James Burnham

• 1. Introduction

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  James Burnham was born in Chicago on the 22nd of November 1905, the son of an English railroad executive, and he died on the 28th of July 1987 in Kent, Connecticut, having spent the intervening decades confounding nearly every political category his contemporaries tried to place him in. He began his career as a committed Trotskyist organizer, wrote pamphlets under a pseudonym, debated Leon Trotsky in party bulletins, and then, with stunning speed, resigned from the Marxist movement entirely and became one of the most influential theorists of the American political right. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, helped inspire George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. The questions that follow are not simply about what Burnham believed at any given moment. They are about how a single mind could travel so far, and what that journey reveals about the century he inhabited.

• 2. Princeton to the Barricades

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  Burnham graduated at the top of his class at Princeton University and then crossed the Atlantic to attend Balliol College, Oxford, where his professors included J. R. R. Tolkien and Martin D'Arcy. He returned to the United States and joined the faculty at New York University in 1929, eventually chairing its Department of Philosophy. By 1933, however, the classroom was not enough. Along with Sidney Hook, he helped organize the American Workers Party, led by A. J. Muste, a Dutch-born pacifist minister. Burnham supported the 1934 merger that produced the US Workers Party, and the following year he pushed for an alliance with the Socialist Party of America, aligning himself with the Trotskyist wing of the movement. Writing for Partisan Review during this period, he became a direct influence on writers including Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv. His first book, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, had appeared in 1931, but the book that defined his radical years was a pamphlet he published in 1935 under the pseudonym John West, titled War and the Workers.

• 3. The Break with Trotsky

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  By 1937, serious fractures had appeared inside the Trotskyist movement. That year the Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party, which led to the formation of the Socialist Workers Party, or SWP, at the year's end. Inside the SWP, Burnham allied with Max Shachtman against the majority faction led by James P. Cannon and backed by Leon Trotsky himself. The argument turned on whether the Soviet Union was still a degenerated workers' state worth defending. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, followed by Stalin's invasions of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, pushed Burnham and Shachtman to conclude that the USSR represented a new and predatory form of class society. In February 1940, Burnham wrote Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky, formally breaking with dialectical materialism and pointing to Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead as a sounder foundation for social analysis. The SWP's special 3rd National Convention in early April 1940 voted 55-31 in favor of the Cannon majority. Even though the majority offered proportional representation to the minority, Burnham and Shachtman resigned and launched a new organization, again called the Workers Party. Burnham then addressed a letter to that organization's National Committee on the 21st of May 1940, resigning from it as well, and making his complete break with Marxism official.

• 4. The Managerial Thesis

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  In his resignation letter of May 1940, Burnham wrote that he considered Marxian economics "for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena." He went further, arguing that a new form of exploitative society, which he named "managerial society," was not only possible but more probable than socialism. The following year, 1941, he spelled this out in The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. The book's central claim was that a new class of managers, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers was displacing both the old capitalist class and the working class, concentrating power in its own hands. Private property would be abolished, but common ownership would never arrive. Life magazine included the book on its list of the 100 outstanding books published between 1924 and 1944. In The Machiavellians, published in 1943, Burnham extended the argument, proposing that this emerging elite would survive better if it preserved certain democratic forms: political opposition, a free press, and a controlled circulation of elites. His 1964 book Suicide of the West became a foundational text for the post-war conservative movement, articulating his interest in traditional moral values, classical liberal economics, and anti-communism.

• 5. Orwell's Debt

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  George Orwell read The Managerial Revolution closely, and his relationship to Burnham's ideas was both admiring and deeply critical. Orwell noted in 1945 that Burnham's geographical picture of a world divided into competing super-states had "turned out to be correct," with the earth's surface being parcelled off into three great empires. By 1946, Orwell had summarized Burnham's framework in terms that map almost exactly onto the three superpowers of Nineteen Eighty-Four: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. The rulers of Burnham's managerial world, as Orwell described them, would be business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers who would crush the old classes and ensure that power and economic privilege remained entirely their own. The character of O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party intellectual who speaks coldly about power as an end in itself, was partly inspired by Burnham's Machiavellian theory of elite governance. Yet Orwell never fully accepted Burnham's admiration for that kind of power; the novel reads in part as a satire of it. Burnham himself had made predictions Orwell found obviously wrong, including the claim that Germany would defeat Britain before turning east, and that the USSR was bound to be defeated by Germany.

• 6. Cold War Strategist

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  During World War II, Burnham left NYU to work for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Recommended by George F. Kennan, he was invited to lead the semi-autonomous Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination. These wartime experiences shaped his Cold War thinking. As early as 1947, in The Struggle for the World, he called for common citizenship between the United States, Great Britain, and the British dominions, along with a World Federation organized against communism. His vision was explicitly imperial: a world federation led by the United States would hold a monopoly of atomic weapons and a preponderance of decisive material power over the rest of the world, a balance-of-power order deliberately replaced by American primacy. In 1955, he helped William F. Buckley Jr. found National Review magazine, and the column he wrote there, titled Third World War, treated the Cold War as an active, ongoing conflict rather than a stable standoff. Buckley called him "the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding." Some observers regarded Burnham as the first neoconservative. His ideas fed both the neoconservative and paleoconservative wings of the American right, and Sam Francis, the paleoconservative author who lived from 1947 to 2005, wrote two books about Burnham and built his own political theories on the managerial revolution framework. In early November 1978, Burnham suffered a stroke that affected his health and short-term memory, and he died of kidney and liver cancer at his home in Kent, Connecticut, on the 28th of July 1987. He was buried in Kent on the 1st of August 1987.

• 7. Faith and Its Reversals

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  Burnham was raised a Roman Catholic by his family in Chicago, then rejected Catholicism while still a college student and professed atheism for the rest of his life. On his deathbed, he returned to the faith of his youth. That arc from conviction to rejection to return mirrors in miniature the larger trajectory of his intellectual life: the committed Trotskyist who broke with Marxism in writing, the strategic theorist who helped found the magazine that shaped American conservatism for decades, and the philosopher who held a chair at New York University while writing under a pseudonym for socialist pamphlets. He married Marcia Lightner in 1934. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Reagan in 1983, was recognition not of any single book but of a half-century of argument that kept forcing its readers to ask where power actually lives and who actually holds it.