James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut
James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography
By David T. Byrne
(Northern Illinois University Press, 256 pages, $33.95)
“Only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man.” So wrote James Burnham in a 1963 edition of The Machiavellians (originally published in 1943), a book that is central to Burnham’s political philosophy that had evolved from its Marxist beginnings in the early 1930s to its conservative ending as a Senior Editor of National Review in the late 1970s. Burnham’s political philosophy is the subject of a new book by scholar David T. Byrne titled James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography.
Byrne, who earned a doctorate in history from Claremont Graduate University and who previously wrote an intellectual biography of Ronald Reagan, claims that there were two James Burnhams: “One an embryonic neocon, and the other a paleoconservative paragon.” But, as the quote at the beginning of this review indicates, Burnham transcended ideologies after his initial seven-year flirtation with Marxism (of the Trotskyite variety). As Burnham wrote in a preface to the 1960 edition of The Managerial Revolution (originally published in 1941), in the 1930s, he had accepted the “empty ideological mumbo jumbo” of Marxist thought until he “tried to relate the [Marxist] formulas to reality.” During much of the 1930s, he was the leading American spokesman for Soviet exile Leon Trotsky, but he came to view Marxism as a religion instead of a rational political philosophy. The signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939 coupled with Burnham’s increasing doubts about the coherence of Marxist thought when subjected to empirical evidence, led him to shed his Marxist identity and intellectual colleagues.
As Byrne notes, Burnham’s break with Marxism occurred as he began writing for Partisan Review, an influential liberal (mostly non-communist) journal of opinion. And as war clouds gathered, Burnham turned his attention to ideas about power and geopolitics. During the war, Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. He envisioned World War II resulting in a postwar clash of “super-states,” each led by a “managerial” elite whose primary goals were to maintain and, where practical, expand their power and influence. Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal America were all ruled by “an elite privileged class that would use the state to advance its social, economic, and political interests.” Byrne explains that Burnham used the socio-political ideas of the Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli and a group of Machiavelli’s intellectual disciples, including Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Georges Sorel, to formulate his own “science of politics” that ruthlessly examined the rhetoric and actions of the “ruling class” in all major powers.
Burnham’s science of politics pierced the veil of “formal” political rhetoric to show the “real” meaning of such rhetoric when viewed in the context of history and actual events. Political elites, he wrote, cared primarily about their own power and privileges. Politics for Burnham — domestic and international — was about the struggle for power among elites. Byrne writes that Burnham tried “to scientifically study how rulers obtain, use, and lose power.” Human liberty and freedom, Burnham wrote, can only thrive when there is a meaningful opposition to those who wield state power. True democracy was impossible. Human nature is flawed to such an extent that ambition must be countered by ambition.
During the war, Burnham worked as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, and after the war, he consulted for the newly established Central Intelligence Agency. The postwar world presented Burnham with the opportunity to use the science of power derived from the Machiavellians combined with geopolitical insights he learned from thinkers like Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. The clash of super-states that he predicted in The Managerial Revolution grew from the ashes of the Second World War. As Byrne notes, the “themes of power and struggle were central in Burnham’s next three books: The Struggle for the World (1947). The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), and Containment or Liberation? (1953).”
With this Cold War trilogy and his work for the CIA and Congress for Cultural Freedom, Burnham became a “cold warrior.” Byrne analyzes each book of Burnham’s Cold War trilogy. Together, these books urged U.S. policymakers to strengthen “containment” while moving to the offensive with a policy Burnham called “Liberation.” Burnham’s trilogy, Byrne notes, was highly influential both in Washington and in intellectual circles. The Struggle for the World likely influenced the Truman Doctrine. The Coming Defeat of Communism was the basis for the drafting and adoption of NSC-68, the classified strategy document that guided American Cold War policy for decades. Containment or Liberation? influenced the Eisenhower administration’s rhetoric (if not their actions) and became what historian George Nash called the conservative movement’s “theoretical formulation for victory in the Cold War.”
Burnham later abandoned the anti-communist Left when they refused to acknowledge the danger posed by communist infiltration of our government and society. Burnham applauded Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to reveal domestic communists within the government, even if he didn’t always agree with McCarthy’s methods. He later wrote (with his wife’s help) The Web of Subversion (1954), which provided what Byrne calls a “litany of examples” that detailed the nature and extent of communist infiltration of the government, including at the highest levels in the FDR and Truman administrations.
With George Kennan and Walter Lippmann, Burnham became one of the most influential Cold War strategists of the late 1940s to the early 1950s. Burnham and Kennan worked together early in the Truman administration to conduct “political-subversive” warfare against the Soviet empire. Containment or Liberation? was a respectful but withering attack on Kennan’s containment strategy set forth in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” which appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1947. Burnham argued that containment was too passive, too defensive, and would result in a Soviet victory unless the Soviet empire changed or collapsed. Kennan thought that Soviet systemic problems would lead to the gradual “breakup or mellowing” of Soviet power. Burnham thought that the U.S. should seek to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities to bring about that change or collapse. To this day, scholars debate which one was right.
Byrne is among those (this writer included) who believe that Pres. Ronald Reagan shifted U.S. strategy from Kennan’s containment to Burnham’s liberation during the 1980s and thereby brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Byrne shows how Reagan’s policies echoed the proposals that Burnham wrote about in his Cold War trilogy and in numerous columns at National Review. Reagan conducted economic, political, geopolitical, and subversive warfare against the Soviet empire that left it, as Reagan predicted, on the “ash heap of history.”
Burnham, however, doubted that the U.S. and the West would achieve victory in the Cold War. In 1955, he was recruited by William F. Buckley Jr. to become a senior editor at National Review, where for the next 23 years he traveled several days per week from his home in Kent, Connecticut, to New York City to write one of the most important and incisive columns on international affairs. Each Burnham column manifested the Machiavellian realism that defined the essence of his intellectual work. Burnham, in those columns, was skeptical that U.S. and Western leaders would do what was necessary to achieve victory over Soviet communism. In 1964, he wrote his last major book Suicide of the West, which was a devastating dissection of modern liberalism that he characterized as the “ideology of Western suicide.” Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Burnham focused his columns on the war in Vietnam, advising the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to wage war to achieve victory or get out. They did neither, and the war was lost in part, wrote Burnham, because U.S. policy was confined in the “strategic prison” of containment.
In the book’s epilogue, Byrne attempts to explain Burnham’s continuing relevance to today’s world. He notes that both neoconservatives and paleoconservatives claim Burnham as one of their own. The neocons claim that Burnham was an interventionist, while the paleocons view him as a realist. In truth, Burnham doesn’t wholly fit in with either group. But neither, contrary to Byrne’s argument, are there two Burnhams. Instead, as John Patrick Diggins, Samuel Francis, and Daniel Kelly have explained, Burnham’s positions on issues evolved based on empirical evidence. He was a Machiavellian realist who would likely see a Trumpian America First policy as a good fit for the second decade of the 21st century. He would recognize and seek to oppose the influence of the “deep state.” He would understand and appreciate the limits of American power. And he would surely grasp the challenge posed by the Chinese communist empire. Oh, how we could use the sage of Kent, Connecticut, in today’s crisis-ridden world.
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