Magic Words

On David Graeber's bottled lightning conversation

Guido van Nispen from amsterdam, the netherlands, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

“He let his eyes run over the sea’s great expanse and set his gaze adrift till it blurred and broke in the monotonous mist of barren space.” This scene from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice came to mind when I learned of David Graeber’s death nearly four years ago. Like Mann’s protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, David decamped to Venice as a celebrated author sorely in need of a vacation. Shortly after completing the manuscript for what became his 19th book, The Dawn of Everything (co-written with the archaeologist David Wengrow), he unrolled his towel on the same beach where Aschenbach expires at the end of Death in Venice. The poignancy of the moment gave him no premonition. “I’m in the midst of so many things,” he texted me the day before his heart gave out in a Venice hospital. He was 59.

I waved my way into David’s midst with a fan’s note circa 2007, a few years before his prominent role in Occupy Wall Street and the publication of Debt: The First 5,000 Years catapulted him into public-intellectual status. Back then, I was discharging the disillusioned remains of a lectureship at Harvard. Hearing that Yale had moved to purge David from its anthropology faculty, I wrote to express my unsurprised sympathy. He was a decade older and leagues more accomplished. He grew up Jewish and radical in Manhattan, a milieu foreign to my upbringing in rural Pennsylvania. Still, we met on the same wavelength. Reverse snobbery toward the Ivy League is a rare frequency.

Once I began editing The Baffler, the left-wing quarterly, I invited him to contribute from London, where he had wound up. He should write about whatever he fancied. I didn’t expect him to fancy auditioning his essays over the telephone in torrents of extemporaneous talk, interrupted by snorts of delight. Dialing into David’s giggle bewitched me into a friendship that overran and outlasted the workaday editor-writer relationship. As he talked, his ideas flowed in a companionable blend of earthiness and erudition. When the line went dead, the grief felt caducous, as though some part of myself fell away. The strangeness impelled me to wonder whether I had overlooked some larger property or principle at play in the tonic of his conversation.

I found the necessary clue in his theoretical ambitions. “What kind of social theory,” David asked in his 2004 pamphlet Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “would be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs?” Any social theory that rode on the hip of democratic freedom would need to be flexible enough to nourish organic resistance to the imposition of total systems of values. But a “politics of protest,” he cautioned, would never be enough. Radical self-government also requires a regulative mechanism, some plenary dispensation to negotiate the differences that foil human understanding in the thick of social action. David could have laid down down an Olympian synthesis, a grand reconciliation of diverse points of view, and proceeded to bark strategic directions to social movements. Instead of telling others what to believe and when to act, he reached toward the terms of universal human emancipation by reconstructing social theory itself as an egalitarian conversation among equals.

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Theoretical work in anthropology has long revolved around the dilemma of “incommensurability.” Societies in comparison may share common terms but value them differently, use them in contrary ways, or diverge over the creditability of evidence. The procedure of relativism seeks to deem each society in the comparison rational in the context of its own value system. But “incommensurable” perspectives are held to be incompatible, mutually exclusive, unable to be combined in any way that would settle the issue because the theorist cannot find a way to adduce equivalencies through a shared matrix of rational inquiry.

Versions of incommensurability have invigilated Western social theory ever since news filtered into European capitals of the existence of greater varieties of peoples than the precepts of medieval scholasticism could render intelligible. If the Enlightenment concept of secular rationality meant to forestall a nasty conclusion that radically different claims for being human would plunge the world into a permanent state of chaos, then the violent twentieth century left us with the specter of the incorrigibly irrational citizen. American social theorists abandoned the search for a logical justification of value a century ago.

How, then, is democracy possible? David complained in his 2001 book Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value that his colleagues had ceased to recognize the question. Chockablock with post-structural linguistics, the discipline instead announced “some giddy new ‘postmodern’ age in which no universal standards of evaluation any longer exist: that everything is endless transformation, fragmentation of previous solidarities, and incommensurable acts of creative self-fashioning.” These gestures, in his view, emulated the ideology of neoliberal capitalism, restricting all political claims to “creative consumption” and parochial assertions of “group identity.” He accused postmodernists of “bourgeois narcissism” and likened anthropologists bestriding the academic left to marketing executives.

Anthropology blinded itself to the persistence of oppression in the new world order by looking for universal principles on the wrong level of reality, according to David. Ethnographers tended to select comparative criteria from definitive texts or official versions of events, and in doing so conflated politics with parties, morality with law, magic with religion, and aesthetics with formal genres of art and literature. Granting institutions of authority the presumptive right to represent a whole people mistook culture, “nothing more than the process of its own creation,” for a static entity in possession of some official custodian. “The paradoxical result is that if one is to take a consistent position of cultural relativism,” David observed, “authority is the one thing that cannot be treated relativistically.”

He appealed to ontology to reconstruct the problem and overcome the paradox. From our genesis in families, he posited, all of us are “dialogic creatures who create ourselves through some sort of deliberative process.” Mundane conversation in the domestic sphere is a principal activity through which we form, grow, and embed ourselves in one another. The give-and-take of quotidian existence generates the basic information we need to survive by furnishing us with rough-and-ready understandings of how other people might act to influence us. The representations we make of others are laden with repertoires of judgment, carrying implicit theories of value and motivation. Out of this “ontological ground of sociality,” we grow into “sedimented beings,” palimpsests who perpetually reconfigure horizons of mutual understanding through more complex forms of perspective swapping.

Conversation, so conceived, suggested to David the possibility of a radical humanism predicated on the experience of subordination. He cited the fact of certain universally comprehensible metaphors, such as “the sense of being stifled, crushed, ground down, overburdened, struggling under a heavy weight.” When we seek metaphors of domination across cultures, he said, we practice “dialogic relativism,” a mode that neither uncovers universal truths nor assembles the pieces of the human condition in a single coherent pattern, but penetrates more deeply into shared experience all the same.

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Below the level of constituted authority, ordinary conversations perpetually recycle means and ends, wheeling into encore relations that spill across boundaries, recombine, and multiply. “Universal ideas are not ideas that everyone in the world has,” David emphasized in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. “Universal ideas are the ones that everyone in the world would be capable of understanding. Universal moral standards are not ones on which everyone in the world agrees, but ones that, through a capacity for moral reasoning and experience of forms of moral practice that we already do share, we would be able to work out together.”

The catch is that our representations are never more than provisional and fragmentary. They often turn out to be wrong as well. Imagination may be the source of language, but language neither invents nor mirrors reality. Our perception of reality, David argued, following the philosopher Roy Bhaskar, is disclosed to us piecemeal via “mechanisms of action” (institutions or structures) which interact unpredictably and simultaneously on different levels. We can never achieve clairvoyance, because “real things are precisely those whose properties will never be exhausted by any description we can make of them. We can have comprehensive knowledge only of things that we have made up.” Most of us take this axiom for granted, and thus invoke “reality” when some event contradicts our expectations. In so doing, we implicitly recognize that humans are too varied and volatile for us to predict their every action. “It’s only when we start imagining that the world is somehow generated by the descriptions that we make of it that incommensurability becomes a well-nigh existential dilemma,” David wrote.

Popular belief in phenomena like dreams and gods signifies invisible sources of human motivation. David incorporated a spiritual dimension into his ideas about conversation in Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, his first, best, and least-read book. From 1989 to 1991, he lived in a rural area of the African country. With a notebook wadded in his pocket, a tape recorder in harness, and a small shelf of Dostoevsky’s novels, he spent his time listening informally to rival oral histories of a recent event that revolved around feuding ancestors. He took his subjects to be characters in a polyphonic novel, coexisting and interacting in an unmerged unity.

In the Malagasy cosmos, generic beings called “hasina” signified the indefinable and unknowable tendencies of reality. Hasina themselves had no power. But when people gave hasina particular names, associated them with material objects, and employed “the power of words” to persuade others to take oaths and to participate in rituals, spirits turned into delegated intentions imbued with the capacity to generate effects in the world. Because spirits could be realized only by social action, “persuasive words were themselves a form of hasina.” The use of words to manifest non-existent possibilities he called magic. “Magical action is the only kind that might be said to consist of a null set,” David wrote; “it does nothing in the physical context of its enactment, but only in so far as it enters a broader, more political context of narration, discussion, and report.”

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David’s elegant ontological realism undermined the habits and sensibilities of social theory, whose metanarratives tend to telescope the present as if it were pre-appointed by uniform sequences, lawlike regularities, or inexorable processes. The concept of social evolution, one of his bugbears, takes non-existent possibility hostage to stages of development (“postmodernity”); unreproducible conjunctions of zeitgeist (“the Enlightenment”); or linear directions of history (“late capitalism”). Promethean fantasies in thrall to the ideology of progress extinguish the undescribed levels of reality with writs of factitiousness and legislate fugitive spiritual elements out of sight. Social theory, so conceived, creates existential distance between humans by interpolating covert dualisms—subject and object, agency and structure, past and present, truth and myth, spirit and flesh, imagination and reality, consciousness true and false. These dualisms produce the rational symmetries of causality, explanation, and prediction that serve to hypertrophy authority.

Neoclassical economics, another bugbear, derives its theory of value by inflating fragments of reality that emerge piecemeal into schemes of total apprehension. The economists presume that the mechanism of property ownership exhausts human capacity, as though we are not deliberative beings, but isolated individuals bearing infinite desires, selfishly calculating all social intercourse for wealth and power in production and consumption. The generative level of domestic life, impossible to conceive on these terms, gets demoted to “mere reproduction of a workforce capable of producing marketable commodities.” In actual experience, history has no direction, and society is a dance of multifarious actions. Ordinary people in conversation continually surprise predictive models with irruptions of social creativity.

Not all authority is illegitimate; nor should one presume that candied words can or should efface all differences. “Within the dialogic basis for all thought there’s already the shadow of a communistic eternity,” David wrote. “To realize itself it has to pass through conflict, argument, or it’s meaningless, infantile, ultimately false. Love without at least some tiny element of hatred is just stupidity.” But when the mechanisms overlaid on society fail to gratify needs or desires, the poetry of the spoken word jumps across emerging levels of reality. Acknowledging the paradox of universal finitude allows us to make use of reality’s unexercised tendencies and to deliberate about non-existent possibilities. Dialogical imagination returns the inner motion of perception to its beginning reports in practical human needs and desires. Deliberation plays language games with perspectives, approximations, and narratives, introducing novelties and renegotiating value. All that we may expect from the magic of our words is the unexpected.

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David’s philosophical anthropology tuned out the contested status of human rationality. A presumption that popular sovereignty can be redeemed within dominant institutions he regarded as another dead end, a fatal antimony between the marketplace mechanism of “public opinion” and the primary level of deliberation. “An ‘opinion’ is what you have when you don’t have any power,” he said in a dialogue with Brian Eno, the English musician and composer. “Opinions float around, baring teeth with nothing to bite into. So, they often take on an extreme, expressive quality—‘I say let’s just nuke ‘em’—that no sane person would hold when expecting to trigger real-world consequences. That makes for a vicious circle. The actually powerful people say, ‘we can’t have too much democracy because most people, their opinions are really extreme.’” The way out of the vicious circle lies in “accepting a degree of humility about what it is possible to know,” seeing that we are unseeing.

Exiting the vicious circle is one thing. But the difficulty of finding and sustaining a place to prove deliberation in political practice has dogged democratic theorists like a bad penny. “Political freedom means the right to be a participator in government or it means nothing,” Hannah Arendt wrote in On Revolution. In large part, then, it has meant nothing. The American revolutionaries, as Arendt, John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, and others have lamented, invoked popular sovereignty in the U.S. Constitution while neglecting to endow local townships, councils, wards, or any other institutional spaces with the means to transmute deliberation into participation.

Jurgen Habermas removed the dilemma to a higher plane of abstraction in The Theory of Communicative Action. Like David, Habermas adopted a pragmatic theory of language, an intersubjective conception of reason, and an interpretative framework—the “moveable horizon”—that substantiates mutual understanding piecemeal. But the German philosopher neglected to give a political account of the degree to which systems are amenable to modification by “communicative action” and evaded the question of practice in a scheme of social evolution that largely blotted non-Western societies out of the story.

In Direct Action, a participant-ethnography of the contemporary global justice movement, David supplemented his philosophical anthropology with a knockabout political sociology. He called attention to common ways of challenging the authority of transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations, and entities such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. He spotlighted deliberative assemblies blooming out of the soil in Argentina, Canada, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Italy, Mexico, and South Korea a decade before Occupy Wall Street took everyone by surprise.

To manifest possibility in the zone of dialogical imagination, David learned, there was no need to persuade everybody to agree on every issue. “You don’t even want to achieve ideological uniformity,” he averred. An assembly that meshes over a definition of a specific problem and a commitment to a specific course of action forms “a community of purpose without a community of definition.” The rules of discourse can support a revisable consensus. Do not blow up minor moral differences into mortal threats. Do extend the benefit of the doubt. Do not reduce perspectives to a juxtaposition of opposite extremes. Do look for zones of affinity. If such rules do not yield a creative synthesis that everybody can accept, then the rules can change. Deliberative assemblies, when properly facilitated, encompass a plurality of perspectives from a perspective that refuses to impose itself as a worldview. The crux is that everybody gets a say.

Sustaining deliberative practices on a larger scale is more difficult by orders of magnitude. Today’s behavioral sciences, a congeries of disciplines devoted to resolving incommensurability through a technocratic apprehension of value, seek to disburden us from the challenge. The predictive sciences of morality simply nullify dialogical imagination with a view of humans as passive automata, sunk in sense data. Virtually everything that policymakers in thrall to behavioral science think they know about social values comes from monological procedures—polls, surveys, focus groups—curated, codified, and quantified for behavior modification in the knowledge economies of business, government, education, medicine, and philanthropy. Those incorrigible differences that remain bear the stigma of mere subjectivity.

Early in the 1990s, it was still plausible to view digital communication as an alterative means of democratic social action, a set of unstructured, cooperative tools for influencing others with the ethics David espoused. By the end of the decade, however, a new philosophy of computer science ushered in “Web 2.0,” decking out user interfaces that locked in limits to digital representation. The design of the new software processed words as verbal behavior disconnected from narratives of intentionality. The computer scientist Jaron Lanier, writing in 2010, called the warping of information technology “black magic” and warned that social engineering had become intrinsic to instant communication.

Ever since, social media’s predictive algorithms have frustrated the practice of deliberation. The input-output logic of machine relations strangles social creativity and spreads surveillance—a traditional technique of war between states—by abolishing distinctions between public and private, near and far, and marketplace and domestic sphere. “The fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other,” David argued in Lost People. “To recognize another person as human is to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them.” The global communication monopolies have stood this postulate on its head. The illusion of universal perspicacity is now predicated on incommensurable differences.

The residual psychological legacy of the Cold War bears some of the blame for disabling our resistance to the perverse rule of the algorithm. The reciprocal paranoia that defined the conflict turned inward in the 1990s, as David was first working out his ideas about conversation. New kinds of expressive wrongness cropped out of the poisoned soil of permanent military readiness. University administrators drafted new speech codes. Publishers began expunging offensive words from textbooks. Liberal intellectuals cowered from the defense of writers exposed to the threat of violence for their representations. The censoring mentality, J.M. Coetzee wrote in observing the collapse of civil society in this period, stems from a penchant for taking offense. “The strength of being offended, as a state of mind, lies in not doubting itself; its weakness lies in not being able to afford doubt itself,” Coetzee said.

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To paranoiacs, silence stirs ambiguity, doubt, suspicion. When censorship is prescriptive as well as proscriptive, the power that David found immanent in everyday social relations forfeits to the regnant mechanisms of law, violence, or bureaucratic coercion. The terminally offended appeal to the state as the source of their freedom of speech, incorporating its authoritarian implications into psychic life.

Through these developments, paranoia has turned us all into vulgar relativists. David insisted that we inhabit one reality and that we share a common history, not a multiplicity of “histories.” Ever since 9/11 enshrined paranoia as a basic principle of American political life, accusing opponents of inhabiting an “alternate reality” has become the default currency of political exchange.

The predicament of deliberation under these conditions occasionally exasperated David. In 2014, he spent 10 days in Cizire, one of three cantons in northern Syria controlled by Abudulla Öcalan’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Observing Kurdish guerillas experimenting with deliberative assemblies made David feel a decade younger, he said. But watching the rest of the world avert its eyes from the Kurds’ experiment in dialogic self-governance angered him. The US government classified the PKK as a left-wing terrorist group. In Building Free Life: Dialogues with Öcalan, David lamented the state principle “that if someone is designated ‘terrorist,’ their ideas cannot be taken seriously.” That his fellow leftists tacitly concurred upset him. He blurted out to a Turkish newspaper:

I think a lot of people on the international left, and the anarchist left included, basically don’t really want to win. They can’t imagine a revolution that would really happen and secretly they don’t even want it, since it would mean sharing their cool club with ordinary people; they wouldn’t be special any more.

In 2019, he involved himself in Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign. Corbyn had turned his Labour party into a mass movement, throwing open local branches to debate and discussion. Hundreds of thousands of new members joined. When some of them uttered anti-Semitic remarks on social media, the neoliberal faction of Labour accused Corbyn of failing to discipline them. David retorted in a video: “If you really want to fight anti-Semitism, you should do exactly what the Corbyn people did do in the Labour Party: Create a forum where everybody can say whatever their want. Some people are going to say anti-Semitic stuff, because, let’s face it, this is an anti-Semitic society. This stuff is everywhere. It’s only if you bring it out that you can address it.” That this remedy stood no chance, then or now, needs little elaboration.

David’s faith, alas, counts dwindling numbers of adherents, even among critics of the new censoriousness. Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Age the Social Justice Movement, for example, rehashes complaints of direct democracy as “structureless” and asserts that hierarchy is inevitable in movements for social change. Likewise, Vincent Bevins’s autopsy of the global left in the 2010s, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, dwells on the failings of Occupy-style horizontalism and recommends a steroidal dose of Leninism as the antidote. Both books have important things to say, but the authors cling to the conceit of discerning history’s alleged ruptures and pivots. Neither analyzes the global-justice movement before 2010 or acknowledges, much less reckons with David’s stab at repairing the contemporary caesura between politics and ethics.

“Liberation in the imaginary,” his revolutionary cry, was poetic rather than strategic, vascular rather than apocalyptic. The left’s more common slogan, “liberation of the imagination,” he rebuked as a dangerous fantasy. Imagination and reality are not opposed, but mutually constitute one another. A self-appointed vanguard class that sets forth to pierce the veil of reality, presuming to conjure value out of inert matter, mirrors capitalist modes of history-making. Conflating tendencies with laws and mechanisms with totalities forgets that “every human possibility is simultaneously present” in the sinews of ordinary relationships.

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I never joined David in Zuccotti Park or followed him (or anyone else) into the personality markets of social media. I asked him once how he coped with the hatred that dominates digital conversation about culture and politics. He said he found the platforms “fun.” All the same, pride of authorship made him susceptible to wars of words. So did his overbroad conception of politics, which condemned him to unrelieved struggle over every conceivable issue. “Politics,” he wrote, “is the process by which people act in the knowledge that their actions will be reported, talked about, narrated, discussed, praised, or criticized by other people.” Political authority, by contrast, “is the ability to stop people from acting in this way.” He sweated “positions” as if he were an alternative United Nations. I fielded his complaints about the heckling he suffered online. I frowned on the impertinence of his agita and urged him to abstain from returning fire.

The author and David Graeber in San Francisco in 2013.

Then again, I was raised under a conservative penumbra of reticence. A smack across the face and some soap under the tongue expiated my “smart” mouth. We reached a meridian between our temperaments in the essays David phoned in. My favorite was a trippy piece on panpsychism, a school of thought that attributes rudimentary notions of freedom to a universe enchanted in every particle. “A play principle at the basis of all physical reality,” David proposed, could resolve “the puzzle of how life might emerge from dead matter.” Not only mammals, but lobsters, fish, and even electrons engage in play outside any competition for evolutionary survival. “Obviously, there’s no way to prove it,” he said of his gambit in existential physics. He rested his appeal on an analogy to our ineffable love of wit, rhetoric, and discussion, practices that whistle from the same pleasure centers of nature.

We played together in dialogues that I conjured for him around the principle of incongruity. In New York, we kicked around Charles Peirce’s “evolutionary love” as an alternative to Darwinian biology over a Korean meal with Aaron Swartz. In San Francisco, we sat down with the libertarian financier Peter Thiel, the eco-feminist Starhawk, and the heterodox technologist Jaron Lanier to bat around neuroscience and dreaming. Later the same year, David took up my offer to put him in conversation with Thiel. The event took place at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, where David’s late brother Eric had headed up the library. “I find it interesting that Peter and I agree very strongly about 20 percent of everything, and probably disagree just as strongly on the other 80 percent,” David told the New York Times. “But the stuff we do agree on is the stuff no one else agrees with us about.”

One remarkable essay he wrote for me came out of a conversation about the shame that men like us feel when confronted with our fear of physical violence. “The Bully’s Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination” pricked a memory from his childhood. Bullies had attacked and humiliated him in grade school, he recalled, and no combination of words could placate the hierarchy of power that muscled him. One day, he punched back. The punches that I threw on the playground won rounds of atta-boys at home. Some four decades after hurting his tormentor, David still seemed mortified. He described the essay as “one of the most difficult things I ever had to write.”

He preferred the company of women and often credited feminist social theory for identifying the domestic dialectic that anchored his ideas about conversation. But I could count on his solicitude. After I climbed down from the workplace pedestal and moved into the conventionally unmanly position of solo caregiver to my daughter and (in some kind of cosmic irony) non-speaking autistic son, none of my distress calls to London went unanswered. David’s romantic realism, at once insisting on the universality of humankind and celebrating the limits of our ability to know other people, helped me to see the predicament clearly. “Alienation,” he once said, “is a sign that you understand something about the reality of the world.”

In our last conversations, he mused on an essay he was drafting about the presidency of Donald Trump—a practical joke, he conjectured, played by the working class—and lamented the spread of ennui in the five months since the pandemic had stopped the world from turning. The stagnation affronted his gregarious temperament. “If you donʼt vote, then do something else. Organize in the system or outside, just donʼt remain passive,” he wrote to me about his unease. Meanwhile, he reported a “weird assortment of symptoms” nibbling at his own stamina—a soapy taste in his mouth; nausea after meals; panting after moderate exertion. A holiday in Venice would restore the gleam of health…

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David’s bottled-lightning concept of conversation remained fragmentary, provisional, even ambiguous. In a time when faith in a collective future has collapsed, however, he disproved the old libel that anarchism is a faraway dream, disconnected from the present. Rejecting historical necessity, postmodernism, and power politics, his “anti-heroic politics” alighted on a dispensation of “revolutionary counterpower” that inhabited the world it sought to change. The sublime combination of impersonal detachment and spiritual identification in his ethics resembled Keats’s desire to make poetry “a friend to man.” The vividness and complexity of his embodiment of this desire would make him a perfect candidate for an oral biography, something synchronic rather than synoptic, in the spirit of Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s Edie, or Peter Manso’s Mailer, His Life and Times.

A collective act of remembrance would also stir a paradox that spiraled in on me in the months after his death. I would have preferred a longer goodbye. I would have talked death to death. Suddenly, though, I could not pull my voice past the lump of unuttered words in my throat to talk about David at all. Seeking to connect my peculiar sense of loss to his distinctive vision of possibility, I reread his writings. Why, I wondered, did the words on the page read like verses without their lyric?

“Every successful act of communication,” he wrote, “is an example of the spiritual principle of nonduality, where both parties become, momentarily, the same person.” In ecstatic communion lies the rub. Conversation, like sex, makes the world fruitful and multiplied. Yet the aphrodisiac intensity that fires in the twinship of merged identity tends to annihilate its traces. “Most self-aware thought takes place at exactly the moment when the boundaries of the self are least clear.”

Randolph Bourne, uncredited, Uploaded by Mike hayes at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Randolph Bourne, another possibility man, mourned these moments of self-forgetting intimacy as one of life’s “small tragedies.” Bourne died at age 32 in the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. In his brief career, he too blamed the crisis of democratic theory on the desiccated rationality supreme in the state sciences of prediction and control. He envisioned a lyrical left taking wing in a transnational federation of cultures, and he pegged his hopes for a “beloved community” on a rising generation of proletarian intellectuals.

“To those of us who have not been tempted by success, or who have been so fortunate as to escape it,” Bourne wrote in “The Excitement of Friendship,” engrossing conversation propitiates our inner selves.

It is almost impossible seriously to believe in one’s bad luck or failures or incapacity while one is talking with a friend. One achieves a sort of transfiguration of personality in those moments.

The magic spell of the spoken word, alas, evaporates in the requiem of reading the final type. Across the ripple of cold letters, your gaze drifts till it blurs and breaks in a monotonous mist of barren space. “He is a brave and hardy soul who can retain his personality after his friends are gone,” Bourne sighed.