Randolph Bourne, horrified at the support of the war by so-called liberals and progressives, had insisted that an unconditionally defeated Germany wo… - Randolph Bourne

Secondly, war has always been the occasion for a huge, catastrophic leap into statism, a leap that occurs during the war and lasts as a permanent legacy afterwards. As the great libertarian Randolph Bourne warned, as we entered the disaster of World War I, "war is the health of the state." Time and again, war and foreign intervention destroyed our ancestors—the classical liberal movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In England, Germany, France, and the United States, this tragedy repeatedly took place. In the United States, the big leaps into statism came with war: the War of 1812, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War.

His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic—until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired.

The Randolph Bourne Institute (RBI) seeks to honor Bourne's memory by promoting a noninterventionist foreign policy for the United States as the best way of fostering a peaceful, more prosperous world.