Randolph Bourne and William James

Introduction

During the 1910s Randolph Bourne was an influential spokesman for a younger generation of American intellectuals and reformers. His essays in leading journals of thought, politics, and culture such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic tackled every contemporary concern. Rejecting the genteel tradition, he called for a literature grounded in American experience, psychologically and sociologically realistic. He advocated for progressive reform of public schools, favoring education geared to life. He supported feminism to free women from economic dependency on men but criticized separatist feminists. He fiercely and bravely condemned U.S. involvement in World War I, seeing it as an outgrowth of the inevitable militaristic propensities of the modern industrial state (Bourne, p.89-98). Predicting that wartime repression would kill social reform, he was one of the few Anglo-American intellectuals to dissent from the war. His essays on the assimilation of immigrants rejected the idea of the "melting pot," envisioning instead a "trans-national America" that would embrace ethnocultural diversity (Clayton, p.101-103).

Bourne had a highly visible disability. His birth in Bloomfield, New Jersey, on May 30, 1886, was difficult, and forceps delivery left his face, mouth, and ear twisted. Spinal tuberculosis at age four stunted his growth and severely curved his spine. In adulthood, he was just under five feet tall. His labored breathing made it difficult for him to project his voice in large rooms. Still, "he talked with a slow relentless flow of words," said a friend, and he had boundless energy.

Discussion

The truth for James is not an inherent and immutable to the idea, but a pass in the idea that its verifiability. Verifiability is for James in a pleasant feeling of harmony and progress in the succession of ideas and facts, i.e., to have such ideas, they follow each other and are also suitable to each event experienced reality. These true ideas play a key role: they are useful tools for the individual that guide their choices to address the reality of a satisfactory and not detrimental. Its possession is a very practical, far from being an end in itself, is a means to meet other basic needs.

Teaching Americans that all parts of modern society were interdependent regardless of national boundaries (Bourne, p.48-52). In a climate where the very thought of peace or nonintervention had become an act of disloyalty, Dewey initially expressed minimal concern. Not surprisingly, Lasch focuses on Randolph Bourne's articulate attacks on ...