In my essay “The Herd Mind,” I explained how “War is the health of the State,” according to Randolph Bourne: in particular, how war causes a country to regress from a diverse civilization to a uniform herd locked in fight-or-flight mode, and easily driven by the government. As I mentioned in my talk “How the … Continue reading “From Primitive to Universal Plunder”
Tag: randolph bourne
The Herd Mind
Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State.” This has long been the byword for anti-war, anti-state libertarians, and rightly so. But Bourne did not mean exactly what most libertarians take this phrase to mean. To understand the maxim’s original meaning, as Bourne used it in his great unfinished essay “The State,” one … Continue reading “The Herd Mind”
The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne
Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century—in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic—until his radically antiwar views on … Continue reading “The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne”