David T. Bynre has assembled the first academic biography of James Burnham, a whip-smart and acerbic 20th century political mind. The main argument is Burnham was an important intellectual forefather of two distinct traditions of thought on the contemporary political right, neo-conservatism and paleo-conservatism. Byrne chronologically walks readers through Burnham's intellectual trajectory from formal logician/bourgeois academic to Marxist intellectual (specifically friendly to Trotskyism) to elite theorist to anti-communist Cold War pragmatist/realist to a devastating critic of liberalism. Byrne provides close readings of Burnham's major works (The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, The Web of Subversion, The Suicide of the West) while following this trajectory. Byrne also interjects with occasional connections to modern echoes of Burnham's thought on the Right. There are two major inflection points in Burnham's political journey: 1) the obvious failures of Soviet communism to provide material prosperity and political equality. 2) liberal hand-wringing during Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusades. These are mapped persuasively but sometimes Byrne's subject's deeper motivations remains enigmatic. Additionally, I think in some ways the author oversells Burnham's political evolution. From what I see in the analysis is that Burnham always remained clear-eyed and rational about the nature and operation of political power. The bigger shift was a transition from an intellectual to a live player in the political arena. He became sufficiently activated by concerns about communism and domestic weakness concerning strategies for defeating communism and that induced him to act more directly for his interests.

In many ways, it is infuriating that Burnham hasn't already been subject to extensive study in the fields of political theory and intellectual history. This work makes it implicitly clear that Burnham has been systematically overlooked by intellectual histories especially those that analyze or celebrate figures like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, John Dewey, Arthur M. Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Kennan. I hope this is just a first step and that the academy will welcome the study of Burnham. In my view, The Machiavellians is Burnham's most important accomplishment as it re-animated an important body of political thought, elite theory, that does away with the obvious failures and moral positioning of Marxism. Today, there are many live players working to sustain and explain Burnham's insights (e.g. Marc Andreessen), but this has mostly been an outside game narrowcast to a small subset of elite aspirants. The world should have a greater awareness of Burnham and his ideas.

I strongly recommend this work.

The Two-Sided Propagandist Who Profiteered from the Cold War

“…Beginning his intellectual career as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, Burnham” (1905-87) “preached socialist revolution to the American working classes during the Great Depression. He split with Trotsky over the nature of the USSR in 1940. Attempting to explain the world that was emerging in the early days of WWII, Burnham penned one of the most successful political works of the early 1940s titled The Managerial Revolution. This dystopian treatise predicted collectivization and the rule by bland managers and bureaucrats. Burnham’s next book, The Machiavellians, argued that political elites only seek to obtain and maintain power, and democracy is best achieved by resisting them. After World War II, Burnham became one of America’s foremost anticommunists. His The Struggle for the World and The Coming Defeat of Communism remain two of the most important books of the early Cold War era.” The fact that Burnham started as a communist and became an anti-communist at the start of the Cold War proves my earlier theory that the same players profited from stirring a cold conflict between the USSR and USA, while actually causing a hot conflict by propagandizing for and against “socialism” in foreign countries, from which both sides extracted resources in exchange for “helping” them defend against the “evil other”. This is not a rare case of somebody crossing between sides, but it was rare for somebody to do so openly: usually players would have hidden their conflicting interests.
“Rejecting Kennan’s policy of containment, Burnham demanded an aggressive foreign policy against the Soviet Union.” Keeping the Cold War alive profited him directly, as he made money from publishing: “Along with William F. Buckley, Burnham helped found National Review magazine in 1955 where he expressed his political views for over two decades… The political theorist’s influence ranged from George Orwell to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Burnham’s ideas about the elite and power remain part of American political discourse and, perhaps now, have more relevance than ever before.”
The first thing I had to look up was how this guy influenced Trump, given Trump’s general allergy to reading. The argument made is that Burnham’s theories have been picked up by others, and these eventually led to Trumpism. There is a mention that Burnham helped run “a rogue CIA operation with mobster Frank Costello to kidnap American communists and pump them full of sodium pentothal”, according to Alan Wald, the leftist in 2017. Then, finally, after many unspecific mentions of Trump, there is a direct link: “Trump has embraced some of the ideas that Burnham inherited from Trotsky: bureaucrats hold the power, even though they are not real representatives of the people. Instead, they pursue their own interests. They are the enemies of democracy” (189). This is explained as being why Trump has argued against UN, WHO, etc. But in reality, Trump and his folks have been these bureaucrats who are serving themselves, instead of anybody else.
The other point that interested me is his work as the editor for 23 years for this conservative National Review. Instead of merely editing, he used this post to publish regular propagandistic articles: “He called for the United States to invest heavily in its military because the Soviets could not win an arms race” (5). So, he was fueling the Cold War by insisting that the US government had to pay its military contractors more and more and more. This was sold as an intellectual, smart idea that was being published in an academic journal, when as a founder Burnham might have been receiving enormous sums from these military contractors to stress the need to buy more and more from them, just as TV shows include Coke product placements.
Another curious note I found while browsing is the idea that Burnham “insisted that ‘McCarthyism’ was an invention of ‘communist tacticians’ and that ‘Eastern seaboard’ intellectuals had taken the communist bait and ran with it, promoting the idea that McCarthyism, not communism, was America’s biggest threat.” Publishing this honest idea ended his relationship with the liberal Partisan Review and started a lifelong of attacks against liberals for Burnham (129). This same quote also proves that Burnham was aware that he was playing both sides by stirring conflicts between these imagined boundaries between “communism” and “capitalism”, when on both sides there were profiteers who were taking advantage of this conflict itself to make a profit.
It should be interesting to do a more thorough read of this book. It has a lot of things in it that must be objectionable to all possible sides, which is a sign of good writing.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024