James Burnham

In this intellectual biography of one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century, David T. Byrne reveals the fascinating life of James Burnham.

Beginning his intellectual career as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, Burnham 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. Rejecting Kennan's policy of containment, Burnham demanded an aggressive foreign policy against the Soviet Union. Along with William F. Buckley, Burnham helped found National Review magazine in 1955 where he expressed his political views for over two decades.

As Byrne shows in James Burnham, 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.