Paul Tuns, Review:
James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography by David T. Byrne (Northern Illinois University Press, $45.95, 242 pages)
James Burnham, like many of those on the political Right in the second half of the 20th century, migrated there from the Left. Historian David T. Byrne examines the intellectual journey of this foundational conservative thinker from literary critic and Trotskyite philosopher to one of the most influential Cold Warriors on the Right in James Burham: An Intellectual Biography.
The first third of the book traces Burnham’s education which culminated in becoming a professor at New York University. Influenced by Sidney Hook’s essay “Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx,” and disparaged by some combination of a bad breakup with a girl and the ravages of the Great Depression, Burnham became convinced that Marxist revolution was necessary. He would become a follower and friend of Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky (chased from the U.S.S.R. by his rival Josef Stalin), a contributor to a number of left-wing magazines and journals, and, in 1934, joined the American Worker’s Party (AWP), the Trotskyite alternative to the Communist Party of the United States of America. Byrne outlines the allegiances and disagreements on the left, including eventually between Hook and Burnham, and Trotsky and Burnham. There was a lot of feuding over theory and putting those theories into practice, and Burnham was at the centre of many of those arguments on the Left.
Burnham was already disillusioned with Marxism following the Stalin purges and show trials of the late 1930s, but he abandoned the Left when the Soviets aligned with Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. Burnham broke with both Trotsky and the AWP in 1940, but his alliance with classical and political liberals was short-lived. Burnham was working on one of his most influential books, The Managerial Revolution (1941), which argued that under free market capitalism, ownership became divorced from control, as a rise of an expert class of managers in both government and business arose. In Byrne’s words, Burnham “conceives of an elite privileged class that would use the state to advance its own social, economic, and political interests” and “control who enters their ranks” as a means of maintaining its own hold on power. Notably, Burnham saw that this class was less interested in making money than hoarding power and privilege. This new Managerial Class made a joke of the notion of democracy or liberalism.
Burnham’s next work, The Machiavellians was a book about the nature and practice of power. Burnham dispassionately describes power structures and their maintenance without judging them. Some critics thought he was defending the power elite, which was obviously untrue in light of The Managerial Revolution. But Byrne is not incorrect in stating that The Machiavellians was “a product of the gloomy James Burnham,” as he (somewhat cynically) argued that the “real meaning” of words and texts are “often disguised in the formal meaning.” So, for example, the debate at Nicaea was not really about the nature of God but the authority of Rome.
Orwell, who was influenced by Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution when writing his novel 1984, famously reviewed The Machiavellians, in which he criticized Burnham for “power worship” which blurred his “political judgements” because the author could not imagine a world in which current trends were discontinued. If the Nazis had the upper hand or the New Deal ruled U.S. politics, such power dynamics would become entrenched.
Burnham was prone to such analysis but he also provided the arguments for discontinuing the trends, by calling for strong actions. He did this in his “Cold War trilogy” – The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, and Containment or Liberations? – published between 1947 and 1953, in which he would outline the necessity for both armed warfare and political warfare, to counter the imperialist reality of Soviet communism. He would feud with liberal early Cold War thinkers like George Kennan and Arthur Schlesigner Jr., who advocated less robust containment policies regarding America’s communist nemesis. Burnham’s single-mindedness regarding challenging communist supremacy around the globe influenced the conservative movement and, later, Ronald Reagan, who, when president, gave Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom and acknowledged his intellectual debt to him. The West won the Cold War in part because of Burnham’s clearly seeing the threat of communism and the necessity to everywhere stand firmly against it.
Burnham’s anti-communism would lead him to work with the C.I.A. in the early 1950s, working to support overthrowing the regime in Iran, communism in east Asia, and buttressing anti-communism intellectual activity in the west through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The intelligence agency could fund or direct political warfare to undermine communism abroad by supporting nationalist movements in communist regimes and undermining communist movements in allied countries. It was through the C.I.A. that Burnham met William F. Buckley.
Burnham was brought into National Review as a senior editor when Buckley started the conservative magazine, but it would become clear that Burnham was the senior editor, with Buckley effectively treating him as the executive editor. Burnham, reported in other books about National Review and its cast of characters, was given control of the front of the magazine – its editorials, news articles, and essays. Burnham used his influence to stress the anti-communist position of the three-legged stool of modern American conservatism: economic (libertarian), social (traditionalist), and a hawkish foreign policy. Byrne writes, “NR gave the Cold Warrior a megaphone that he used to promote these ideas to American conservatives for the next 23 years in hundreds of columns and various blurbs.”
While most analysts of Burnham’s thought focus either on The Managerial Revolution or his foreign policy thinking, Byrne stresses that there are “two James Burnhams” – the foreign policy hawk and clever analyst of elitism and power, a neoconservative and paleoconservative.
There is much to recommend Byrne’s work; he is correct to point out consistencies in outlook and tone from Burnham’s communist days and his time on the Right, and he devotes entire chapters to each of Burnham’s books to fairly but not uncritically engage with Burnham’s arguments. But Byrne is too vehement in his repeated insistence that there are two Burnhams. While James Burnham was less doctrinaire on economic issues and freedom than many of his National Review colleagues, he was still nonetheless comfortable with those views as they were the predominate position enunciated by the magazine during his almost three decades at the conservative institution. Byrne would have been wise ending his story with Burnham’s influence on post-war conservative’s great representation in Ronald Reagan rather than trying to force Burnham’s ideas into an analysis of current conservative politics under Trump. But other than that niggling complaint about the last few pages, Byrne’s James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography is a magnificent work, deserving shelf space in the library of anyone interested in recent U.S. history or the conservative movement.
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