Untimely Papers

by Randolph Bourne, James Oppenheim

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236 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2018

About the author

Randolph Silliman Bourne was a progressive writer and "leftist intellectual", and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work "The State," discovered after his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolp...

Reviews

[logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a beautiful book that no one has read. goes from mostly idealist to a hardcore materialist in like three months, and it's the best shit anyone has ever said about america. praise be to bourne for this blessing of literature.

war is not the health of a nation, but rather the test of the health of a nation. pray ours is healthy in all the right ways.

[Ardyth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very interesting thoughts on the State, the Government and the Nation, the roots of each, and how we have been trained over a couple hundred years to conflate these distinct things into one.

[Chet]

Read this a week or so back but I've been travelling and visiting family and haven't been logging my reading. This is a WWI era anti-war text, from a young American intellectual who would die shortly after writing these pieces. He goes in on Woodrow Wilson and the American government in general. Had he lived longer he like many Americans of his generation probably would've been deeply caught up in the romanticism of the Russian Revolution, and then like many anarchistic American intellectuals would've probably abandoned this deep affection once Stalin's administration started purging Nazi collaborators (oh those poor Nazis!). But what we have is what we have. A crystalized time capsule of a particular anti-war vibe at a particular time in history. RIP Randolph Bourne.

[Marco Pavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant writing. Bourne essays are truly remarkable and his analysis on dynamics and causality of WWI with respect to the USA entering the conflict, and how the Wilsonian propaganda machine laid the foundations of modern discourse on public policy is truly untimely