility stamped out.
With social difference naturally came social friction, which left unchecked could
lead to any number of bad consequences, up to and including violence. Irony was a way to
manage this difference. “By adopting another’s point of view and making it his own, in
order to carry light and air into it,” Bourne wrote, through irony one, “literally puts himself
in the other man’s place. Irony is this the truest sympathy.”123 Irony managed difference
123 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 137.
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by being a way for people to get out of the myopia of their own individual experience and
at least try to look at the world from another person’s point of view. Now how accurately
one could simulate those experiences might not precise in the least, but the act of trying –
from a position of good faith – was at least a sincere expression that another person’s
experience, and thus the other person, was, in and of themselves meaningful. In the
introduction to this thesis, I mentioned the famous David Foster Wallace commencement
speech, “This Is Water,” in which he adjured the new graduates to constantly direct their
thinking toward giving other people the benefit of the doubt: that instead of being angry at
a cashier for be being rude, that instead they should remind themselves of all the reasons
they ought to forgive it. Because, as Wallace understood fifteen years ago and Bourne over
a hundred, we usually don’t know what other people are going through; we don’t know
their experiences. But we should try to. For the sake of democracy, we had to.
For Randolph Bourne, there was no such singular experience that would
encapsulate being American – instead it was a constant process of creation and destruction.
For this process to continue, for American democracy to continue, the people that made up
America had to be able to come together for a common national project. But by its very
nature, democracy, in the same way that science by its nature requires the possibility of
refutation, requires the potential of difference. To live in a democratic society means to
live in one that evolves and adapts to any number of different considerations or values.
This is the great contradiction of democracy: the essential “togetherness” it requires to exist
it built up from groups or individuals that fundamentally need not agree on much of
anything: the only common interest is the pursuit of a democratic society, and its attendant
consequences that whatever I want, or whatever my group needs, is never a given, but only
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a process of becoming against so many other needs and wants of other individuals and
groups. Politics – whether through organization around certain goals, voting for certain
policies, or consolidation around certain groups – was one means to achieve such ends. But
prior and more important to any of that was the capacity to be curious, to have an open
mind, to be able to perceive a world beyond one’s own initial conviction. Democracy, at
its heart, was always already an experiment of difference-unto-unity; E pluribus unum, so
says the dollar bill, after all.
To create a society founded on this contradiction, which is to say, to create America,
meant to somehow collapse those countless differences among individuals and groups, no
matter how numerous or from however many perspectives, into not a hegemonic but
conscientiously pluralistic social understanding that did not just accommodate differences
but relied on them. The end goal of democracy, at least in theory, is never hegemony but
parity; it is not a contest of dominance but a project based on the ideals of compromise and
conciliation. This too, was for Bourne, the function and practice of irony.
The ironist’s soul, in Bourne’s conception, functioned much in the same way as a particle
accelerator: an assortment of ideas and perspectives would be tossed in and then smashed into
each other in order to see what new ideals would be created. Some of them, being unfit for the
world, would immediately fizzle out, but others would persist and be, perhaps, of creative or
spiritual worth. This clash of ideals was possible because the ironist:
since he has no citadel of truth to defend, is really the more adventurous. Life, not
fixed in predestined formulas, or measurable by fixed, immutable standards, is fluid,
rich, and exciting. To the ironist it is both discovery and creation. His courage seeks
out the obscure places of human personality; and his sympathy and understanding
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create new interests and enthusiasms in the other minds upon which they play. And
these new interests in turn react upon his life, discovered unexpected vistas there,
and creating new insight into the world that he lives in.124
To experience life through irony was to experience the constant churning of ideas and ideals. The
valuable ones would make it out into the world, the poor ones would be dismissed, and in
between all the rest would remain in motion: mixing, colliding, negating, until they survived or
perished. Irony was an engine that took in ideas and combusted them into movement for change
– cultural, social, moral; the distinctions were slight from a pragmatic point of view. But it
needed ample fuel:
There is but one weak spot in his armor, but one disaster that he fears more than the
loss of his life, - a shrinkage of his environment, a running dry of experience. He
fears being cut off from friends and crowds and human faces and speech and books,
for the demands to be ceaselessly fed. Like a modern city, he is totally dependent
on a steady flow of supplies from the outside world, and will be in danger of
starvation if the lines of communication are interrupted.125
Luckily, as noted above, the modern landscape meant fuel was in high supply. With abundance
of newspapers, magazines, and whatnot, there was no shortage of ideas to be found in print. That
America was a grand mixture of nationalities was an even greater boon. The fabric of American
life was already woven from so many people from different countries of origins, who brought
along with them their own cultures and practices. Anyone who stepped off a boat and claimed
America as a new home was full of new ideas. The question, for Randolph Bourne, was how to
124 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 359. 125 Bourne, 367.
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fold these new people and their ideals into the collective potential of American cultural. “Trans-
nationalism” would take care of the people; irony, then, would take their ideas and used them
stoke the fires of American creativity, and in doing so, keep warm the hearth of democracy and
drive the engine of American progress into the future.
Conclusion
Irony, for Randolph Bourne, did not just produce better ideas, but also a better, deeper,
and more connected social experience. Irony had the potential to take the diverse mass of peoples
and identities that made up the American populace and form them into the “beloved community”
founded on a mutual, good faith desire to be a coherent nation by fostering the grandest ideal that
can exist in a democratic society: empathy. For Bourne, as I have argued, this empathy was not
just a passive, if benign tolerance of other people, but an active, creative position in which at
every instance the good, ironic citizen was compelled to ask “but what of their experience? What
of their wants and needs?”.
Bourne’s irony, as such, was both entirely consistent within the broader history of the
concept, but also an aberration, and it was yielded not as a means to create distance, but instead
collapse it, so that all Americans would have a better, perhaps essential, way to understand and
thus live with one another. It is no wonder then that the majority of Bourne scholars have treated
it with indifference or dismissiveness: irony, for Bourne, was held up as the single most
important socio-intellectual force in American social and political life; meanwhile, Bourne wrote
about it with a confidence that was both absolutely certain and pretty much apolitical. He did not
frame irony through the most germane politics of the early nineteen-teens, nor did he attach it to
any explicit platform of progressive or socialist politics, even though he clearly had an affinity
for both. Instead, he wrote about irony as if it were an essential truth about American social life,
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much in the same way that a physicist would describe the laws of gravity or the behavior of
particle flying through space. This, I hope to have convincingly argued, was not an oversight but
an intentional rhetorical choice, as irony, for Bourne, was simply an essential constituent of
democratic existence, in the same way that electrons or protons are essential particles of
contemporary physics: the whole system would fall apart without it. This was why irony could
not merely be “taken on and off again” for Bourne – because irony, like democracy, was not just
a temporary disposition, but a way of life unto itself. To be committed to irony – which is to say
to be an “ironist” – meant, for Bourne, a sort of absolute dedication to its precepts, at least as he
understood them. But under a close reading, which I argue I have done, there are some aspects of
irony that may, to modern readers, come across as overly ambitious, or even absurd, but all the
same none of them appear as cultish, delusional, or even impossible. Irony was exceedingly
powerful in Bourne’s imagination, but it was never absurd. By comparing it with David Foster
Wallace’s celebrated commencement speech, “This Is Water,” I hope to have established that
such an idealistic impulse, with regards to irony qua empathy, was not only not implausible but
in actuality a natural reflex of empathic hopefulness against an increasingly self-centered world
view. For a democratic society to maintain itself, both Bourne and Wallace argued – a century
removed from one another – that the capacity to either assume the lived position of another, to
understand and empathize with them, was not the endgame of democratic live, but the substance
of it.
All of this is to say nothing about how Bourne also positioned irony as a key corrective to
some major defaults of philosophical pragmatism, at least as far as it was proposed by 1913. In
the previous chapter, I examined how between the axioms of pragmatism and the subsequent and
novel concept of youth, Bourne imagined a radical, yet slow, reconfiguration of American
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intellectual life. Through pragmatism, the very fabric of lived reality was opened up for
reevaluation, what with the open redefinition of various “truths” along socio-existential lines.
Youth, as a product of this new, conceptual openness, provided the appetite for newer
experiences, the accumulation of which could only better inform and prepare the individual for a
life in the increasingly fractured and fraught modern condition – a condition largely defined by
the increasingly multi-cultural character of American life. But in that sliver of promise between
novel philosophical methodology and the want of novel experiences to expand such a
philosophy, remained a spiritual absence in regards to evaluation of whatever was to be
discovered. Irony provided a means to fill that empty space. Irony could do what pragmatism and
even youth could not: evaluate, in a spiritual way, everyday experience along lines not of means
and ends but of values and social cohesion.
Matthew Stratton, again phrases this as irony’s ability to “re-value, trans-value, or de-
value” so-called “truths,” and he is not wrong in this regard.126 It was this exact multi-critical
power that made irony not just useful (in the pragmatic sense) but essential (in the democratic
sense). Pragmatism opened up a lot of true possibilities regarding human experience, but if those
experiences were to be closed off to morality or a broader sense of human camaraderie, well,
then they could not really end up mattering much. Likewise, the concept of “youth” could
implore one to be more open in viewing new experiences as valid sites for spiritual or social
consideration. But only irony, with its capacity for creative empathy and democratic good faith,
could complete the equation, so to speak; only irony, for Bourne, could pull together the
philosophically and the socio-conceptually compelling novelties of modernism into a sense of
126 Stratton, The Politics of Irony in American Modernism, 33.
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greater community that did not just persist but had potential to thrive. Which is to say, again, his
infamous “beloved community.”
The curious thing about modernism, however, was that it did not just create a communal
disjunction, but an existential one as well. Irony, offered a lot to the former concern – irony
could create a better community, especially so in conjunction with pragmatism and youth, by
fostering within the individual a good faith open-mindedness regarding difference and otherness.
Even so, despite all its presumed power, irony in and of itself, did not do much to make the
modern American individual self-sufficient in that grand mess of modernity. The “ironist” as so
described, was a communal creature – a being meant to pull together and resolve the problems
attendant to the creation of the beloved community. But even the ironist had to exist outside the
world of ironic criticism. They had to be in the world. And just as much as the realities of
American life in modernism needed an empathic disposition if genuine democratic thinking was
to persevere, so too did the individual’s sense of self, and validity. And this was the hard part,
regarding democratic idealism: it is so easy to think about the large picture, to focus on how it
puts the needs of the group over the comparatively small needs of the individual. But, at least as
modernism emphasizes, the individual never ceased to be a singular, monadic site of experiences
or concern. I suppose a pedantic way to phrase this dilemma would be something like: irony
could provide the individual the means to function within modern society, but something else
would be needed if they the individual were to function as an individual within a modern society.
And so, in the following chapter I will investigate the ways in which Randolph Bourne
positioned the aesthetics of taste as a means to do just that: an answer to the question of how the
individual could be centered and meaningful in and increasingly rote and defined social
existence; how the individual could find themselves and thus claim some semblance of agency
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and subjectivity in the modern world. What comes next is the story of Randolph Bourne’s
aesthetics of taste.
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CHAPTER THREE: THE AESTHETICS OF TASTE
For virtually all readers of contemporary cultural studies, the debate between “high art”
and “low art” isn’t really a debate at all anymore. Pretty much any cultural text, whether it be the
previously regarded “low” forms of pulp novels, soap operas, comic books, pop music,
blockbuster movies, and so on, are, critically speaking, on equal footing with the longstanding
“high” forms, such as literature, classical music, paintings and sculptures by the “masters,” the
works Shakespeare, cinema, and whatever else has been, historically, the purview of established,
institutional critics, whether they wrote from academia or in the pages of august publications.
This battle has been going on for a long time and outside of certain academic sets, still does –
perhaps far longer than a lot of people realize. Only it wasn’t always framed in the terms of
“high art” versus “low art:” in the early twentieth century, it was often framed as “culture”
versus “non-culture,” or more direly “culture” versus “anarchy.” This was the debate Randolph
Bourne wrote about in a couple of essays, wherein he sought to counter the cultural idealism of
English critic, Matthew Arnold, who famously wrote that culture was “the best which has
thought and said in the world.”127
Culture can end up meaning a lot of things. At the fin-de-siècle, culture was widely
understood in terms of tangible stuff – works of art that one could look at, listen to, read, or hold
in their hands. Bourne’s take, however, was outside of his own time and more in step with ours.
His concept of culture – in a similar way to how he reconceputalized “youth,” “trans-
nationalism,” and “irony,” as examined in the previous two chapters – was less about objects, but
instead concerned about the very experience and substance of life itself. There is a lengthy
127 Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 4th ed (Harlow, England ; New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 6.
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passage that appeared in his essay “The Cult of the Best,” and while most Bourne scholars cite at
least part of it, none of them give it the attention it deserves. At least not as far as I am
concerned, as I believe that it is among the most important things Bourne ever wrote, if we are to
understand his cultural idealism:
For as long as you humbly follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital. If you
are using your energy to cajole your appreciations, you have none left for unforced
aesthetic emotion. If your training has been to learn and appreciate the best that has
been thought and done in the world, it has not been to discriminate between the
significant and the irrelevant that the experience of every day is flinging up in your
face. Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another, and no training
in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to
forms and settings. The mere callousness with which we confront our ragbag city
streets is evidence enough of the futility of the Arnold ideal. To have learned to
appreciate a Mantegna and a Japanese print, and Dante and Debussy, and not to
have learned nausea at Main street, means art education which is not merely
worthless but destructive.128
Being in the world, for Bourne, always and already meant living within a discrete cultural
paradigm, wherein culture was not just a category of certain kinds of stuff, but the experience of
living in the world itself; it was the substance of everyday experience and the complications that
could come from such encounters, far more than it was the act of visiting museums or attending
an opera. And make no mistake, “complications” were an essential feature of Bourne’s cultural
128 Randolph Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 194. My emphasis.
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idealism: it would be from such complications, or friction, or uncertainties – the “nausea at Main
street” – that the individual could truly come to know themselves. As such, I submit that
Bourne’s understanding of culture has more in common with contemporary definitions than it
does his own historical context. Raymond Williams writes of three categories of culture: the first
being aligned with “human perfection” and “universal values;” the second category concerns an
analysis of “stuff” from a position that questioned whether said “stuff” was worth considering at
all; and finally “the ‘social’ definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular
way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in
institutions and ordinary behavior.”129 Randolph Bourne was focused on the importance of the
latter two categories during a time when most other thinkers were focused primarily on the first.
For both Bourne and Williams, prior to an evaluation or critique of the meaning of a
cultural text should be some kind of foundational, conceptual understanding of what culture
ought to mean in the first place. For Randolph Bourne, this meant thinking about “taste.” This
was not “taste” as we might think of today, as a passive or instinctive stance of liking or disliking
something. Rather, it was an active position interrogating one’s social experience for the
purposes of self-discovery and self-definition; it was a process of existential import that I call the
“aesthetics of taste.” Today, “aesthetics” is often meant as shorthand for the philosophy of art,
and as such is used in the discussion of the nature of art, beauty, and so on. While not entirely
removed from that understanding, in my usage, as it relates to Bourne’s cultural thinking, I am
using “aesthetics” in a more fundamental sense: to describe or refer to sensory experiences and
how those are constructive or constituent of more complex forms of comprehending the world.
129 Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 4th ed (Harlow, England ; New York: Pearson Longman, 2009), 32–33.
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In this chapter, I am going to explore how and why Randolph Bourne writings on taste
and culture showed him continuing to develop his radical cultural idealism. Bourne’s idealism
focused on the individual’s experience as expressed through the “aesthetics of taste”, as opposed
to the belief that culture was best conceived as a collection of the “best thought and said in the
world.” A lot of what follows in this chapter is going to be about the “philosophy of taste,” a
concept that Randolph Bourne hardly invented – though I will argue that he significantly, and
radically, adapted it to the modern, American social landscape of his time. In Bourne’s
conception, taste was not an endpoint shaped by achieving or appreciating “the best,” but a
creative, existential apparatus through which individuals not only experienced culture, but
created it in turn through that very act of experiencing the world: taste was the way, he believed,
people could wield power over social reality and direct its shape. In the same way that I
previously argued pragmatism and irony were independent, but fundamentally linked, in a
process of creating and trans-valuing values, so to were taste and culture: culture produced that
which taste evaluated, which in turn would play a role in what culture produced. Unlike the
Arnoldian ideal – for all its egalitarian posturing – Bourne’s vision of culture was personally
empowering and genuinely democratic: taste was Bourne’s means by which an individual could
both find themselves in culture and have a role in creating that culture at the same time, whether
it be in pride in their cultural origins or an appreciation of something entirely new – as opposed
to the acquiesce to the preferences of elites and their institutions, which for Bourne was a real
and ever-present danger in the early twentieth century.
It may seem strange, possibly even funny, to call Matthew Arnold a “dangerous” thinker.
It is hard to imagine anyone reading him today and finding his ideas anything close to
threatening or socially destructive. Arnold is the stuff of week-one reading assignments, usually
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found in the first section of cultural studies readers and compilations.130 Generally, this means
excerpts from his 1869 essay collection, Culture and Anarchy – and in particular the titular essay
– which are read for historiographical purposes before getting to the fun and juicy stuff like
Stuart Hall or bell hooks. But my glibness here belies just how influential he was from the end of
the 19th century and up through around the middle of the 20th.131 The gravity of Arnoldian
thought still has a considerable presence today: for example, the acclaimed Pixar movie
Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007) ends up being, more or less, a perfect encapsulation of Arnoldian
thought, in telling a tale about a preternaturally talented rodent who is able to rise above his
humble origins and cook incredible cuisine. The grand statement of that movie is that despite
one’s humble origins (here meaning Remy, a literal rat born in a sewer), it remains possible to
transcend such lowly beginnings and produce genuine greatness. This depiction of the individual
and their relationship to the broader culture in which they lived was pure Arnoldian thought. I
think that most people who don’t professionally or passionately devote themselves to thinking
about culture would find a variation of Arnold’s core idea – that culture ought to be conceived as
a collection of the best things we make, write, say, or think – pretty amenable, if not outright the
best way to go about defining culture, or at least “high culture.” Even if the denomination of
“high culture” or “high art” aren’t explicitly thought of, there has been a constant thread in
American cultural conversations about how whatever is new or radical fails to meet up to the
established standard-bearers, either qualitatively (i.e. “This punk rock is garbage compared to
Sinatra”) or categorically (“This punk rock is just noise, not real music like Ol’ Blue Eyes”). As
130 For example, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey, the very reader I used for my graduate coursework and which will be cited presently. 131 Iris Dorreboom, “The Challenge of Our Time”: Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne and the Making of Modern America, Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 201.
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discussed in the first chapter, this kind of reactionary impulse to any product of youth culture is
hardly anomalous. But the critical basis to say something not merely along the lines of, “I just
don’t care for it,” but “this is bad and you are bad for thinking that it’s good”? That was set up,
or at least given a certain critical legacy, by nineteen-century English poet and cultural critic,
Matthew Arnold. There were many battlegrounds over the “correct” shape of culture and its
artefacts, and the role and status of taste was a deeply contested one; one that often – to this day
– is set in terms of “high” vs. “low,” or “elite” vs. “common.”
I begin this chapter with a brief history on how “taste” was understood in the
philosophies of Immanuel Kant – from whom Bourne took the idea of taste being a
transcendental part of the human condition – and Friedrich Nietzsche – who greatly inspired
Bourne in general, but here was formative in the idea that culture and the individual were
existentially inextricable. Then, I will do a lengthy overview of Matthew Arnold’s cultural
idealism, focusing on how it ultimately sought to construct oppressive cultural hierarchies,
despite the egalitarian promises Arnold believed in. I primarily illustrate this through the creation
of a cultural “canon” – that familiar concept of a list of so-called great and essential works of art.
From this backdrop, I will explore the reasons why Bourne felt the Arnoldian conception was a
truly dangerous one that needed to be rejected in favor of a cultural project that championed
individual agency and relevancy, a conceptual change that was at once radical and necessary
given the transition into modernity. This will lead me to a discussion of Bourne’s cultural ideal,
the “aesthetics of taste.” I argue that “taste” was a way for the individual to center themselves in
an increasingly chaotic and fractured modern world; it would allow the individual to become an
active participant in culture, and thus escape the Arnoldian consequence of being objectified by
an indifferent cultural monolith. It was also a conception of taste as a form of creative social
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power: the aesthetics of taste would empower people to determine their own social reality,
instead of merely inheriting or acquiescing to a pre-established cultural hierarchy that did not
speak to their wants or needs. A cultural ideal built up from taste would democratize culture,
make it process that everyone had a role in creating. A culture operating from the aesthetics of
taste would – along with youth, trans-nationalism, and irony – help produce a more creative,
democratic, and empathetic society.
The Philosophy of Taste in Kant and Nietzsche
One thing that needs to be established right from the top that in all that follows: “taste” is
not simply a matter of liking vs. disliking things, or what is pleasing vs. what is not, though it is
not exactly untethered from those everyday understandings either. The philosophical discussion
of “taste” was a far more foundational one that had to do with the origins of aesthetic judgment:
how do we determine what is “good” when it comes to culture and its products, and what are the
consequences of these determinations? Whether something was liked or not was just one way
that “taste” manifested itself, but that was not the be-all-end-all in the slightest. So here, I will
briefly examine the two key figures, as least insofar as they pertain to the division between
Matthew Arnold and Randolph Bourne’s cultural idealisms: Immanuel Kant and Friedrich
Nietzsche.
That Immanuel Kant features at all in a conversation that revolves around democratic
idealism might be something of a surprise, as the man’s philosophy isn’t typically regarded as
being exactly supportive of democratic ideals. Then again, the complexity of Kant’s idealism
contains some surprising avenues, if you know where to look; Bourne did – and it all starts with
aesthetics: not as the philosophy of art (as it is commonly meant today), but the philosophical
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investigation of sensory experience.132 Aesthetics has a long history as a focus of philosophy, but
a formal investigation into taste in particular probably begins with Immanuel Kant. And Kant, as
was his wont, sought to bring taste – which for Kant was a division of the faculty of judgment –
under the umbrella of reason: he wanted to make taste fall under metaphysically rational laws
and the principles of universality, even if the individual act of aesthetic judgment was not itself a
rational one, per se. As Henry Allison puts it in his deep-diving analysis of Kant’s Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, the aptly named Kant’s Theory of Taste, “Thus, as it were by default, the a
priori principle supposedly governing taste is assigned to judgment in its reflective capacity,
which essentially involves a movement from particulars to universals.”133 Allison understands
Kant as thinking at a distinctly 18th-century intellectual period where “taste was thought of as a
special way of knowing, one for which rational grounds cannot be given, but which nonetheless
involves an inherent universality. In short, taste was not a private but a social phenomenon...”134
This was important to Kant because if taste were purely private, then it could not be rationally
universalized; this is important for this present thesis because, as will be seen later in this
chapter, for Bourne, taste was both a private and social phenomenon and the dynamic between
those two ended up giving taste a remarkable social power.
132 This can get terminologically messy, but Kant’s idealism did not have the same meaning as it did for Bourne. Idealism, to put it exceedingly simply, for Kant, was a philosophical position that “ideas” are only knowable insofar as they are shown to us through our senses. So, for example, my idea of a barn being red is only a matter of my perception with no bearing on the actual, ontological status of the barn itself. Idealism for Bourne, on the other hand, was the less-philosophical meaning of “an ideal state of things” – for example, an ideal country would have no death penalty 133 Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Modern European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 5. 134 Allison, 1.
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This isn’t to say that Kant’s law of taste made an individual’s taste any less personal,
however. And this is where things get a little tricky. As Terry Eagleton writes in The Ideology of
the Aesthetic, “Aesthetic judgements, Kant argues in the Critique of Judgment, are at once
subjective and universal.”135 Frequently, this is called Universal Subjective Validity, and though
seemingly oxymoronic, it is not as confusing as it might seem (though this is Kant we’re talking
about, so it is not exactly simple either). Essentially, Kant held that aesthetic judgment was not
totally private, because all of the objects of taste were somewhere out in the world: they can be
mutually experienced, expressed, communicated, and so on. But they are personal in the sense
that they certainly happen to me in a distinctive way. And yet, through the process of judgment,
they are also universal because all people – having human minds and thus human rationality –
ultimately end up calling on that same faculty of reason. Eagleton, again:
Such judgements are certainly subjective; but they are so purely subjective, so
expressive of the very essence of the subject, untainted by idiosyncratic prejudice
and ‘devoid of every possible condition which would necessarily distinguish the
judge from other people’, that it is possible to speak of them also as
universal…Aesthetic judgments are ‘impersonally personal’, a kind of subjectivity
without a subject…To judge aesthetically is implicitly to declare that a wholly
subjective response is of the kind that every individual must necessarily experience,
one that must elicit spontaneous agreement from them all.136
135 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Nachdr. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 93. 136 Eagleton, 93.
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One way to unpack “impersonally personal” might be to say “personal in a way possible only
from a shared rational capacity implicit to personhood.” This shared, rational personhood ought
to sound familiar because it was the exact social understanding Bourne hoped and believed irony
would make possible: that despite all of our differences and our individual experiences, we are
all in the world together, and as such we can always find a way to (at least attempt) to understand
one another. Irony hoped to bridge this gap through creatively empathic imagination; Kantian
aesthetics offered another bridge, through the brute existential facts of social existence – we all
exist in such a way that we experience things, and that commonality alone is a meaningful
connection. Thus, Bourne was suggesting that taste could be a means to a kind of social
transcendence outside ourselves, in a similar way to irony.
In making aesthetic judgments, Eagleton writes, Kant held that, “we exercise a precious
form of intersubjectivity, establishing ourselves as a community of feeling subjects linked by a
quick sense of our shared capacities.”137 Now, Kant may have been concerned with philosophical
“beauty,” which for him required a disinterestedness towards an object – meaning that one’s
personal feelings did not play a role in aesthetic evaluation. And because this is Kant, it can be
difficult to explain. Let’s imagine two people admiring Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Kant
would have held that both people, from a position of pure aesthetic judgment, would find the
painting to be “beautiful,” not on account of any objective qualities of the painting itself – its
composition or its place in art history – nor from any personal relevance. In fact, if one of the
observers, say, found the painting “beautiful” because it reminded him of a view from his
childhood home, that would negate the necessary quality of disinterestedness. Kant’s “beauty”
had no place for nostalgia, sentiment, nor any kind of moral or thematic consideration. The
137 Eagleton, 75.
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Kantian aesthetic, according to Eagleton, was “in no way cognitive.”138 “Cognitive,” a technical
term for Kant, is probably better understood as “intellectual” or “conceptual” today. In that light,
Kantian aesthetics were pre-intellectual: beauty, for him, was not a product of intellectual or
reflexive analysis – again judgment based on compositional rules, interpreted themes, or personal
resonance – but instead a revelation fundamentally inherent to a shared mental architecture
among all people. We observe; we behold beauty: at no point does conceptual thinking feature in
the process. Thus, in the Kantian paradigm, “What brings us together as subjects is not
knowledge but an ineffable reciprocity of feeling.”139
Randolph Bourne was not a Kantian. But there was something in Kant’s aesthetics he
saw as necessary: that shared “reciprocity of feeling,” which created a “community of subjects.”
As I argued with the previous chapter’s irony, Bourne’s idealism needed a mechanism for people
to get outside of themselves, to be able to approach the world in a way not constricted to their
own narrow perspectives. Irony was meant to do this through a creative vision of empathy and
the trans-valuation of values; taste was meant to serve a similar role in the evaluation of
kaleidoscopic and modern social experiences. Given the increasing cultural diversity developing
in the early twentieth century, Bourne realized that against such a tide of newness and
unfamiliarity, there could either be a human reaction based in rejection or acceptance: Bourne
opted for the latter. To recall a line from above, “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge
after another, and no training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able
to react to forms and settings.”140 But as I argued earlier, Bourne wasn’t actually talking about
discrete physical objects, but rather the experience of culture itself. “Forms and settings,” after
138 Eagleton, 75. 139 Eagleton, 75. 140 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194.
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all, have slight relevance to how one experiences a painting in a gallery, compared to what one
may experience during everyday life. So when he continued the above quote with, “and not to
have learned nausea at Main street, means art education which is not merely worthless but
destructive,”141 I read a definite literalism in his concern – the inability to accept new cultural
forms were destructive, as they resulted in the oppressive tactics and violent actions, as touched
on in the first chapter’s discussion of Bourne’s reconceptualizing of national identity. Though
Bourne did not cotton to the particulars of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, as described as a pre-
conceptual judgment of beauty, nor Kant’s arcane metaphysics, Bourne did want the innate,
transcendental humanity suggested by said metaphysics. Bourne’s idealism, after all, was one
founded in the idea of democratic togetherness and ironic camaraderie. But his idealism also,
perhaps as a contradiction, had to open up a space for individual empowerment – the collapsed
Kantian objectivity-unto-subjectivity as a remade subjectivity-over-objectivity. Bourne
developed this through the work of another German philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy was decidedly anti-Kantian. If part of Kant’s goal was
to find a way out of the body and to the deep truths of existence, then Nietzsche was completely
and irrevocably embedded in that body. For Kant, the truth may have been out there, so to speak;
for Nietzsche truth was anything but. As Terry Eagleton explains: “It is the body, for Nietzsche,
that produces whatever truth we can achieve. The world is the way it is only because of the
peculiar structure of our senses, and a different biology would deliver us a different universe
entirely. Truth is a function of the material evolution of the species.”142 Keijo Rahkonen deepens
the bodily nature of Neitzsche’s taste, writing, “Furthermore, Nietzsche recognises that
141 Bourne, 194. 142 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 234–35.
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individuals sense and taste things differently because they are embedded in different ways of life,
and because they have different bodies.”143 For Nietzsche, the body was the foundation of human
experience, rather than a primary site from which to launch a transcendental understanding
beyond itself. Contrary to Kant’s “personally impersonal,” Nietzsche’s notion of taste was so
personal and embedded in the self that it could not ever transcend that position; taste was simply
too in the world to ever find a position above it. But simply being in a body was not the end of
Nietzsche’s aesthetics, as like many of thoughts it led back to the infamous will to power; and for
Nietzsche, “the body itself is…a mere ephemeral expression of the will to power.”144
The will to power, of course, is a constant refrain found in Nietzsche’s writings and many
a scholar has dedicated their career to understanding its nuances and depths. For this thesis,
however, what is important is a general foundation from which to illuminate Bourne’s aesthetics
of taste. And frankly, it is not hard to see Nietzsche’s influence on Bourne. Eagleton helpfully
condenses the will to power as, “…just the universal truth that there is no universal truth, the
interpretation that all is interpretation; and this paradox…allows an iconoclastic radicalism to
blend with a prudently pragmatist suspicion of all ‘global’ theorizing.”145 Following my
exploration of the foundations of Bourne’s cultural radicalism in Chapter One, there is a lot in
this description that rings as immediately familiar. While pragmatism, especially as developed by
John Dewey, was in part an explicit rejection of previous philosophical ponderings, here
Eagleton argues that the same epistemological conclusions were native in Nietzsche’s thought as
well. Then there is the continuation of the will to power into an “iconoclastic radicalism,” which,
143 Keijo Rahkonen, “Bordieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle,” in The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S Turner (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 135. My emphasis. 144 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 234. 145 Eagleton, 248.
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as I have argued, is a pretty good apt description of Bourne’s idealism overall. Eagleton
continues, noting, “The will to power does not dictate any particular values…it just demands
that you do what it does, namely live in a changeful, experimental, self-improvisational style
through the shaping of a multiplicity of values.”146 Again, what I have previously argued as part
of Bourne’s cultural idealism reappears, as Chapter Two’s irony illustrated this same want in
Bourne: for values to be trans-valuated along lines that were not ontological in origin, but social
and brought about through lived experience.
So it is not difficult to see Bourne’s attraction to this existential underpinnings of truth –
again, pragmatism asserted that all capital-T Truth was, in fact, refereed by experience.
Regardless of whether Bourne was starting from his admiration of Nietzsche or his love of
pragmatism, he seemed fated to end up at the same conclusion. And Bourne drew upon this
body-embedded quality of both pragmatic and Nietzschean thought as a cornerstone to his
aesthetics of taste, where, I will soon argue, taste branched out into a social modality from which
one interpreted and sought understand the experiences of everyday life. The embodied, social
nature of truth qua taste, as taken from Nietzsche’s philosophy, meant taste was a battleground
over the shape of life itself, of social reality. And from here was derived a major feature of
Bourne’s aesthetics of taste – namely, as I will argue below, that taste was not just a product of
culture, but productive and constitutive of it at the same time. Where Kant saw transcendental,
disinterested human perception as guiding taste, Nietzsche, adversely argued, “one cannot watch
‘without interest’ because every perception of the world is necessarily perspective-laden.”147
146 Eagleton, 250. 147 Rahkonen, “Bordieu and Nietzsche: Taste as a Struggle,” 134.
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In Kant, for all of his deep and twisty metaphysics, there is a sense of optimistic
humanism. Simply by possessing human reason, we are all of us capable of coming to the same,
undeniable ontological and moral truths that govern the universe. Similarly, as Terry Eagleton
observes, “Aesthetic intersubjectivity adumbrates a utopian community of subjects, united in the
very deep structures of their being.”148 And if the metaphysics of taste carry with it a hint of this
utopianism, then it is not hard to carry that over into a relatively benevolent view of culture – it
would be, after all, the product of disinterested, rational practice made possible through
transcendental interconnectedness. In Nietzsche, the dynamics of taste were decidedly less
cheerful. Culture was a power struggle between competing tastes, where one would win and the
defeated alternative, only through a perverse hope of suffering and self-loathing, could in turn
hope to become powerful enough to lash out and challenge the status quo of oppression.
The one philosopher Bourne almost certainly idealized more than any other was
Nietzsche. He titled several of his own essays as references to Nietzsche’s works, and Nietzsche
was the only modern philosopher (other than the pragmatists, of course) that Bourne frequently
wrote about. So, it should come to no surprise that there is a distinctly Nietzschean flavor to a lot
of Bourne’s cultural thinking. More important to my argument, is the understanding of taste’s
capacity to shape culture and thus social reality and how that factored into Bourne’s cultural
idealism, as set against the Arnoldian ideal.
The Arnoldian ideal, despite its Kantian aspirations, would ultimately lead to a recourse
of oppressive power. As I will explore later in this chapter, it was a belief that people – left to
their own vices and devices – would tend to produce anarchy instead of the stability that society
needed in the face of modernity. Randolph Bourne, however, needed those very people that
148 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 97.
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Arnoldian thinking shirked off. As I will explain later, Arnold’s overarching fear of anarchy
ultimately overrode any genuine equalitarian or democratic commitments that his cultural
thinking aimed to make claim to. In order to safeguard society from social upheaval, Arnold’s
ideal culture, ultimately, could not be anything other than an oppressive one. Bourne, meanwhile,
imagined a world in which those same, so-called anarchic qualities of disruption, novelty, and
experimentation – as evaluated by pragmatism, youthful idealism, and irony – would be the very
ideals that created, not destroyed, the potential of America.
Then, there are many ways in which Bourne utopian idealism was surprisingly reflective
of Kant’s transcendental one. In Kantian idealism, everyone was connected by their possessing
of a rational mind, and in this way were ontologically united just by being rational beings.
Randolph Bourne’s utopian idealism, however, was not one of ontological transcendentalism, but
of social collaboration. As members of a society, all were connected through the process of being
in and being productive of culture, and as such, were never truly isolated from one another.
Irony, in Bourne’s imagination, sought to connect people through empathy; taste, he also
imagined, could connect them through the sheer fact of social existence: everyone, always
already, after all, existed in a society, and as such, one of the most meaningful ways in which
they could appreciate that mutual concept of humanity, was through cultural conversation over
what they wanted to see, hoped to see, or needed to see.
The debate between Arnold and Bourne, as one-sided as it was (and could only be, given
the time between when they wrote), suggests some additions to the historiography to turn-of-the-
century cultural thought. First, the way in Bourne oscillated between Kantian and Nietzschean
ideas shows that culturally minded intellectuals were still very much engaged with so-called
academic philosophy. And engaged in ways which end up being surprising: one might assume
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that the debate between Bourne and Arnold would have been a kind of proxy war between the
philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche: Arnold would, along such lines, naturally be assumed to be
the avatar of the more conservative (by modern standards) idealism of Kant and its desire to
establish a rational order to the world; Bourne as the Nietzschean agent, enthralled with the
rapturous possibilities of a “poetic” metaphysics. But as I have argued, Kant and Nietzsche seem
to be present in the thoughts of both men, as Bourne found human interconnectivity in Kantian
transcendence and Arnold ultimately relented to a Nietzschean usage of social power. As such,
more attention should be given to the ways that intellectuals tried to weave extant philosophies
into explicitly social visions. Second, it suggests that more attention specifically should be given
into the broader depth of Bourne’s philosophical lineage: his debt to and fondness of Nietzsche is
well-established – both Leslie Vaughan and Matthew Stratton have written fantastic work in this
regard – but the ways in which he engaged with other philosophers and philosophies, with the
exception of pragmatism, is far less investigated.
Now that the background of the philosophy of taste has been established, I will turn to the
ways Arnold and Bourne conceived of their respective cultural theories, and why this debate was
one of the most important sites in the battle of modern cultural idealism. Because for both men,
the stakes could have not been larger. For Matthew Arnold, the battle was one between “culture
and anarchy,” which was, verbatim, the title he gave his book on the matter; a title chosen
without a sliver of hyperbole. Randolph Bourne also saw the stakes as being dire, though instead
of them being over the survival of the nation’s stability, they concerned the fate of America’s
soul: the question for Bourne wasn’t whether America would survive as a socio-political entity,
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but if the country could meet its “spiritual” and creative potential. Could America become, to
paraphrase a way he wrote about the ironist, the kind of country that “counted in the world?”149
Culture Versus Anarchy
One of the main arguments I have been making in this thesis is that one of Randolph
Bourne’s overarching goals came from his beholding the new horizon of cultural ideas and
possibilities at the turn of the century, and seeing in them a potential for a radical idealism that
could meet the problems brought about by modernity, and thus create a more “spiritually”
resonant and authentically democratic society. These ideas and possibilities came from many far-
ranging sources, such as philosophical pragmatism; new generationally situated understandings
of the world; or broadened acceptance of national identity (Chapter One). Or else, from the
“ironic life” that could “re/de/trans-value” the social beliefs that society was built on (Chapter
Two). I have been arguing that it was this humanistic and open-hearted way Bourne approached
the challenges of modernity that makes him a valuable figure to think about in contemporary
scholarship.
But, while Bourne was not unique in holding a perspective of progressive humanism,
neither was he emblematic of the broader attitudes of his time. Turn-of-the-century America,
after all, was not just a time of great cultural change, but also a time of an equally verdant,
reactionary approach to such changes. As I mentioned in the first chapter, with the explosion of
immigration that marked the turn of the century, came an equal and opposite confrontation
against it: there was a sharp rise in nativism and a desire for some to fight against the cultural
changes they saw happening. Even among progressive thinkers, there was uncertainty in how to
manage the implicit cultural “challenge” posed by so many new people, from so many new
149 Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” 1992, 144.
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places and backgrounds – and thus the many debates between the “melting pot” or other versions
of “Americanization.” But where the nativists could be violent, while the progressives always
believed in an absolute benevolence behind their programs, in either case some kind of
oppression was unavoidable. And Matthew Arnold, though not writing in American context,
certainly believed his cultural idealism to be, if nothing else, fundamentally kind.
In Bourne’s time, Matthew Arnold was one of the mostly highly regarded cultural
thinkers, with influential figures such as John Erskine, Bourne’s Columbia professor and
inspiring voice behind the Great Books movement, and Ellery Sedgwick, owner of and Bourne’s
editor at the Atlantic Monthly, considering themselves Arnoldian devotees.150 Bourne, as is
probably clear by now, was decidedly not among these Arnoldian fellows. And he never had
been. Bruce Clayton notes that “As early as his college days, Bourne had begun a polemical
quarrel” with Arnold’s concept of culture.151 Bourne’s distaste of Arnoldian thought was so
apparent, in fact, upon publishing “The Life of Irony” – discussed in depth in the previous
chapter – Sedgwick mentioned in a letter to Bourne, “I have never heard you say much about
your reading, but I take it that you have great antipathy toward Matthew Arnold.”152
If Bourne held antipathy toward Arnold in 1911, by 1914 he saw Arnold’s idealism as a
genuine cultural threat. What was it about Matthew Arnold that Bourne found so dangerous?
What was it about a deceased English poet and cultural critic – whom by accounts was a
perfectly amiable fop – that caused Bourne to dedicate two essays railing against his ideas? (To
150 The Great Books movement is probably the most visible and influential part of the Arnoldian legacy that persist to this day. My undergraduate Honor’s College required a cross-disciplinary introductory Humanities survey which they proudly boasted was based on Columbia’s, for example. 151 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 16. 152 Quoted from: Clayton, 61.
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be fair, Bourne never once leveled any ad hominem attacks against the man; likewise I have no
intention of placing Arnold in the same camp as other culturally conservative moments such as
the nativists or the “America First” crowd). If you read the scholarship on these two essays –
“Our Cultural Humility” (written in 1914) and “Cult of the Best” (written in 1916) – the reason
is mostly depicted as one of a deep, but simple, disagreement about how best to understand
culture. Bruce Clayton understands Bourne as seeing Arnoldian thinking as “loathsome and
politically reactionary.”153 Casey Nelson Blake, meanwhile, sees the main problem as being the
Arnoldian “tendency for an education oriented toward the acquisition of ‘the best’ to overlook
‘the joyous masses who might easily…have evolved a folk-culture if they had not been outlawed
by this idea.”154 Leslie Vaughan sees the issue as a category mistake: where Arnold saw culture
as definable entities – art and thoughts – Bourne wanted to change the conception of culture to
“the interaction among people, places, and artifacts…a ‘living effort’ of a people’s self-
expression and solidarity.”155
They’re all correct, here and there, of course. But as I have already suggested, there is a
misunderstanding of the stakes at play in Bourne and Arnold’s cultural imaginations. One of the
reasons, as I argued in the previous chapter, for why Bourne wrote about irony from an
omniscient, objective perspective, was to secure irony’s place for the sake of his idealism – irony
was too important for his idealism to be debated, so he simply wrote about it as if it were brute
fact. Because, part of his cultural, democratic idealism needed individuals to be able to transcend
their personal experience in order to truly appreciate each other’s value and social validity; to be
able to empathize with each other in a sincere way: for without that, a genuine democratic
153 Clayton, 183. 154 Blake, Beloved Community, 95. 155 Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, 125.
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culture would not be feasible – the absence of irony, for Bourne, was a danger for democratic
society.
When writing about the role of taste in culture, however, Bourne was concerned with a
kind of danger that went in the opposite direction: instead of the question of how individuals
could come together to produce a benevolent, democratic culture, he was worried about the ways
in which culture itself could be destructive to the individual. The primary source of this danger,
in Bourne’s thinking, was not Matthew Arnold himself, but what the Englishman’s thinking
sought to create: a top-down, hierarchical, authoritarian ideal in which “good” or “proper”
culture was whatever established and hallowed by elites. In this chapter, I am going to examine
what it was about Arnoldian thinking Bourne found so dangerous and how his critique of Arnold
was his method for explicating his own, radical theory of culture. But to do so requires some
basic understanding of what Arnold envisioned with his cultural idealism.
Arnold and Cultural Stability
As I mentioned above, Matthew Arnold was a leading influence on cultural thinking in
early twentieth-century America. Leslie Vaughan writes that “the genteel cultural critics of the
school of belles lettres” were greatly influenced by Arnold.156 Bourne saw Arnoldian thought
thoroughly dominant during his time world, noting that “it was Matthew Arnold, read and
reverenced, by the generation immediately preceding our own, who set our eyes to the goal of
culture which has become common property of all our world.”157 And Bourne understood that
there were very good reasons for Arnold’s popularity in America at the fin-de-siècle. Arnold
156 Vaughan, 124. 157 Randolph Bourne, “Our Cultural Humility,” in History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: B.W. Huebsch Inc., 1920), 31.
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offered Americans what seemed to be perfect solution to the question of culture and democracy,
as Bourne wrote of Arnold’s persuasive power:
For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had the energy and perseverance could
reasonably expect to acquire by taking thought that orientation of soul to which
Arnold gave the magic name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was
a matter of acquisition with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still a
matter of adding little by little to one's store until one should have a vision of that
radiant limit, when one knew all the best that had been thought and said and
pictured in the world.158
On the one hand, Americans wanted an egalitarian approach to most issues, such a democratic
representation in government, and a socio-economic system that (in theory) allowed anyone to
pull themselves up by the bootstraps, just as Carnegie or Vanderbilt had done. Obviously, not
everyone was “cultured,” in the same way that not everyone was wealthy. But part of that great
American promise was that anyone could be. In the same way that a great industrialist could
have begun as a poor Scottish immigrant or onetime ferry boy, so too was cultural wealth open to
any individual of sufficient ambition. So, it was hardly surprising to Bourne that the Arnoldian
ideal offered a lot that was tantalizing to the American palette: it offered a vision of culture that
was both seemingly egalitarian (available to anyone who really wanted it) and consumerist.
On the other hand, culture, for Bourne, was something of a special social category that
resisted such seemingly egalitarian intrusions: cultural items could be bought, and cultural
appreciation could be acquired, but the objects of cultural appreciation were something of a
different category. As I’ve hoped to make clear in the previous chapters, culture, for Randolph
158 Bourne, 31–32.
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Bourne, wasn’t about stuff; it wasn’t about culture qua acquisition, but rather as a feeling of
belonging and being able to carry one’s beliefs and experiences into the broader social life, and
through that process become a thread in that living skein. Therefore, the general, conservative
impulse regarding culture may have been to keep it protected, to keep it from changing too much
or too quickly. But such a reflex was ultimately destructive in Bourne’s idealism, as his vision of
culture needed to be malleable. In the same way that youth needed to break free from the stodgy,
outdated thinking of the older generations, so too did modern cultural thinking need to escape
from the cultural reverence that defined the “generation immediately preceding.” Bourne’s ideal
needed cultural thinking to be adaptable, open-minded, creative, and resonant with individual
needs. Arnoldian thinking was anything but.
Arnoldian cultural idealism started off benevolently enough, defining culture simply as
“being the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on all the matters which
most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world…”159 This is a fairly
appealing way to frame culture, at least on the surface. It does not come without any potential
issues or critiques (nothing ever does), but I think it would be fair to assume that a lot of people,
especially those outside of the realm of cultural studies, would find it more or less agreeable.
Arnold continued, bolstering his egalitarian bona fides, “[Culture] does not try to teach down to
the level of the inferior classes…. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been
thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of
sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely – nourished and not
bound by them.”160
159 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 6. 160 Arnold, 6. My emphasis.
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Arnoldian thinking proposed a vision of culture that was positioned as universally
attainable: it was a cultural ideal aimed to make the “best known and said in the world” the
baseline of all things worth knowing, equal and open to all, class be damned. And from this,
those gifted with the right disposition or opportunities might be introduced to “sweetness and
light.” Although Arnold did not define the phrase – in the Victorian England he was writing to he
would not have had to – it was a commonly used literary idiom coined by Jonathan Swift
meaning, essentially, “beauty and reason.” All of this was done in the grand pursuit of
“perfection,” which might prima facie ring as a fairly daunting claim. But Arnold came across as
practical and level headed, writing that perfection was, “…an increased spiritual activity, having
for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy...”161
This was a remarkably sensible way to define perfection – a concept that hangs heavy, as being
at once the only thing worth wanting, but also devastatingly indefinable. Is perfection simply
ticking off all of the right boxes, at the right times, in the right order? Is it transcending that
checklist altogether? Or at least in some way bypassing it? Or is it borne of pure human folly and
linguistic accident? Was it a concept so powerful that it was by its very conception impossible? It
is not for nothing that Spinoza only spoke of “perfection” in how it pertained to God. Arnold’s
take on the term is, no doubt, somewhat refreshing, as it frames it in attainable watermarks: be
better in employing reason; get better at appreciating beauty; be kinder to your fellow person.
This was also a definition that seemed like something Bourne could have written as well – reason
as a means to sympathy is definitely something that kicked around in Bourne’s thinking – though
I will soon get into why it did not sync up with what Bourne was thinking at all. But by pulling
161 Matthew Arnold, The Project Gutenberg Etext of Culture and Anarchy, 10th ed. (Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 2003), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4212.
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all of these concepts into his theory, two very important things happened here: first, culture was
defined as the pursuit of “perfection” via “the best thought and said” in the world; second, this
pursuit would lead to an apprehension of beauty and reason. This matters because all of these
concepts – perfection, beauty, and reason – were, in an overtly Kantian manner, concepts that
had to be virtually immutable if they were to have any philosophical value. If perfection was a
moving target, then the word was essentially meaningless. If the concept of reason could be
upended or changed overnight, what good was it? And if the ideals of beauty flopped to and fro
like a trout on a riverbank, what would that say about the intellectual or social utility of those
ideals?
Here, Arnold was aiming for the Kantian metaphysics of rational absolutes; those a priori
concepts that had to obtain if there were to be any philosophical baseline to judgement at all. But
while Arnold was reaching for that, at the same time he did not totally trust the safety net of
“universal subjective validity.” In the Kantian skein, rational apprehension is seemingly
something that all people are capable of, just by having a reason-capable human mind. But what
if it were the case that not all people were capable of such reason? What if their lesser appetites
overruled their innate capacity to transcend to a higher plane of rational judgment? These
concerns were ever-present and dominant in his worldview, and so he needed “a principle of
authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us.”162 Arnold’s
biggest problem was that the high-minded metaphysics of Kant did not so neatly line up with the
real world Arnold perceived. And so, in place of “objective subjectivity” he needed something
more stable, something easier to manage within society. He called it “the best thought and said in
the world.” I will call it The Canon.
162 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 8.
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The Canon
The Canon is basically a compendium of the “best of the best.” Though my term for it is
somewhat idiosyncratic, what it represents is, I imagine, immediately familiar to anyone who
went through a high school or university Humanities class. Recall the mention above of John
Erskine’s Great Books movement, perhaps one of the most institutionalized, and thus common,
instances The Canon today.
For Randolph Bourne, such a top-down cultural structure was frightful to behold. As he
wrote in “History of a Literary Radical,’ “If the ‘classics’ had done little except hold his mind in
an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous taste, they seemed to have done little
more for even the thorough scholars.”163 The Canon was a form of containment – a prison – not
just for the student but even more so for the teacher. The main issue for Bourne, which I will
examine in greater detail below, wasn’t that there were “anointed” works of great cultural
import: because most of the time the works in The Canon were, and remain, meaningful and
valuable and worth talking about; the fact that Shakespeare is taught in pretty much every
English program at some point does not mean reading Shakespeare is a mistake – the problem
comes when such works are automatically assumed to be more worthy than anything else, and
when their proliferation dominates over other works of art or culture that ought to have a notable
place in the cultural conversation.
This is where Matthew Arnold took on a distinctly Nietzschean hue. For all his Kantian
teleology, the methodology behind his cultural theory was ultimately one of social power: who
gets to decide what is culture? Who gets to guard it? Who gets to determines what is “good” and
163 Randolph Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 193.
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what is not? The answer, unsurprisingly, was a phalanx of educated, professional individuals for
whom cultural attunement was a natural disposition, a cultural class transcendent of social class.
He wrote, “…in each class there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their
best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are… for simply concerning themselves with
reason and the will of God, and doing their best to make these prevail; - for the pursuit, in a
word, of perfection.”164 At first glance, this might have been a convincingly egalitarian stance.
As in the movie Ratatouille, mentioned during the introduction, even from a society of literal rats
could come a Remy, an individual capable of creating cuisine that met – and would end up
rivaling – the human competition. But behind this seemingly egalitarian humanism was always a
lingering specter of authoritative cultural power. Because Remy never made rat cuisine; he made
human haute cuisine – specifically French cuisine, which the viewer is meant to assume as being
the pinnacle of gustatory excellence. This culinary assumption is, in and of itself, one baked into
wider cultural beliefs about the comparative value among various national cuisines: it is hard not
to wonder, for example, whether Western audiences would have been so convinced of Remy’s
gourmet gifts had he, instead of French food, which generally commands the highest restaurant
prices, cooked kung-pao chicken, which as a Chinese-American fare tends to occupy the
cheapest rung of takeout.
A cultural keeper and decider could come from anywhere in theory, but no matter where
they came from, they would always end up agreeing on The Canon being the sacred list. Culture
was a top-down paradigm, where those imbued with cultural power and status were able to
determine the “correct” aesthetics for everyone else to follow and appreciate. In the same way
that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals presented ethics as something the powerful used to
164 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 9.
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dominate the weak, Arnold’s theory of culture utilized the same social power dynamic. As
Vaughan describes, Arnold “regarded culture as the property of the chosen people, set against the
shallowness of the philistines. Culture was something to be acquired and consumed passively by
people who had no taste or who presumably did not know better.”165 The purpose of these
“chosen people” was not just cultivation of a list of great cultural works, but a deeper and more
frankly insidious means of preventing anarchy – which for Arnold meant any meaningful
challenge to the status quo. The Canon was not just a list of artworks and ideas, but a mode of
social control. This paradigm was so grotesque to Bourne that he spent two essays calling it out
more or less by name, either under the guise of refuting Matthew Arnold himself or the more
abstracted instantiation of the Englishman’s cultural theory.
Today, there is no shortage of arguments for why The Canon is a deeply flawed and
problematic way of structuring culture. The first that comes to mind is that virtually everyone
who has some say in what does or does not qualify as “the best” has historically been socially
affluent, financially secure, white men – men who were academics, artists, critics, collectors,
curators, publishers, politicians, or otherwise members of the social elite. These were men for
whom good faith disinterestedness in cultural values cannot be assumed without profound
naiveté. Marginalized and minority voices did not have much, if any, presence in the cultural
discourse. This remains a major problem today, but it was an even larger one a century ago. For
Randolph Bourne, however, this was only one expression of a deeper problem: that any form of
institutional cultural authority – The Canon, or as he termed it, “the cult of the best” – was,
perhaps, the most visible modality of that inherently destructive institutionalism, especially
among the university-educated, progressively minded urbanites that made up his social circle. As
165 Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism, 124.
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I have been arguing throughout this thesis, through his writings on “youth,” “trans-nationalism,”
and “irony,” Randolph Bourne was – being one “in-but-not-of-the-world” – always trying to
account and make a place for all of those on the nominal fringe of American society into his
final, idealistic project of American promise. He imagined a place and a voice for all – regardless
of class or national origin – which was the very status that Arnoldian cultural idealism, from its
very intellectual foundations despite its egalitarian posturing, ended up denying. And thus, for
Bourne, dangerous to the potential and progress of his radically idealistic vision of American
culture.
The Cult of the Best
“‘Culture’ has come to mean the jacking-up of one’s appreciations a notch at a time until
they have reached a certain standard level. To be cultured has meant to like masterpieces,”
Bourne wrote.166 Now there wasn’t anything in and of itself wrong with liking masterpieces –
Bourne himself, a talented pianist, took great joy in performing the great works of classical
music. He wrote, “I am not denying the superlative beauty of what has come to be labeled ‘the
best that has been thought and done in the world.’ But I do object to its being made the universal
norm.”167 The last sentence is the clincher: the problem was not liking high art or, by extension,
high culture. I doubt there are many cultural studies scholars today that truly lament the existence
of the aforementioned Criterion Collection or boycott a curated exhibition of post-impressionist
art out of pure principle. For Bourne, the problem came when that was all that one could do; that
the appreciation of established “high art” turned automatic– you call something great because it
has already been determined as being great or because it sufficiently follows the rules that define
166 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 193. 167 Bourne, 194.
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greatness. Bourne, again, “We have devoted much attention to importing aesthetic values and
works of art from Europe, and to providing museums, libraries and art courses for the public. But
we have scarcely asked ourselves what is to come if it all.”168 It was easy to walk through a
museum, scratch your chin before a “masterpiece” and say to yourself, “Ah yes, this is a great
and important work of art” while never asking yourself why it was important or regarded as such
in the first place. You could be told what the work art meant, what it represented, or was trying
to say. And you could be told why it was important historically, aesthetically, or thematically.
But that was the extent of the spectator’s job. Determining those meanings, those reasons why
the work of art was important was meant to be left to professionals who knew about such things.
For Bourne, this meant curators, art historians/academics, and wealthy collectors.
Bourne wasn’t arguing that it was bad for a society to have a set of art-world
professionals, or else curated museums and art history classes in universities. But he was very
much concerned about what happened when those institutional opinions were myopic and
powerful enough to reinforce an aesthetic ideal that had little bearing to the realities of modern
life. This kind of cultural hierarchy, which often dominated the cultural discourse, was
categorically un-American in flavor. Bourne noted, “To me this conception of culture is
unpleasantly undemocratic.”169 Instead of culture being a communal, shared thing – a space in
which any opinion or preference could be offered and considered, and possible adopted – such
cultural hierarchies created an absolute dictated from on high. Arnoldian culture ultimately
supported a system that could not adequately understand the social needs of those living in
modern America. For Bourne, there were two main dangers that Arnoldian idealism produced.
168 Bourne, 193. My emphasis. 169 Bourne, 194.
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The first concerned a conceptual dilemma of alienation and cultural disenfranchisement. The
second regarded the practical production of American culture at the turn of the century.
In “The History of a Literary Radical,” a semi-autobiographical account of Bourne’s own
education, in which he wrote himself as his own fictional friend Miro whose educational
experiences were then reported by the “real” Bourne, he recalls reading the “dead classics” – the
usual suspects of “the greats” ranging from august Greek and Latin figures, to Dante,
Shakespeare, and so on. Throughout this education, “His mind was a moving present,
obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and piercing into a no more comprehended
future.”170 For all their importance, they “passed before his mind like figures in a crowded
street.”171 He found himself asking, “Where did they fit into [his] life?” For all their gravity, the
“dead classics” did little to move him or speak to him. “Miro found himself surfeited and
dissatisfied,” Bourne wrote of his own art education. 172 What it meant to be alive in America in
the first decades of the twentieth century was not a question to be answered by the classics. They
were not, to his experiences and needs, vital. They were, again, “an uncomprehending prison”
that held his mind in stasis.
The “cult of the best” was harmful because it negated the ability to think about culture
reflexively. It rejected the inquisitive powers of youth and irony by declaring there was nothing
to question at all – the best was simply the best. “Art education has, in other words, become
almost a branch of moral education,” he wrote, meaning that all it did was point out right and
wrong, while neglecting to foster any more curious or creative perspective.173 “Criticism and
170 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 186. 171 Bourne, 188. 172 Bourne, 187. 173 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194.
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expression are neglected in favor of absorption and reverence of the classics,” he continued.
Instead of thinking about what a work of art was trying to say, instead of thinking about why a
work might matter, the discourse became a droll matter of repeating whatever established critics
and scholars had to say. An education in “the classics,” Bourne wrote was a sequence of
“medicinal doses of inspiration.”174 This amounted to malpractice, as instead of prompting
anything creative or meaningful for the individual it “had done little for him except hold his
mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous taste.”175 The Canon could
define was “good,” but this professional consensus did not mean it was meaningful to anyone’s
social experience. The ought to be and the is did not line up.
The “cult of the best” did not care about what mattered to individuals. “It is prompted by
the scholarly ideal rather than by an ideal of taste. The prize goes to those who can acquire the
most of these goods. No one is challenged to spontaneous any more than the monk is asked to
create his own dogmas,” he wrote.176 In this way, the experience of art was a game, either of
ownership – who personally owns the most august collection – or of facts – can I cite a renowned
critic’s interpretation, can I point out which of the figures in a painting was Toulouse’s mistress,
can I list off all of the themes and references contained on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?
What’s missing from the equation was what does any of this have to do with me? What can it
teach me about my here and now? The answer to those questions was simply: nothing. By design
the “meaning” of culture was “something handed down, not grown in the garden of [one’s] own
appreciation.”177 But in to live in the world, especially a modern one that was fundamentally
174 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 188. 175 Bourne, 194. 176 Randolph Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194. 177 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 194.
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different from the that of previous generations, required far more than the ability to repeat the
words of critics or parrot passages from a textbook. It instead required the ability to think critical,
to be able to navigate a newly destabilized society and reach into the chaos and from it construct
some measure of stability, and this mean fostering an ideal of taste.
This is the first part of the passage cited above: “For as long as you humbly follow the
best, you have no eyes for the vital…If your training has been to learn and appreciate the best
that has been thought and done in the world, it has not been to discriminate between the
significant and the irrelevant that the experience of every day is flinging up in your face.”178 In
the previous chapter, I argued that Bourne produced new cultural concepts that would help
people navigate the challenges of modernity – the gestalt of pragmatism, youth, and irony that he
understood as the Experimental Life. Pragmatism in particular was to be the guide of experience,
the thing to determine what was important and what was not. I think it is clear that Bourne was
linking the necessities of culture to the same ideals here. Cultural ideals, he believed, needed to
be socially efficacious; they needed to do something in helping us process experience and live in
the world. The “vital” for Bourne was whatever people needed to flourish amidst the tumultuous
tides of modernity. It was what was necessary to push back against the flattening and alienating
waves crashing against the shores of early-twentieth century America, as brought about by
industrialization, mass media, and mass consumption.
Still, “vital” remains somewhat of a vague term, though this was by design. There was
common rhetorical move Bourne often used. He often employed commonplace words, such as
“vital” or “spiritual,” and meant them both in their everyday usage, as well as in a second,
idiosyncratic way. You could read through his essays with the everyday usage of certain words
178 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194.
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in mind, and have little trouble understanding his main ideas. But if you were truly reading him
as he wanted to be read, then understanding him meant in some ways understanding yourself.
Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels observe that
“Bourne’s writing felt aphoristic because he often presented complex meanings in
short, poetic phrases that required effort on the part of the reader to unpack (i.e.,
‘war is the health of the State’)… they invited the audience into a process of
meaning making, but they were also rhetorical insofar as the meanings created,
although varied and plural, all tended to carry with them certain motivational
tendencies. Aphorisms thus sacrificed power for complexity but gained the
compensation of active participation and depth of meaning.”179
With this in mind, Bourne was inviting us to interrogate the meaning of “vital” along our own,
individual terms – because if I cannot determine what the word “vital” points out for me, how
can I start to find the things and concepts identified by the word. Discovering what was “vital”
was not asymmetrical or static, but a process that was going on constantly. It is only by being in
the world that I come to find the things that are important to me, and these in turn go one to
change how I understand the very concept of personal importance. And this, of course, would
naturally vary from person to person. Just as the “cult of the best” was dangerous in its top-down
designation of meaning, the “vital” would, as an oppositional ideal, be a corrective. It was
something for everyone to determine for themselves, by reflecting upon their own experiences
and needs, and as such it was never something that could be taught down. But all The Canon
could ever do was teach downward.
179 Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels, “‘The Effort of Reason, and the Adventure of Beauty’: The Aesthetic Rhetoric of Randolph Bourne,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 3 (August 1, 2012): 287, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2012.691174.
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This was Bourne’s concern when it came to the Arnoldian conception of culture. “The
best” did not always equate to what one found personally meaningful or socially relevant to their
particular situations. Even worse, it sought to negate the ability to think with independent
creativity, with a critical eye pointed in service of the self. And if culture did not produce those
abilities, what was it actually worth? “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after
another,” Bourne wrote, “and no training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has
become able to react to forms and settings.”180 By its very definition, “the best,” as it was always
backward-looking to some degree, did not hone one’s ability to react. It could be a guide to
ideals, but these ideals were always a matter of “then” and not “now.” The Arnoldian
formulation admitted as much by being the best “thought and said” and not the best “being
thought and being said.” Living in a society required being able to cope with whatever
assortment of problems it might throw at you right now. When Bourne talked about a series of
“aesthetic challenges,” he was not using the term in its more contemporary meaning of
“regarding the philosophy of art and beauty,” but the more in a sense of “relating to perception
and sensation.” Essentially, he was talking about what happens at the intersection of the world
and one’s conscious apprehension of it. Here, we can again see pragmatism at work in Bourne’s
thinking, as he prioritized the experience of being in the world as prior to any definite
conclusions about meaning and purpose, both of which – as the “vital” – were to be determined
by people through those experiences.
The Arnoldian cultural platform, Bourne believed, lacking in any capacity for social
reaction, was a failure. It was a failure in the same way that the “melting pot” theory of
American multiculturalism ended up as, which I explored in the first chapter: it was situated in a
180 Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” 194.
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conception of culture that could not speak to the necessities of the American modernity.
Arnoldian culture, given the absence of social reactivity or creative reflexivity it left in its wake,
ended up being a spiritually empty affectation, as had the project of cultural assimilation: they
both sought to fold the kaleidoscopic potential of modern American into a idealism based upon
cultural hierarchies and social homogony. Arnoldian ideals had failed and Bourne had little
interest in running a diagnostic in attempt to save them. He wanted them dead and gone. And he
wanted them replaced. Not with just a different set of values, but with an entirely different
cultural mode all together.
Life as an Aesthetic Challenge
“Artistic appreciation in this country has been understood chiefly as the acquiring of a
familiarity with ‘good works of art,’ and with the historical fields of the different arts, rather than
as the cultivating of spontaneous taste,” Bourne lamented.181 He continued later, “An education
in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not devote itself to clarifying and integrating
natural taste. The emphasis must be always on what you do like, not on what you ought to
like.”182 So what is “taste” and why was it so important to Bourne? “Taste,” of course, does not
seem to be a particularly impressive criteria on which to evaluate art. “I guess I just don’t like it,”
while an entirely valid opinion, is not an especially interesting one. But for Bourne, following
Nietzsche, as explained above, “taste” was the foundation of social aesthetics, and by extension,
social existence. It was the lived framework from which experience was understood and
digested. “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another,” he wrote, “and no
training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and
181 Bourne, 193. 182 Bourne, 194.
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settings” in a pragmatically phrased echo of the Nietzschean conception that all life was a
manifest struggle of taste.183 The purpose of taste, then, was in cultivating the ability to react to
these forms and settings; it was liking and disliking unto power. And though he does not
explicitly weave taste into his previously established social vision of pragmatism, youth, and
irony, I argue that those early ideals were in the background of his thinking. Pragmatism, youth,
and irony were all inquisitive methods and critical perspectives about living in the world, and
taste was no different. In fact, I think there was a way in which taste functioned as the extension
of those meta-cultural concepts into everyday experience. Where pragmatism helped determine
the “truth” of philosophical ideas based on their “cash value,” taste was the pragmatic evaluation
of cultural objects and ideas, the creation of cultural “truths.” Pragmatism demanded that all
critique stem from experience and the first instance of the cultural-aesthetic experience was
always already rooted in the self: What do I see? What do I think it is? What do I do with it?
How do I feel about it? Can I find myself in it? Do I want to? Those weren’t just important
questions to ask but perhaps the most important ones because they spoke to something that was
obscured in the increasingly complicated modern world. The ideal of youth would supply the
impulse for creativity and experimentation; it would be the willingness to go out of one’s
comfort zone and play around with new cultural possibilities. Irony would provide a spiritual
balance through the trans-valuation of values and the empathic consideration of the cultural
wants and needs of others, essential considerations for a flourishing democratic society.
Arnoldian thought, however, foreclosed upon the power of these social concepts by
denying the individualized self in the first place; it always situated culture on the outside of the
individual. “This tyranny of the ‘best,’” Bourne warned in “Our Cultural Humility,” “objectifies
183 Bourne, 194.
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all our taste. It is a ‘best’ that is always outside of our native reactions to the freshnesses and
sincerities of life, a ‘best’ to which our spontaneities must be disciplined… we effectually protect
ourselves from that inner taste which is the only sincere ‘culture.’”184 The Arnoldian “cult of the
best” made cultural value something outside of the individual, something achieved or acquired,
rather that part of a personal, lived experience. And it also objectified the person trying to
apprehend the work of art, making them an object of aesthetic-critical hierarchies, instead of an
agent in their own right. It divorced individuals from their own needs in art and culture, reducing
them to objects staring at other objects, all determined by hierarchies that frequently viewed
them with indifference or contempt.
This was what made the “tyranny of the best” a destructive force – it denied any open,
two-way relationship with culture and in doing so obliterated the possibility for individual
authenticity. Under the “tyranny of the best,” what was culturally valuable and meaning was
already decided. You could accept it, and be part of a one-way cultural conversation, or you
could reject it and have no place in the conversation at all. Culture, essentially, was never really
yours, even if you came up in the society that produced it, because it was something that – unless
you were part of the small elite of culture guardians – was off limits to your contributions, either
material or intellectual.
The aesthetics of taste, however, allowed people to center themselves in culture, which
was increasingly necessary in the context of burgeoning modernity. New and developing
technologies, the mass industrialization of commerce and media, and the ever more massive
social bureaucracies made it easy for one to feel individually insignificant in society; after all,
compared to all of those great engines of change and progress, how could I possibly matter?
184 Bourne, “Our Cultural Humility,” 39.
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When everything was changing so fast and so seemingly indifferent to whether I even existed or
not, how could I possibly find anything meaningful in the world around me? Taste offered an
alternative. It made it so that someone could look at the world around them and still find ways to
be connected, to feel once again as part of culture. Because taste was a kind of ownership: it
could only ever be truly mine. Sure, it would undoubtedly be influenced by or shared in part with
others. And it definitely ought to confront the new as often as possible and be challenged
constantly. But ultimately, no one can make you like something or dislike something against
your will. Not truly, not deep down in your soul. What one likes or dislikes can be challenged or
judged or even mocked and shamed – it might become the cause of embarrassment or self-
loathing in the worst of these instances – but it can never be taken away. And this is where
Bourne, in my argument, drew from Nietzsche – taste was a form of social power, a means to by
projecting one’s self out into the social, they in turn could challenge and alter the very fabric of
social reality. But whereas Nietzsche saw this mostly in terms of the strong dominating and
oppressing the weak with their vision of reality, a victor in competition, Bourne saw taste as
liberating and equalizing; it was a power that all held, innately, on an individual level. What did
or did not fall under the umbrella of “culture,” under the Arnoldian paradigm, was solely decided
by a distinct class of “civilized,” “cultured” elites whose social purpose was determining such
things. But because the very nature of taste was individualistic and malleable, it meant that there
could never truly be a dominion of taste or an aesthetic tyrant – there could be no absolute
cultural authority, just a constantly changing conversation. Bourne, with his aesthetics of taste,
envisioned culture as emergent from a communal, aesthetic discourse. It was to be a radical
break from the institutional, status quo of cultural power.
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When Bourne wrote, “Civilized life is really one aesthetic challenge after another, and no
training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and
settings,” he was offering up a distinctly pragmatic solution to the problem of culture and one’s
place in it. Instead of culture as being deontological, which is to say and endpoint one arrived at
or a mere acquisition one had to make in order to be properly “civilized”, Bourne conceived it as
the very substance of society. Culture was not to be the possession of an elite class that would
then be dictated downward, because it was not a thing to “be held as personal property”185. It was
an emergent event that came from people living together in a society; gravity as emergent from
the nature of matter. Culture was an effect that was produced by a community, a “living effort, a
driving attempt both at sincere expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression
wherever it was found.”186 As such, Bourne’s cultural idealism was against the idea of cultural
authority, dismissive of any meaningful distinction of high art and low art, and suggested new
ways for individuals to direct social power. It rejected the socially disinterested interpretations of
the elite and professional cultural stewards, and put the weight of cultural discourse upon the
“vital” – what culture meant or could mean to any and every one living in the world.
Conclusion
Talk about the “meaning of life” has become such a silly cliché at this point that it is hard
to even think about earnestly. I mean, that’s the joke, right? Classic New Yorker cartoon content
– some poor fool treks up a tall mountain to the ostensibly wise mystic just to ask, “what is the
meaning of life” only to be told something disappointing, something that undercuts the whole
value of the question. And that’s the whole point of those cartoons, right? Just to show how
185 Bourne, “The History of a Literary Radical,” 194. 186 Bourne, 195.
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naïve and dumb and impossible the question is in the first place. Randolph Bourne did not think
the question was any of those things. In his pre-war writings on the Experimental Life and
culture, finding the meaning of life, or finding a way to come up with a meaning to life, seems to
have been the underlying concern that ties them all together. In “Two Generations” – his reply to
Ms. Comer’s grousing about what she saw as the modern, layabout youth, which I discussed in
the previous chapter – Bourne made it clear that he believed there was incredible rift between the
world America was leaving and the one it was entering. Whatever gave grounding or guidance to
the older generations simply would not hack it for the younger ones. Hence, the Experimental
Life of the first chapter: Bourne wanted to find a way for people to not just survive, but
democratically thrive in the chaos of burgeoning modernity. This meant that the idea of culture
needed to be conceptually rewritten as a process of creative sociality, not merely a pre-ordained
aesthetic or intellectual destination. This is why Bourne focused his cultural evangelism on
“taste” and why he felt Arnold’s beliefs were not simply trite or old fashioned but actively
dangerous and destructive. Arnoldian thinking, being deontological, was not one of sudden
adaptability or personal relevance, though those were the precise qualities Bourne saw as
necessary in grappling with the modern world. In the chaos and fracturing that came with
modernity, The Canon did not function as an anchor providing stability in the storm, but as a
millstone dragging people down and preventing them from navigating through the constant series
of aesthetic challenges that confronted them day after day.
“Taste,” on the other hand, would allow people to reclaim their cultural agency, to reach
out into the world and freely embrace what was meaningful or relevant to them. Through “taste”
and the internalized “sincere culture” that would come from it, the individual would come to
matter just a little bit more in the world, be able to find that “self-transcendence” which would
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help them be less isolated from and more empathetic to their neighbors. For Bourne, taste was
not simply a matter of likes and dislikes, but as I have argued, a complicated theory that tied
together Kantian idealism with Nietzsche means: it was Kant’s social transcendence through a
form of Nietzsche’s will to power, but a will to power that ended up being collaborative rather
than oppressive.
Of course, this did not totally negate the main Arnoldian concern: would not basing
culture on taste bring about the exact kind of cultural anarchy that Matthew Arnold so feared,
wherein a lack of judicious cultural control stabilizing society would result in the tyranny of the
basest individual whims and desires? How, for example, would “taste” not simply replace the
“cult of the best” with an equally destructive “cult of the self?” Or in a society without cultural
hierarchies, would a spat of drunken, back-alley fisticuffs have just as much cultural value as a
Mozart symphony? “Through culture seems to lie our way, not only to perfection, but even to
safety,” Arnold wrote of the key function of culture.187 And while an aesthetics of taste might
make the individual more free, it would not seem to make society more safe.
Then again, the democratization of taste was not the same thing as declaring that all
cultural artefacts and ideas had an inherently equal value. Nor was it a commitment to act as
such. Bourne’s rejection of cultural hierarchies or institutional authority was not tantamount to
cultural nihilism or anarchy. It would be prevented from falling into such possibilities as the
aesthetics of taste was part of Bourne’s cultural idealism, along with pragmatism, youth, “trans-
nationalism,” and irony. It was okay to have disagreements or debates over the value of cultural
ideas – that was the soul and function of irony, after all – to trans-valuate values. Meanwhile,
youth and trans-nationalism were concepts meant to embrace and celebrate all of the new and
187 Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy,” 10.
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profound possibilities, and the people who made them so, attendant to American life in the early
twentieth century. And yes, sometimes confronting the new and unfamiliar – especially on
crowded streets, strewn with colored lights, the smells of smoke and sloshed liquor coming from
every direction along with music and chatter in languages unknown, while spinning and spinning
just trying to take it all in – was an experience of “nausea on Main Street.” But the thing about
nausea is that sometimes it will not go away until you are used to being at sea.
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CONCLUSION
History as an Echo
“Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries.”
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Plot 188
You don’t even have to imagine this anymore.
There is a plague destroying the nation. And not just the country, but the entire world.
City streets, once pregnant with life and possibility, are emptied. Public officials panic, because
there is increasingly the worry that there is not enough space to store all of the bodies, which
build up, day after day, with no end in sight.
Rising nativism – increasingly violent – is stoking fires of racial hatred across America.
“America first!” some shout, as they position all their ills and grievances against people who
only wanted a chance to live and thrive, or really only wanted a chance for their children to live
and thrive, in a country that built its own mythology upon that very possibility, that very
promise.
Almost daily, a select few individuals experience expanses of wealth that dwarf
imagination; it is above and beyond what has ever existed in human history. Instead coming to
the aid of the beleaguered masses, they invest in passion projects, do everything in their power to
kill unions, and daydream about things they can name after themselves.
Massive media conglomerates, whether for purposes of ideological power or economic
gain, have made the “news” in the image of their own self-benefit: whether through propaganda,
188 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998), 307.
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or else simple mass disinformation, the day-to-day events of the world are depicted as less-and-
less “factual,” than they are as useful to whatever interest reports them.
Europe, tenuously kept at peace by overly complicated alliances – meant to persevere
through long standing historical animosities – is starting tear at these seams. Old empires, long
dying, are increasingly headed toward the matter of obituaries, not resurrection. What this can
possibly mean for the future of the world is gloomily unclear.
New forms of technology have irrevocably changed how people communicate, what they
think they know, what they believe. And how they make money, how they survive, how the live
day-to-day. Some celebrate these new possibilities; others fear them. But no one really knows
which direction the wind is blowing.
The future of American democracy seems genuinely, gravely uncertain.
A Death, Premature
You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal
sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were
winning…And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of
inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean
or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply
prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We
had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and
beautiful wave…
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas189
189 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, 2nd Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 68.
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There are moments in history where it seems that new and radical possibilities not only
appear on the horizon but seem so perfectly poised to occur; to happen; to take place; and thus
usher in a new era. And there have always been, it seems, periods of upheaval or instability
wherein the old ways of thinking are on the precipice of obsolescence, of replacement, such that
the opportunities for radical change and paradigm shifts in ideals seem all but inevitable; and in
the wake of the old world’s demise, a better one would be all but certain. From a hotel in Las
Vegas, the legendary and commensurate drunk, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote an obituary for such
an idealistic moment, wherein the waters of social renewal, so seemingly strong and certain in
the 1960s, had failed, not even a decade later. “With the right kind of eyes,” he wrote, “you can
almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."190
Despite the momentum behind that odd alliance of 1960s subcultures, America refused to
change.
Idealism can be likened to a kind of high or drunken optimism, because it usually results
in a hangover; an intellectual headache marked by regret and shame that one ever believed in the
it at all. Randolph Bourne was no exception to this, as he saw the foundations of his idealism
collapse with America’s entry into World War I. For Bourne, the process of militarization was of
less importance than the fact that so many of his peers and idols had so quickly acquiesced to it
in the first place – it was an intellectual failing more than it was a political one. At first he was
angry; then he despaired.
Hopelessness is the antipode of idealism, and what is arguably Bourne’s most famous
essay was a thorough encapsulation of that grim intellectual space. There are a lot of reasons
why “The State” is stands out among Bourne’s ouvre: it was more ambitious in scope, as he
190 Thompson, 68.
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attempted to combine a new intellectual history of America, from the Revolution to his present,
with a political theory on the structure of modern nations; and it was unfinished – found in a
waste bin in his room – and published after his death, both of which contribute to it often being
considered his masterpiece. Where he had previously seen so much promise at the heart the
American experiment, “The State” argued that whatever potential he had once descried had only
ever been an illusion, an absence that had always already been there.
In “The State,” to quickly summarize, Bourne posited three levels to society: there was
the Nation (or Country), which was people and their culture; the Government, which were the
political institutions; and then the State, which was an ontologically diffuse “mythic conception”
that operated below the levels of politics and culture. Bourne wrote, evoking the impulse to a
herd mentality, “Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their
collectivity at the threat of war.”191 (It is telling that Bourne, who had previously written of all
people at living instances of moral consideration and creative potential, now compared them to
cattle). For this reason, Bourne wrote in his most infamous line, “War is the health of the
State.”192 Michael Walzer adds that while war was the health of the state, “it was the moral death
of the people. And yet the people rush headlong to their death…”193 Modern nations, Bourne
despaired, were locked in a cycle where the State, needing war, would induce its citizens to a
herd mentality, which would lead them to die on battlefields, only confirming the dangers against
which only the State could defend. “We reverence not our country but the flag,” he wrote.194
Symbols and abstract fear had overtaken substance and critical reflexivity.
191 Randolph Bourne, “The State,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 73. 192 Bourne, 71. 193 Walzer, The Company of Critics, 62. 194 Bourne, “The State,” 87.
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“The State” was, in addition to being among his most famous, was also among Bourne’s
most complex works. He was trying to write in a more analytical and less polemical mode, and
so it lacked some of his distinctive voice and personality. In the introduction to this thesis, I tried
to explain, insofar as I understand it, Bourne’s definition of the “spiritual.” It was best
understood, I tried to show, as his concept of a “moral and creative” social existence, in which
one would embrace the possibilities of “being in the world.” But now that I have examined the
foundations of his idealism, there is, perhaps, another quote that shows just how much he had
lost that idealism: “This whole era has been spiritually wasted.”195
Bourne wrote that sentence in June of 1917, in the essay “War and the Intellectuals,” two
months after President Woodrow Wilson – who had famously run for the office on the promise
of keeping America out of the conflict – had declared war on Germany, thus formalizing
America’s entry into World War I. And so quickly, many of Bourne’s friends and peers had
fallen in step with the order – Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, to name the most significant.
That act of American belligerence and the intellectuals’ support for it served to completely
obliterate Bourne’s idealism from the ground up. So, when he wrote “this whole era has been
spiritually wasted,” he was not writing rhetorically, but from a place of genuine despair. He
meant it – all of the potential I have argued above that he had envisioned; all of the idealism he
had tried so hard to establish and promote; all of it was simply nullified, seemingly overnight.
The era was “spiritually wasted” because all of the intellectual promise and potential that he had
founded his idealism upon were suddenly erased. Instead of an American future founded on the
195 Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 6.
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new possibilities brought about by creative empathy and recognition of culturally creative, upon
individual determination, there was only an intellectual wasteland.
In the same essay Bourne also wrote, “Only in a world where irony was dead could an
intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-
liberalism and world-democracy.”196 Normally, when we hear about the “death of irony,” it is
usually meant as a call for a return to sincerity, a declaration that snark and sarcasm and over-
wrought self-awareness have nothing to offer in a given moment. But, as I argued in Chapter
Two, “irony,” for Bourne, was not the same thing as is meant it today: it was, instead, the
empathetic disposition that made the trans-valuation of values possible, and thus the foundations
that made democracy, in and of itself, possible to begin with. So, when Bourne wrote about the
“death of irony,” he was not making a plea for newfound social sincerity – “irony” already
assumed that, after all – but was lamenting the obliteration of the very dialectical process that
could sustain American society in that modern time of fracture. And make no mistake, he
experienced this obliteration directly: when he attacked John Dewey for supporting American
militarization, Dewey got him fired from the New Republic; when he criticized the war in
another magazine, The Seven Arts, that publication was promptly deprived of funding and
shuttered. In the face of war, Bourne was silenced; dissent or contrary opinions were made
virtually impossible to elucidate. The death of “irony” was a foreclosing of any position not
already deemed acceptable or amenable to the dominant power structures, both political and
intellectual. Walzer puts it succinctly: “To oppose the war meant to howl uselessly in the
wilderness.”197 Bourne’s obituary for “irony” was essentially a pre-emptive obituary of
196 Bourne, 5. 197 Walzer, The Company of Critics, 59.
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American life altogether, as once again Walzer observes that Bourne “seemed to despair of
democracy itself.”198
Too often, this is where scholars mark the end of the story of Randolph Bourne. The
prose may change but the events do not: Randolph Bourne died in 1918 from the influenza
pandemic that took tens of millions other lives; it was raining; Bourne’s ending was ultimately
not a happy one. But Bourne did live to see the end of the war, and on November 21, 1918, he
wrote to his mother, “Now that the war is over people can speak freely again and we can dare to
think. Its [sic] like coming out of a nightmare.”199 He would be dead before the year was done,
and no one can say what he would have thought – much less written about – the new paradigm of
American power and the cultural explosion that would follow in that wake.
I am not going to end this with Bourne’s death. Instead, I hope that this thesis has shown
that, despite Bourne’s later despair, his cultural idealism ultimately could survive it, even if he
did not necessarily realize that himself. His refutation of that hope does not compel us to follow
him in that direction; that an idealistic vision faltered does not mean that it ends up being useless.
Over the three chapters of this thesis, I have examined Randolph Bourne’s cultural idealism,
from its philosophical foundations through a radical interpretation of pragmatism (Chapter One);
from the disposition of trans-valuative, creative empathy – as made possible with “irony”
(Chapter Two); and from the way he envisioned culture as a living, malleable feature of social
life, which could and ought to be embraced by all members of society, so that they could live in a
world defined by their own subjective needs (Chapter Three).
198 Walzer, 61. 199 Randolph Bourne, “Three Excerpts from Letters to His Mother, Mrs. Sara Bourne, October and November 1918,” in The World of Randolph Bourne, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1965), 326.
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Randolph Bourne was an idealist, but what set him apart from others was how he found it
in unusual places. As Cornel West observed in the first chapter, it was “social misery” that John
Dewey confronted in the early years of the twentieth century.200 That time, after all, was in the
wake of the so-called “Gilded Age,” and despite the efforts of progressive leaders and activists,
the country was hardly in a golden era. It would be easy to look upon the nation; fractured by
modernity; rife with inequality, prejudice, racism; confused about its identity, its future, its role
in the world; and find little to preface idealism upon. And yet, Randolph Bourne did. He was not
blind to the misery of the world, but nor was he blinded by it. With the right set of eyes, he was
able to see the intellectual and cultural potential just behind the surface. And it wasn’t just a
potential for improvement, but radical change - Randolph Bourne envisioned an America truly
steeped in the democratic values of empathy, camaraderie, and open-minded discourse; he
imagined a nation where diversity was synonymous with strength and cultural agency was shared
by all. He did this by thinking about ideas themselves in radical, novel ways – he took concepts
and made them into what they had to be; in, but not of the world.
Today, the future of America seems to be as precarious as it ever has. The fate of
democracy, of civil society, is terrifyingly uncertain. This thesis has never been an argument that
Randolph Bourne’s idealism held the solution to our current problems. But I have argued that he
too lived in chaotic and uncertain times, and despite that was able to imagine a radical future for
the American promise. We still have that choice, it seems to me. And while whatever idealism
we imagine today cannot and will not be the exact same as Bourne’s, there are few better places
to start, and few better examples to follow.
Randolph Bourne lives.
200 West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 79.
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