Introduction

James Burnham began his intellectual career in the 1930s as one of Leon Trotsky's leading American exponents and ended it as a senior editor for America's preeminent conservative magazine, National Review. In between, he penned two of the most successful political works of the 1940s: The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. During his lifetime, Burnham's writings influenced figures across the political spectrum—from George Orwell to Barry Goldwater, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Ronald Reagan, from C. Wright Mills to Karl Popper. In the twenty-first century, Burnham has been called a neoconservative and a proto-Trumpist. In fact, two James Burnhams did exist: one an embryonic neocon, and the other a paleoconservative paragon.

The emergence of these two James Burnhams will be described in chapter 1. The teenage Burnham penned an essay extolling World War I,and his belief that violence could regenerate the world appeared in his writings for almost a half-century. First as a Marxist and later as a Cold Warrior, this James Burnham optimistically argued that democracy could prevail if force and power—sometimes even violence—were properly used. A second James Burnham who was skeptical and gloomy appeared during his college years. This side of Burnham, in its mature form, questioned true democracy and its future, maintaining it was always stifled by the ruling elite. Both James Burnhams remain politically significant.

Burnham first gained prominence as a thinker in the 1930s when he embraced Marxism in the wake of the Great Depression. The newly minted Marxist trumpeted Trotskyite positions to the American working class. In chapter 2, I show how the two James Burnhams manifested themselves during this time because according to cynical Marxists, the United States is a sham democracy in which the wealthy and powerful conspire against the masses. Violent revolution would sweep away this decrepit system, however. From 1933 to 1940, Burnham wrote dozens of articles for socialist journals expressing these viewpoints while attempting to foment socialist revolution.

Burnham began questioning Marxism in the late 1930s in the wake of Joseph Stalin's purges. The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland further eroded his faith. He pivoted by challenging Trotsky's assumption that the Soviet Union was a state for the working class and openly disavowed Marxist concepts like the dialectic, the unity of opposites, and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Stalin was not the problem in the USSR, he wrote. Marxism was. Trotsky fired back. Consistent with ideas that he had presented in his classic The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky had refused to fault Marxism. The revolutionary declared that Stalin and his bureaucratic clique had perverted the revolution. He blamed Burnham's inability to correctly interpret Soviet affairs on his bourgeois American upbringing. In chapter 3, I examine this dramatic breakup that was codified in important Trotskyite texts, such as “A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party” (1939) and “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham” (1940).

Burnham, now an apostate Marxist, embarked on a new intellectual journey. Yet he did not completely abandon the Marxist framework in the early 1940s—he just denied Marx's contention that the future belonged to the working classes. Burnham's new imminent ruling elite differed from Marx's because they were not defined by their economic class; according to Burnham, they took many forms. His book The Managerial Revolution (1941) foretells the rise of a new powerful caste composed of dreary bureaucrats, corporate managers, and technicians. In this work, Burnham describes their quest for power and the limitations they imposed on democracy. Some remnants of his Trotskyism can also be found in the book, such as the idea that a privileged bureaucratic elite held the levers of power. In chapter 4, I discuss The Managerial Revolution and its significance.

Burnham's next book, which I analyze in chapter 5, was a gloomy work titled The Machiavellians (1943). This treatise details the works of four thinkers the author called Machiavellians because of their realistic attitudes about human nature and society. Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Georges Sorel were the subjects of this book, particularly their ideas about the elite and power. Burnham proclaims: “The Machiavellians present the complete record: the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions.”¹ Darkly reducing politics to a struggle for power, The Machiavellians teaches the reader to ignore the words of the ruling elite. It insists that democracy may be an unattainable ideal, but it must be fought for lest tyranny prevail. Burnham asserts that the perilous quest for some measure of democracy can be achieved only by resisting those in power because “only power restrains power.”²

The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, as I show in chapter 6, remain important texts. They inspired parts of George Orwell's 1984, such as the dystopian book's idea that elites exercise power by manipulating the masses with words. And Burnham's two books have influenced a sect of conservatism called paleoconservatism. Members of this movement believe that the elite and bureaucratic state have gained too much power, at the expense of the people. Paleocons—asserting realism—claim that the struggle for power is natural in politics and society. Democracy is achieved by exercising power and resisting those with excessive power.

After World War II, Burnham turned his attention to foreign affairs and became one of America's foremost anticommunists. He wrote The Struggle for the World (1947), a classic in early Cold War history. In chapter 7,I describe how the former Marxist warns against Soviet expansion and insists that the United States must use power—possibly even violence—to confront the Soviet behemoth because a defensive strategy could never win. Contending that Americans need to be educated about the evils of communism and the threat it posed to Western civilization, Burnham argues that provincial isolationism no longer suffices in the dangerous postwar era. The new hardliner demands an American empire, specifically a soft empire through which the United States exerts its power and influence around the world against communism, not one that placed foreign nations under a US yoke. According to Burnham, parts of an American empire already existed in Europe, Japan, and the Philippines. To ensure success, the United States had to embrace its allies and make them recognize that they benefited by following it. He maintains that the US military must also be strengthened because it showed American resolve. Defeating the USSR was his ultimate goal because “the danger of this war will not disappear until the present Soviet regime is overthrown, and world communism as a whole rendered impotent.”³ This work displays little optimism for the future as it suggests that all American political leaders could do in the struggle for the world was vacillate.

A cross-country trip in the late 1940s allowed Burnham to study Americans more intimately, and this led to some optimism. He began to believe that ordinary Americans did recognize that war raged. And that it had to be won. This positive view was displayed in his next Cold War work titled The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950). In chapter 8, I show how this book provided a road map for American Cold War triumph. Burnham asserts that the goal of US foreign policy should be to liberate the people of Eastern Europe from Soviet communism by employing both hard power and soft power—the latter he called political warfare—against the Soviets. Leaders within satellite states and the Catholic Church should be utilized because they provided an oppositional force to communism. Divides within the Soviet leadership must be provoked. The positive Burnham predicted that the United States would defeat communism; he proclaimed that the victory of democracy was inevitable.

Burnham was also a man of action. While composing important Cold War polemics, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Here his mind teemed with ways to undermine communism, as I show in chapter 9, from planting rumors of Stalin's imminent assassination to capturing Soviet secret agents and injecting them with truth serum. He also became a critical figure in the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, where Burnham and noncommunist liberals collaborated in their efforts to recruit intellectuals to their side of the Cold War. With Burnham's help, the congress sponsored anticommunist conferences and writers worldwide.

Burnham's staunch anticommunism extended domestically. He wanted to outlaw the Communist Party and he refused to condemn Joseph McCarthy or his congressional investigations. As McCarthyism became one of the central political issues of the age, Burnham called himself “anti-anti-McCarthyite.” Another dramatic breakup followed because his neutrality toward McCarthy ended friendships and limited writing opportunities with left-wing journals. He was forced to resign from the editorial advisory board of Partisan Review over the issue and even the CIA grew wary of him. A colleague said that he had committed professional suicide.

Fortunately for Burnham, just as he was burning bridges with liberals, William F. Buckley was eager to start a new conservative magazine, one with a strong anticommunist and free-market slant. Burnham agreed to become a senior editor at National Review, and he became its second-most-important figure for the next twenty-three years. He would never have to criticize McCarthy here. Burnham's primary responsibility was to analyze foreign affairs, which for him meant emphasizing the Soviet threat. He wanted to raise consciousness about the raging power struggle—one he thought that the Soviets were waging more successfully. Burnham usually portrayed US foreign policymakers as bumbling; he lambasted containment and détente policies, believing that they benefited only the Soviets. He called for the United States to invest heavily in its military because the Soviets could not win an arms race. As the Vietnam War escalated, the Cold Warrior demanded that the United States show strength. Disarmament was counterproductive for Burnham. He believed that US security—and hence its national interest—was promoted by using hard power in Vietnam. Burnham later explained America's failure by claiming she had not used enough force. As I reveal in chapters 10 and 11, geopolitical affairs dominated his attention, but he occasionally wrote about America's turbulent domestic scene from 1955 to 1978.

Despite his position at America's most important conservative magazine Burnham never considered himself a conservative Republican.He preferred the liberal Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater. Distrusting ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum, unlike most of his National Review colleagues, Burnham's economic philosophy revealed his skepticism of what he called “the theoretical world of von Misean abstractions.”⁴ He showcases his distrust of US liberal ideology in Suicide of the West (1964), another bleak work predicting that if liberalism prevailed, the West was doomed. He argues that communism posed the greatest threat to Western civilization and that only by defeating communism could the West survive. Burnham, however, questions liberalism's ability to thwart communism because liberals did not view communists as their enemies. Challenging a myriad of liberal assumptions, the book attempts to show liberalism's irrational side. Adopting positions from Edmund Burke, Burnham denounces what he called liberalism's incessant need for reform.

Burnham may have eschewed ideology, but various conservatives drew from his thought after his writing career ended in 1978. Ronald Reagan, for example, evoked Burnham's writings on multiple occasions before and after becoming president. One contemporary writer called Burnham “Reagan's Geopolitical Genius.”⁵ Reagan followed Burnham's advice by pursuing an arms race, insisting the Soviets could not keep up.Containment did not suffice for the fortieth president, either. Consistent with the first James Burnham, Reagan optimistically believed that the Soviet Union could be defeated if the United States properly showed its strength.

The fall of the Soviet Union suggested to some that the United States could promote democracy in other parts of the world. Irving and Bill Kristol helped bring Burnham's ideas to the neoconservative movement that gained momentum in the aftermath of the Cold War. A former Trotskyite and colleague of Burnham's, Irving Kristol is considered a founder of neoconservatism, and his son Bill is recognized as one of the leaders of the movement. In 1996, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” for Foreign Affairs. The article could have been titled “Toward a Neo-Burnhamite Foreign Policy” because it contained the central ideas from The Struggle for the World: explicitly rejecting neo-isolationism, it demanded American leadership in the world.⁶ The most powerful nation on Earth could not retreat in the post–Cold War era. Kristol and Kagan advocated a “benevolent hegemony,” one whereby the United States would exert disproportionate power around the world.⁷ They argued that the United States already exerted tremendous influence globally, such as in the Persian Gulf, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, and that Americans needed to be better educated about the nature of the global leadership position that had fallen to them. The article insisted that “America's allies are in a better position than those who are not its allies.”⁸ Kristol and Kagan also recommended a more robust military budget.

At the same time, certain paleoconservatives continued to advance the ideas of the less idealistic and gloomy second James Burnham. This Burnham has been identified as a forerunner to Donald Trump's rise to power.⁹ One link between Burnham and Trump supporters is Samuel Francis. Francis was inspired by The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, and The Suicide of the West, not his mentor's Cold War writings. Focusing on Burnham's realism and his emphasis on the human need for power, Francis considered Burnham a paleoconservative, like himself. He stressed Burnham's defense of Congress (as opposed to neoconservatives who, for Francis, favored an active executive branch); Burnham's support for tradition; and, finally, Burnham's criticism of liberal universalism. Francis also distrusted the elite, a group he associated with corporate managers and bureaucrats, believing that they posed a threat to the American middle class, the American way of life, and even American democracy.

The same month in which Kristol and Kagan argued in the New York Times that the United States must use power to remove Saddam Hussein, the paleoconservative Francis wrote about a group he called “Middle American Radicals.”¹⁰ The pessimistic Francis suggests that democracy was an illusion for them because as American ruling elites (with the help of the bureaucracy) thrive in Washington, DC, these Middle Americans are “excluded from meaningful political participation.”¹¹ Disproportionally White and middle-class, this group feels powerless as globalization threatened their way of life and their nation. While Kristol and Kagan used Burnham's ideas to justify a more aggressive and international US foreign policy, Francis demands an “America First” approach. This means promoting US economic and geopolitical interests above any cosmopolitan or humanitarian ideals. Pat Buchanan initially carried his political torch. It would be passed to Trump. The president harnessed sentiments that can be found in Burnham's and Francis's writings, even some Trotskyite ones, such as the idea that a privileged bureaucratic elite hold the levers of power. They need to be thwarted in the name of democracy.

Scholarly writings have tended to focus on the two Burnhams separately, with some asserting that he was a neocon in embryo, while others (particularly in the wake of Trump's election) stress his theory of elites. Christopher Hitchens, also a one-time leftist who moved to the right, was in the former group. He called Burnham, “the real intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement.”¹² Hitchens described what he believed to be Burnham's foremost contribution to neoconservatism: the necessity of an “American Empire.”¹³ Along similar lines, an academic article titled “The First Neo-conservative: James Burnham and the Origins of a Movement” argues that Burnham displayed the “psychological signatures of the neo-conservative mind: an abhorrence of containment and a willingness to seize the offensive moment and a respect for ‘empire.’”¹⁴ In this article, the author accurately describes Burnham's “aggressive, Manichean language” and emphasizes links between Burnham's ideas and those of other neoconservatives, like Bill Kristol and Kagan.

Another neoconservative interpretation came from former National Review staffer Daniel Kelly. His James Burnham and the Struggle for the World (2002) interprets Burnham as progenitor of the neoconservative movement. According to Kelly, Burnham's “general stance—secular, empirical, modernist, resigned to the welfare state as inevitable in a mass industrial society, emphatic on the need for victory in the struggle for the world—afforded a preview of the neo-conservatism of the 1970s.”¹⁵ In his book, Kelly quotes the National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser's description of Burnham as “the first of the neocons.”¹⁶ Kelly's book is a solid personal biography that successfully introduces the reader to Burnham's life, but it was published more than twenty years ago. Much has changed in the United States since 2002, such as the war in Iraq, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of a political figure who promised to make America great again by limiting the power of the elites.

Donald Trump's unexpected rise inspired new interest in the alleged paleoconservative Burnham. Michael Lind assesses Burnham in The New Class War: Saving America from the Managerial Elite (2020). Lind's work is admittingly a neo-Burnhamite treatise in that it interprets politics as a power conflict between classes, but these classes are not defined by their wealth. Lind describes the “native working-class populism” of groups who have been excluded from the political process, especially non-college-educated Americans.¹⁷ They struggle against “technocratic neoliberal elites” with college degrees.¹⁸ Over the past half-century, Lind maintains, the elites have gained too much power and democracy has withered. Enter Trump.

Burnham's seeming culpability in the rise of Trump has earned him the wrath of left-wing writers. The scholar Alan Wald, for example, wrote in 2017: “How seriously should we take the head-spinning makeover of an upper-class philosophy professor? Shouldn’t we laugh at James Burnham, who started out lecturing Leon Trotsky on revolutionary strategy and ended up running a rogue CIA operation with mobster Frank Costello to kidnap American communists and pump them full of sodium pentothal?”¹⁹ Wald describes Burnham's attempt to help orchestrate the 1953 coup in Iran, his belief that the United States should use chemical weapons in Vietnam, and his support for colonialism. This recent criticism of Burnham underscores his contemporary significance.

Unlike these works, in this intellectual biography, I show the historical significance of James Burnham by exploring his main books and their historical importance in depth. This book analyzes thinkers that inspired Burnham, such as Aquinas, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Machiavelli, and, at his most mature, Edmund Burke (Burnham was a Europhile). For example, The Managerial Revolution was partly a neo-Trotskyite treatise that shaped some contemporary conservative attitudes. And Burnham's Cold War polemics, which neoconservatives have appropriated, largely inverted Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism. I describe how diverse writers, such as Aquinas, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Machiavelli, and Burke, have nourished the two James Burnhams who remain important for twenty-first century American political discourse.

Burnham's broader political philosophies will not be defended or condemned in this book. Although it is about a political philosopher, this is not a work of political philosophy. Any seeming sympathy for Burnham's ideas—whether his Marxism or his anticommunism—are attempts to explicate his ideas so they can be understood. Readers can determine the validity of these ideas on their own.