James Burnham > Quotes

“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place.”
― James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism

“There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“He remembered the forceful hand that cast him to the earth. He'd fallen like a shooting star, his flesh burning until his wings fell away. Pain was something he had never known before. But even worse than the physical affliction was the knowledge that he would forevermore be denied Heaven.”
― James Burnham, The Fruit of the Fallen

“Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“He does no dreaming about a “perfect state” or “absolute justice.” In fact, Mosca suggests what I had occasion to mention in connection with Dante: namely, that political doctrines which promise utopias and absolute justice are very likely to lead to much worse social effects than doctrines less entrancing in appearance; that utopian programs may even be the most convenient of cloaks for those whose real aims are most rightly suspect.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Where’s there’s no solution, there’s no problem.”
― James Burnham

“Independence, the first condition of liberty, can be secured in the last analysis only by the armed strength of the citizenry itself, never by mercenaries or allies or money; consequently arms are the first foundation of liberty. There is no lasting safeguard for liberty in anything but one’s own strength.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Managerial activity tends to become inbred and self-justifying. The enterprise comes to be thought of as existing for the sake of its managers – not the managers for the enterprise. A high percentage of the time of the managers and their staff is spent on “housekeeping” and other internal problems. Self-justifying managerial control tends to keep alive operations which have little social purpose other than to nourish an enclave of of managers. Tis is conspicuously true of governments. Many acute, expensive problems which our society faces – for example, in agriculture, radio-TV, railroads, finance, etc. - are largely manufactured by the managerial agencies founded to solve them.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“If the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men, the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely. A deeper freedom would be possible in society than Machiavelli himself believed attainable.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish or the admission of practical failure.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Formally, a new election for an office many be held every year or two. But, in practice, the moere fact that an invidual has held the office in the past is thought by him and by the members to give him a moral claim on it for the future; or, if not on the same office, then on some other leadership post in the organization. It becomes almost unthinkable that those who have served the organization so well, or even not so well, in the past should be thrown aside. If the vagaries of elections by chance turn out wrong, then a niche is found in an embassy or bureau or post-office, or, at the end, in the pension list.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“In a new form of society, sovereignty is localized in administrative bureaus. They proclaim the rules, make the law, issue the decrees. The shift from parliament to the bureaus occurs on a world scale. The actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried on by new men, a new type of men. It is, specifically, the MANAGERIAL type. The active heads of the bureaus are the managers-in-government, the same, or nearly the same, in training, functions, skills, habits of thought as the managers-in-industry.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“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.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“Once the managers consoldiate their position within an institution, their objective interests no longer fully correspond to the interests of the other groups involved – voters, owners, members, teachers, students or consumers. A decision on dividends, mergers, labor contracts, prices, curriculum, class size, scope of government operations, armament, strikes, etc. may serve the best interests of the manager without necessarily contributing to the well-being of the other groups.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“The divorce of control, or power, from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal “owner” could control its affairs. Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents. But when the enterprise became more vast in scope and at the same time, the stock certificates became spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers were gradually released from subordination to the nominal owners. De facto control passed, for the most part, to non-owning management.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and so far as we can see, never will exist.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“By examples from Roman and Greek and Carthaginian and Italian and French history, he shows that the “middle way” in such cases almost invariably works out badly; that the enemy should be either completely crushed or completely conciliated, that a mixture of the two simply guarantees both the continuation of a cause for resentment and revenge and the possibility for later translating these into action.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“The intent of sincere humanitarians is to do good to society, just as the intent of the child who kills a bird by too much fondling is to do good to the bird.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“In the first place, we may note that Dante’s ultimate goal (eternal salvation in Heaven) is meaningless since Heaven exists, if at all, outside of space and time, and can therefore have no bearing on political action.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Dante, whom commentators willing to judge from surfaces are so fond of calling “the first modern man,” “the precursor of the Renaissance,” was their spokesman. His practical political aims toward his country were traitorous; his sociological allegiance was reactionary, backward-looking. Without his exile, true enough, it may well be that he would never have written his poem.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily “rational animal.” When the reformers tell us that society can be improved”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“People thought, and still think, so automatically in these terms that they do not realize they are doing anything more than recording unchangeable fact. That the owner of a factory should own also its products; that we need money to buy things; that most people should work for wages for others; that a business has to lower production or cut wages or even stop when it can’t make a profit—all this seems as natural to many as the need to breathe or eat. Yet history tells flatly that all of these institutions are so far from being inevitably “natural” to man that they have been present in only a small fraction, the last few hundred years, of the lengthy history of mankind.”
― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

“Similarly, we may observe that various groups can profess the same goals and yet take differing and often directly conflicting lines of action. Reformist, syndicalist, Trotskyist, and Stalinist parties of the labor movement all cite the same texts of Marx while cutting each others’ throats; all Christian nations have the New Testament and the Fathers on their clashing sides. In one state, the Seventh Commandment forbids capital punishment; in its neighbor, the same Commandment justifies capital punishment. England and the United States both believe in freedom of the seas; but for England this can mean capturing United States ships as contraband, and for the United States, sending them through the blockade. A belief in the immortality of the soul is compatible with a total disregard of material goods (this short life counting nothing against eternity) or total concentration on them (thus attesting, as Calvin taught, that the active soul is elected to blessedness in after life).”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“for money cannot find good soldiers, but good soldiers will be sure to find money.…”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“After a number of experiments in internal administration, the government of the city, firmly Guelph, gravitated into the hands of the Merchant Guilds, now representing the chief social force in the town. Membership in a Guild became a prerequisite of political office.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Second, the lesser goals derived from the ultimate goal—the development of the full potentialities of all men, universal peace, and a single unified world-state—though they are perhaps not inconceivable, are nevertheless altogether utopian and materially impossible.”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Problems without solutions aren't really problems.”
― James Burnham

“Third, the many arguments that Dante uses in favor of his position are, from a purely formal point of view, both good and bad, mostly bad; but, from the point of view of actual political conditions in the actual world of space and time and history, they are almost without exception completely irrelevant”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

“Through the Machiavellians I began to understand more thoroughly what I had long felt: that only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man. James Burnham”
― James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom