James Burnham

Reviewed by Louis Andrews

Right Now! 27, April - June, 2000.

Burnham was of English Catholic immigrant background and graduated at the top of his class at Princeton and then attended Balliol before starting his academic teaching career. By the early 1930s he was already a dedicated Marxist and friend of Sidney Hook and others on the Trotskyite left. Yet he was never doctrinaire and soon his differences came to the fore. By 1940 he was a member of the fourth International, helped found the Workers Party, and then broke entirely with Marxism, Trotskyite or otherwise, with the realization that the end-stage of capitalism was not socialism, but "managerialism". The result was his first important work, The Managerial Revolution, which showed the relationship of Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and New Dealism and of all of these to totalitarianism. It became a minor classic and may have had more influence on the intellectual Left than the Right. The Machiavellians may be Burnham's most important and most misunderstood book. Subtitled Defenders of Freedom, it analyzed the political theories of four non-marxist thinkers who greatly influenced Burnham: Sorel, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels. Despite his decade-long flirtation with Marxism, he recognized that ideologies were not scientific, but merely existed to provide a "rationalization for the existence and power of the dominant minority".

Belief in an ideology is entirely non-rational and thus impervious to reasoned argument. Liberty and freedom best exist in societies where opposing forces, formal or informal, provide restraints on tyranny. Burnham notes "Juridical defense can be secure only where there are at work various and opposing tendencies and forces, and where these mutually check and restrain each other". Private property, religion, and freedoms of press and speech are among these checks. Ultimately though, only power can restrain power, thus the need for a strong opposition. Francis notes "virtually all of Burnham's writing since The Machiavellians must be understood in reference to it". In the years immediately following, Burnham concentrated on outlining a strategy for the defeat of communism in a series of books, some of which were originally prepared for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII. Today these are of but historical interest as a road largely not taken. In the early 1950s Burnham participated in the founding of National Review and was a Senior Editor until the end of his career. He was also one of the few notable intellectuals who refused to denounce Senator McCarthy, instead resigning from the board of Partisan Review in protest.

1959 marked the appearance of Burnham's Congress and the American Tradition. Here he looks at American government and American tradition through the Machiavellian lens and comes to conclusions that often support those of conservatives, but do so for untraditional reasons. For example, he valued tradition because of its social utility, not because of any "nostalgic sentiment or…ethical, metaphysical, or theological principles". Romulus and Remus can be quite as good as the Magna Carta, if believed. Burnham's last book is also his best known, if only because of its snappy title - Suicide of the West. As the title suggests, he argues that the West is dying and the death is self-imposed. Liberalism is not the cause, but is the ideology that "motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it". Thus, liberalism "permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution". James Burnham influenced a number of important thinkers besides Sam Francis, including Brian Crozier [see RN16]. This book provides an excellent look into the mind of one of the century's most interesting intellects and also opens a window for a better understanding of its author, Dr. Samuel Francis, who remains one of the most important political thinkers on the American scene.

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