The Weekly Sage hopes to regularly bring brief profiles of key contributors to thought and faith before a Christian audience for historical education and awareness of valuable resources.

James Burnham

• “The situation with Marxist ideology is the same as that with the leading capitalist ideologies. As we saw in connection with the latter, however, the scientific inadequacy of an ideology is not necessarily important. What is decisive is whether an ideology is still able to sway the hearts and minds of masses of man, and we know that this result does not have to have any particular relation to scientific adequacy….The power of an ideology has several dimensions: it is shown both by the number of men that it sways and also by the extent to which it sways them – that is, whether they are moved only to protestations of loyalty, or to a will to sacrifice and die under its slogans. This power is tested particularly when an ideology, in reasonably equal combat, comes up against a rival….an ideology is not able to make a widespread way among the masses unless, in however distorted and deceptive a form, expresses actual needs and interests and hopes of the masses and corresponds, at least in some measure, with the actual state of social conditions and possible directions of their development. The weakening of the attractive force of capitalist and socialist ideologies is a result primarily of the fact that they no longer express convincingly those needs and interests and hopes, no longer correspond at all adequately to actual social conditions and the actual direction of social development.”[1]
• “The group or groups which have control over access to the instruments of production will, as a matter of experienced fact, also receive preference in the distribution of the products of those instruments. Or in other words: the most powerful (in terms of economic relations) will also be the wealthiest. This does not apply to every separate individual concerned; and there may be a temporary dislocation in the relationship; but to groups, and over a period of time beyond a comparatively few years, it seems to apply always. Social groups and classes are, we might say, ‘selfish’; they use their control to benefit primarily (not necessarily exclusively) themselves.”[2]

James Burnham (1905 – 1987) was an American public intellectual, political theorist, and social philosopher. While his writings demonstrate the strongest of convictions and methods, his life brought several significant moments of conversion in his thought and habits. The strong winds of 20^th century events shattered many minds and systems, but Burnham weathered them. He altered his views on matters from religion to politics, but maintained a prominence and influence consistently. Approaching Burnham provides a valuable lens into the 20^th century, critical for understanding our own time.

Like many of the American sages profiled, Burnham was the son of immigrants, in his case English. Born in Chicago to a railroad executive, young James found himself thrust into the upper echelons of industrial society from his earliest days. As a result, he went to Princeton, but forged his own path by finishing at the top of his class. He continued his studies by attending Balliol College at Oxford.

Burnham returned to the United States having benefitted from some of the most excellent education in the world. As a result, he took up a professorship of philosophy at New York University in 1929, only 24 years old. In the 1930’s Burnham pursued radical activism, writing works such as War and the Workers, and The People’s Front: The New Betrayal. He helped organize the American Workers Party and continued activity led him to participate in the founding of the US Workers Party as well.

Of course, in the 1930’s, the fate of radical politics in the world was not decided by American activists. Leon Trotsky had been exiled from the Soviet Union in the 1920’s, but his supporters were only gradually removed from socialist and communist movements around the world. Burnham was a friend and supporter of Trotsky’s. As a result of internal debates and struggles within American radical organizations, Burnham rejected the philosophical tenets of Marxian allegiance, and ended his practical action on their behalf.

However, this did not end Burnham’s inspiration or relevance. Rather, as social change and war swept across first Europe and the world, Burnham wrote his masterwork, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. In it, he predicted in advance important events such as America’s entry into World War II. More centrally, he argued that the world was transitioning away from capitalist society and into a new period characterized not by free enterprise or political sovereignty, but by massive social and economic expansion by the state, forcing it to govern through a managerial class.

Burnham’s shift was reinforced by time spent in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, during which he forged a view of foreign policy focused on achieving US hegemony and unipolarity. After the war, Burnham continued to write prolifically, first philosophically, in The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, then more politically. He wrote works such as The case against Adlai Stevenson, a Democratic presidential candidate, and The Coming Defeat of Communism. Such works led him to join the burgeoning American conservative movement of the 1950’s, helping William F. Buckley, 20 years his junior, found National Review.

Burnham continued to influence conservative thought and the American intellectual milieu through his consistent contributions to the magazine and later writings. In 1964, Burnham published Suicide of the West, a critique of liberalism with lasting significance and influence. This book continued his generally pessimistic outlook consistently demonstrated in Burnham’s earlier works.

Burnham throughout his life pursued a scientific approach to the political process, leading him to an iconoclastic position. Defending Machiavelli, attacking capitalism along with socialism, and arguing for the complete renunciation of political power compose some of his more interesting positions. However, while raised as a Roman Catholic, his early renunciation of faith and adoption of atheism was reversed in his later years, leading him to return to the church. Reading his earlier works, it appears that values are merely a distraction to the struggle for power that is politics. Nevertheless, Burnham the hard-bitten realist in youth was somehow transformed by the brutal cruelties of the 20^th century and World War II into a man of faith.

• “Many people seem to be offended by definite statements about what is going to happen in human history; it is felt to be a kind of sacrilege. They say: Nobody really knows what is going to happen….people, for the most part, do not want to know what is going to happen; and above all, the ruling groups in society find it advantageous to keep knowledge about what is going to happen; and, above all, the ruling groups in society find it advantageous to keep knowledge about what is going to happen in society from developing and extending. If politicians say before election that they are not going to lead the country into war and then go to war after election, it is obviously more advantageous to them to have people regard this as an unfortunate accident, or punishment, than to have it realized, when the pre-election promise is given, that, in spite of the words, going into war is a predictable consequence of what is being done.”[3]
• “No doubt a unification of Europe under Hitler is a bad thing for the European peoples and the world. But this is no more proved by complicated deductions to show the derivation of Nazi thought from Hegelian dialectic and the philosophic poetry of Nietzsche than is the contradictory by Hitler’s own mystical pseudo-biology. ‘Freedom from want’ is very nearly as meaningless, in terms of real politics, as ‘eternal salvation’ – men are wanting beings; they are freed from want only by death. Whatever the book or article or speech on political matters that we turn to…in the case of them all we find that, though there may be incidental passages which increase our fund of real information, the integrating method and the whole conception of politics is precisely that of Dante. Gods, whether of Progress or the Old Testament, ghosts of saintly, or revolutionary, ancestors, abstracted moral imperatives, ideals cut wholly off from mere earth and mankind, Utopias beckoning from the marshes of their never-never-land – these, and not the facts of social life together with probable generalizations based on those facts, exercise the final controls over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish or the admission of practical failure.”[4]

[1] James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, (London: Putnam and Company, Ltd., 1944), 53-54.

[2] Ibid, 89.

[3] Ibid, 263.

[4] James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, (London: Putnam and Company, Ltd., 1943), 18-19.