James Burnham: life, ideas and books

Life

James Burnham was born in Chicago in 1905. He became a professor of philosophy at New York University in 1929 and chaired its philosophy department. In the 1930s he was an active Trotskyist, and he broke with Marxism in 1940. During the Second World War he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, where he led a division on political and psychological warfare.

After the war he wrote on the Cold War and in 1955 helped William F. Buckley Jr. found National Review, where he wrote a regular column for decades. Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. He died at his home in Kent, Connecticut, in 1987.

Ideas

In The Managerial Revolution (1941) Burnham argued that modern societies, whether capitalist, fascist or communist in name, were passing to control by a class of managers and technicians who run large organisations. The book influenced George Orwell, who drew on it in Nineteen Eighty-Four though he disagreed with Burnham's attitude toward power. In The Machiavellians (1943) he drew on Machiavelli, Mosca, Pareto and others to argue that political life is about the struggle of elites for power and that formal claims of democracy rarely describe it.

In foreign policy he rejected mere containment of the Soviet Union and urged a more active policy of liberation, and he favoured a strong American-led world order. In Suicide of the West (1964) he characterised liberalism as an ideology of guilt and ineffective timidity before communism. His record included errors: early in the war he predicted a German victory.

Major works

• An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931, with Philip Wheelwright).
• The Managerial Revolution (1941).
• The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
• The Struggle for the World (1947).
• Containment or Liberation? (1953).
• Suicide of the West (1964).

Why conservatives read him

Burnham's route from Marxism to the right is a classic of the century. Buckley called him the number one intellectual influence on National Review, and the magazine's insistence on treating the Cold War as a contest to be won owed much to him. Later writers, both neoconservatives and paleoconservatives such as Sam Francis, claimed pieces of his thought, including his analysis of the managerial class, which resurfaces in debates over bureaucracy and the administrative state.

His realism, which saw politics as a struggle among elites, sat uneasily with the moral language of Russell Kirk and the fusionism of Frank Meyer, and that tension kept the movement's early editors arguing. He is studied now as an analyst of power and organisation, and because he shows how several currents of postwar thought converged on one magazine.