The Disputed Legacy of James Burnham

Two biographies of a leading American theorist of the managerial state and, later, a controversial Cold War conservative, James Burnham (1905-1987), are now on the market and laying bare in an interesting way some of the deep fault lines in modern conservatism. One is a detailed study of Burnham’s life by Daniel Kelly, published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The other is a more pointed reading of Burnham’s major writings done by Samuel T. Francis and published by Claridge Press in England. The second work, an updating of a monograph that University Press of America put out in 1984, is by far the more interesting though also more bare-boned. Kelly’s book makes only one fleeting reference to Francis’s first edition, an apparent oversight that may speak volumes. The two interpretations of Burnham’s achievements are, to put it mildly, difficult to square. Whereas Francis sees Burnham as well to the right of center but highly pragmatic in his positions, Kelly and Richard Brookhiser, who did the foreword to Kelly’s biography, see Burnham as a onetime Trotskyist who, after his “ideological period,” marched on with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and his longtime pal Sidney Hook to become a pro-welfare-state anti-Communist (that is to say, a Cold War liberal). Hence, they claim that he was, “the first neoconservative.”

The facts, however, do not very well support this view. In great contrast to Kelly’s portrait, both George Orwell and the English publication Encounter presented Burnham as a cynical exponent of power politics. This is particularly clear when Kelly cites Orwell’s incisive comments (printed in 1946) about Burnham’s Managerial Revolution (1941). (Orwell’s statements are especially noteworthy because the division of managerial empires depicted in Burnham’s work furnished the backdrop of Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Orwell found Burnham’s writing both fascinating and distasteful. Contrary to Brookhiser’s and Kelly’s attempts to treat Burnham’s classic as a transitional Marxist work, Orwell correctly read it as the work of a genuine man of the Right. But the key is not, as Burnham’s critics often tell us, his early view of Nazi Germany as a successful managerial state that would supposedly triumph over “the primitive economy” of Stalinist Russia (note that this faulty prediction was made in 1941). More to the point, according to Orwell, is that Burnham scoffs at the ideal of equality and, despite his retention of a certain Marxist vocabulary, seems to have more in common with fascist elitists than with the Marxist Left.

The same is true of The Machiavellians (1943), Burnham’s appreciative study of political and social thinkers who have understood the mythic nature of revolutionary ideals and the centrality of power in human relations. Kelly reads this study as a warning against “Bonapartism” and “plebiscitary democracy,” but I find no hard evidence for this interpretive view. The thinkers Burnham highlights—Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Max Weber—argued that charismatic leaders and successful manipulators of revolutionary rhetoric are an inevitable part of the modern political scenery. It is hard to make sense of The Machiavellians as a defense of an American constitutional democracy standing up against Mediterranean-style fascism. If that is the book’s message, why does Burnham talk up thinkers who, we are told, considered authoritarian and elitist rule an inescapable human destiny? There is nothing in the text to suggest the fear, attributed to Burnham, that Americans were surrendering to the siren call of Latin fascism or some other exotic form of martial rule.

To prevent his case from falling apart, Kelly devotes much space to avoiding the uncongenial implications of Burnham’s decidedly rightwing attitudes. Although he heartily approves of Burnham’s “secularist modernist sensibilities,” reservations about Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, and stress on the need for a pax Americana to offset Communist expansion, Kelly is profoundly uncomfortable with Burnham’s last published book, Suicide of the West: The Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964). According to Kelly, this “is the most uneven of Burnham’s works.” Burnham’s attempt to focus on “liberalism’s existential reality,” characterized by its kinship to communism, produces a “tendency to oversimplify this reality,” “giving him a straw man as a target.” “As a result, [Burnham’s] version of liberalism has no room for liberals who do not fit his model—[like] his fellow Augustinian Reinhold Niebuhr.” In his study, however, Burnham does distinguish between “more sophisticated” liberals (those who see “the defects in liberalism’s doctrinal equipment”) and those who are totally blind to Communist misdeeds. Certainly Burnham does not deny that “democratic socialists” such as Hook took strong stands against the Communists, but he does say that Communists and liberals share “a leftist gestalt”—a theme that he took up in the 1960s and ’70s as both an editor of and regular contributor to National Review.

Notably, at the beginning of Suicide of the West, Burnham lists thirty-nine defining positions of contemporary liberalism, two of which are the beliefs that “racial segregation and discrimination are wrong” and that public accommodations in “southern United States ought to be obliged by law to allow Negroes to use all their facilities on the same basis as whites.” Burnham took these positions not as a hardened racist but because he thought that the federal government should not take on the task of restructuring social relations. Undoubtedly he also thought, like other NR editors of the time, that any significant increase in the political leverage of American blacks would destabilize American constitutional government. Burnham had stated the opinion that such a government was a happy accident; hence, it seemed best not to overwhelm it with the demands of a minority calling for extraconstitutional remedies for its previous exclusion from mainstream political and social life. Kelly leaves out this decidedly unauthorized opinion about the federal role in the civil rights revolution.

What may upset Kelley about Burnham’s life and writing is a cause for rejoicing for the neo-Machiavellian Francis. Small wonder that this politically incorrect biographer had to labor hard to publish the two editions of his work. The analysis of power and of the politically irrational in Francis’s portrayal of Burnham would not please those to the left of either Francis or Burnham. Francis, who with some forethought titled his first edition Power and History, ends his new edition by citing Burnham’s apothegm from The Machiavellians: “Only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man.” Francis provides what is by no means an unfamiliar face. Orwell in “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” John Diggins in Up from Communism (1975), New Republic editor John Judis, and my book The Search for Historical Meaning (1986), in the sections devoted to Burnham, all give glimpses of the thinker presented by Francis, albeit with disparate value judgments. For Diggins and Judis, Burnham’s emphasis on the irrational sources of power and his invitation to an American imperial mission are proofs positive of the fascist legacy of the American Right. My own historicist reading, by contrast, extols Burnham for his sensitivity to changing historical situations and for his understanding of the role of ideological passions in human affairs. In Francis’s biography, we see Burnham as the unmasker of human rights ideologies and as someone who insisted, like the French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, that human beings must be understood through their cultural and historical particularities.

Pivotal to this last interpretation is an exchange between Burnham and the sociologist Peter Berger in the pages of NR in 1972, on the possibility of creating and propagating a “universal” conservative creed. Burnham warned against Berger’s advocacy of this project, as being unrealistic and for denying the importance of cultural differences and particularities. To Berger’s plea for “a conservatism of compassion” that “remain[s] open to the impulses of the time, wherever they may come from,” Burnham made this reply: “a good many of those who write for the magazines Commentary and Public Interest,” share “a break with liberal doctrine” but also continue to show “the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sensitivity and temperament.” Francis locates in this dispute, which Kelley disregards, the difference between Burnham’s pessimistic understanding of the human condition and what would become for more than a few neoconservatives a global democratic mission to create an American empire. Although this reading is generally correct, it must be noted that the dispute in question took place over a strategic discussion of the Cold War. In 1972, Berger was not pushing a global democratic foreign policy as the means for implementing a universalist conservatism.

Kelly does observe some things about Burnham’s life that reveal his distance from the predominantly Eastern European Jewish intellectuals who filled his political and workaday world. Those whom Burnham met in the NYU philosophy department, which he joined in 1929, or as a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, or as a contributor to Partisan Review, or as a founding member of the social democratic Congress for Cultural Freedom, did not, with few exceptions, belong to his inner circle of friends. His fellow-Trotsykist and co-editor at the New International, Max Schachtman, was never allowed to feel socially close to his journalistic collaborator, nor was he ever brought as a guest to what Kelly calls the “haut bourgeois Sutton Place apartment” where the Burnhams gave parties for their intimates. Once Burnham, in a tuxedo, kept Schachtman wedged at the entrance to his apartment, and apart from the invited guests, as he went over with him an editorial for the New International. Burnham was the son of an English Catholic immigrant who became a railroad magnate, and he grew up in Kenilworth and attended private schools before going on to Princeton and Oxford; like his wife, Marcia, he came from an entirely different social environment from that of his early political associates. Burnham’s move to a renovated farmhouse in Kent, Connecticut, in 1937, where he thereafter lived with his wife and three children, put geographical as well as social space between him and his erstwhile associates.

Such biographical details are important in understanding why Burnham has not been widely proclaimed the first neoconservative. First, his ideas were unmistakably rightist, even when he appeared to be on the Left. His cultural and social experiences were unlike those of, say, Sidney Hook or Max Schachtman. As an NR columnist, Burnham urged the United States to avoid antagonizing Arab powers, lest an American tilt toward Israel drive Arabs into the arms of the Soviets. Burnham treats Hitler as a more or less conventional tyrant. And like most anticommunist conservatives, Burnham is full of praise for the right-of-center West German government as an anticommunist bulwark.

Still, it is not hard to put together biographical facts that serve to soften Burnham’s rightist or aloofly aristocratic image. He was a Trotskyist who later drifted toward social democracy. In his post-Marxist phase he argued that the welfare state was a necessary accompaniment of life in an industrialized society. Burnham supported Eisenhower against Taft in 1952 and Rockefeller against Nixon and later Goldwater. In the late 1970s he treated the character and presidency of Jimmy Carter more sympathetically than he had those of Nixon five years earlier. If Kelly deals sometimes gingerly with Burnham’s beliefs (without misrepresenting them), Francis, on the other hand, is left having to explain Burnham’s very middle-of-the-road stands on American electoral politics. Although these latter positions can be explained—for example, by noting that Burnham disliked Taft’s isolationism and held a low opinion of Goldwater’s intelligence—it is striking how consistently non-rightwing Burnham’s political choices were. But I’m not sure that what is being described is sui generis; it has manifested itself in other theoretical conservatives. In 1964, as a graduate student at Yale, I too supported Rockefeller for president and rallied to liberal Republican “patricians,” while remaining a fervent admirer of both the Machiavellians and James Burnham.

Samuel Francis, James Burnham (London: Claridge Press, 1999), 164 pp., L7.95; and Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World, Foreword by Richard Brookhiser (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2002), 433+ix pp., $29.95

Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Hudson Institute.