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James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography
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.
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.
- GenresBiography
253 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 15, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 10, 2025
David T. Bynre has assembled the first comprehensive intellectual biography of James Burnham, a whip-smart logician, an acerbic polemicist, and, perhaps the most important 20th century political thinker on the Right. The biography’s envisions Burnham as an important intellectual forefather of the two major post-war traditions of conservative thought, neo-conservatism and paleo-conservatism. Burnham’s aggressive anti-communism informs the former school, while his elite theories of power inform the latter.
Byrne chronologically guides readers through Burnham’s intellectual and political evolution. His seeming traverse a wide-range of positions, moving from a formal logician and bourgeois academic to a Marxist intellectual, more friendly to Trotskyism, to an elite theorist of the Italian school to an avowed anti-communist Cold War realist to a devastating critic of liberalism (which more precisely refers to the American Left). Byrne provides close readings of Burnham's major works, including The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, The Web of Subversion, and The Suicide of the West. There is also coverage of Burnham's other writing, correspondences, and reviews of his work by major intellectuals, which was a real treat. To my knowledge, it is hard to find these details in other places, but they capture an important intellectual moment in the early 20th century. Here and there, Byrne interjects with how Burnham's ideas connect to modern echoes of Burnham's thought on the Right, though most of this is easy do to on one's own (if you are familiar with these political ideas). I’m sure most readers who pick up this book will already have a good handle on just how relevant Burnham’s ideas are to today’s politics they just may not know just how important Burnham is to those ideas.
There are two major inflection points in Burnham's political journey: 1) the obvious failures of Soviet communism to provide material prosperity and political equality. 2) liberal hand-wringing during Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusades and tentative foreign policy from Democratic administrations during the Cold War. These crucial junctures are mapped persuasively but sometimes Byrne's subject's deeper motivations can remain enigmatic; Some of this is just how Burnham is. Interestingly, I think there is a good argument that the changes we see in Burnham’s politics emerge from a consistent analytical lens. He’s a positivist. This is consistent with Burnham’s largely life-long materialism and atheism. Subsequently, I think the Burnham’s political evolution has been a bit oversold by history. It is hard to be confident about this because Byrne doesn't present much of Burnham’s Trotskyism. This isn’t really the fault of the author as Burnham destroyed his correspondence with Trotsky after a falling out. Nevertheless, it is true that Burnham moved from being impressed to fearful of the potential organizational efficiency of communist government. Possibly another way to see Burnham’s political ideas as largely consistent beyond his methodological approach is to understand his normative view as pro-American realism and pragmatism. Interestingly, he appears to have been prone to underestimated the power of the American system despite being a staunch defender of it.
In many ways, it is infuriating that Burnham hasn't already been subject to extensive study in the halls of the modern academy. Fortunately, this new biography makes it abundantly but implicitly clear that Burnham has been systematically overlooked by intellectual histories of the 20th century, especially in works that analyze or pay attention to figures like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, John Dewey, Arthur M. Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, or George Kennan. I hope this is just a first step in a re-discovery process, and the academy starts to embrace teaching and studying Burnham. I think this would serve students of both the Right and Left well.
The book provides great evidence to show that Burnham influenced powerful political players during the Cold War. This includes Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. However, I think the longer term impact of Burnham’s ideas may outrun these political accomplishments. This goes for all his major works, but, in my view, The Machiavellians is Burnham's most important accomplishment in political thought rather than the much discussed Managerial Revolution. This is because I think The Machiavellians re-animated an important school of political thought, elite theory, for an American consciousness. Politically, Americans have struggled and still struggle with coming to terms with having an elite class and thinking about how it should be constructed and what its privileges and obligations should be. The Machiavellians is in some ways still burdened by the simple materialist analysis of class struggle, but it highlights how social institutions, factions, and human nature create or obscure political conflicts in ways that are more clear-eyed than analyses that idealistically foreground political ideas. It is also a great predicate for developing understandings of our current political discontents. Plus, there are many live players in the arena today working to spread, explain, and apply Burnham's ideas. This has mostly been an outsider’s game where the messaging has been narrowcast to a small subset of elite aspirants that is until the recent non-consecutive re-election of Donald Trump. The world should have a greater awareness of Burnham and his ideas. Start with James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography!
My interview of the author can be found here -> https://stetson.substack.com/p/revita...
Byrne chronologically guides readers through Burnham’s intellectual and political evolution. His seeming traverse a wide-range of positions, moving from a formal logician and bourgeois academic to a Marxist intellectual, more friendly to Trotskyism, to an elite theorist of the Italian school to an avowed anti-communist Cold War realist to a devastating critic of liberalism (which more precisely refers to the American Left). Byrne provides close readings of Burnham's major works, including The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, The Web of Subversion, and The Suicide of the West. There is also coverage of Burnham's other writing, correspondences, and reviews of his work by major intellectuals, which was a real treat. To my knowledge, it is hard to find these details in other places, but they capture an important intellectual moment in the early 20th century. Here and there, Byrne interjects with how Burnham's ideas connect to modern echoes of Burnham's thought on the Right, though most of this is easy do to on one's own (if you are familiar with these political ideas). I’m sure most readers who pick up this book will already have a good handle on just how relevant Burnham’s ideas are to today’s politics they just may not know just how important Burnham is to those ideas.
There are two major inflection points in Burnham's political journey: 1) the obvious failures of Soviet communism to provide material prosperity and political equality. 2) liberal hand-wringing during Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusades and tentative foreign policy from Democratic administrations during the Cold War. These crucial junctures are mapped persuasively but sometimes Byrne's subject's deeper motivations can remain enigmatic; Some of this is just how Burnham is. Interestingly, I think there is a good argument that the changes we see in Burnham’s politics emerge from a consistent analytical lens. He’s a positivist. This is consistent with Burnham’s largely life-long materialism and atheism. Subsequently, I think the Burnham’s political evolution has been a bit oversold by history. It is hard to be confident about this because Byrne doesn't present much of Burnham’s Trotskyism. This isn’t really the fault of the author as Burnham destroyed his correspondence with Trotsky after a falling out. Nevertheless, it is true that Burnham moved from being impressed to fearful of the potential organizational efficiency of communist government. Possibly another way to see Burnham’s political ideas as largely consistent beyond his methodological approach is to understand his normative view as pro-American realism and pragmatism. Interestingly, he appears to have been prone to underestimated the power of the American system despite being a staunch defender of it.
In many ways, it is infuriating that Burnham hasn't already been subject to extensive study in the halls of the modern academy. Fortunately, this new biography makes it abundantly but implicitly clear that Burnham has been systematically overlooked by intellectual histories of the 20th century, especially in works that analyze or pay attention to figures like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, John Dewey, Arthur M. Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, or George Kennan. I hope this is just a first step in a re-discovery process, and the academy starts to embrace teaching and studying Burnham. I think this would serve students of both the Right and Left well.
The book provides great evidence to show that Burnham influenced powerful political players during the Cold War. This includes Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. However, I think the longer term impact of Burnham’s ideas may outrun these political accomplishments. This goes for all his major works, but, in my view, The Machiavellians is Burnham's most important accomplishment in political thought rather than the much discussed Managerial Revolution. This is because I think The Machiavellians re-animated an important school of political thought, elite theory, for an American consciousness. Politically, Americans have struggled and still struggle with coming to terms with having an elite class and thinking about how it should be constructed and what its privileges and obligations should be. The Machiavellians is in some ways still burdened by the simple materialist analysis of class struggle, but it highlights how social institutions, factions, and human nature create or obscure political conflicts in ways that are more clear-eyed than analyses that idealistically foreground political ideas. It is also a great predicate for developing understandings of our current political discontents. Plus, there are many live players in the arena today working to spread, explain, and apply Burnham's ideas. This has mostly been an outsider’s game where the messaging has been narrowcast to a small subset of elite aspirants that is until the recent non-consecutive re-election of Donald Trump. The world should have a greater awareness of Burnham and his ideas. Start with James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography!
My interview of the author can be found here -> https://stetson.substack.com/p/revita...
March 10, 2025
I actually wrote my Master’s thesis on James Burnham, George Kennan and Walter Lippmann and their arguments over containment in the early Cold War. But it has been some time since I have gone back and thought and read about this time and its history. I was excited to get an advanced readers copy of this intellectual biography and re-enter the world of Burnham.
I enjoyed the book and it is thought provoking to think of both neoconservatism and paleo conservatism as legacies of Burnham. Anti-communism was the element that held the conservative coalition together and once the Soviet Union was gone the two sides (Neo and Paleo) went in very different directions.
And anti-communism seems to be the dominant theme of Burnham’s thinking and writing once he broke with Marxism. The other through-line seems to be the need for action and for seeing the world as it is rather than how one wants it to be. Burnham was seemingly a materialist, a realist and a positivist. Which left me wondering how his role at National Review played out. He loved to argue and engaging in the battle of ideas which certainly made sense at NR. However, he was not traditionally conservative in economics or faith, so he was somewhat unique.
One could argue that Burnham finally saw his influence pay off with the election of Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War. But the pessimistic side of Burnham seemed to think America, and the West, were losing right up until they weren’t. Did Reagan finally push the Soviets by aggressive action and the arms race to the point they could no longer function? Or did containment finally work; thanks in part to the prodding of proponents of liberation.
I think it is clear that Burnham often underestimated the strength of America and the West, its vibrancy and ability to adapt, while at the same time overestimating the unity and overarching drive of Communists around the world. Even so, he was a consistent and forceful critic of the widespread desire to wish away the ugly truth of communism and its impact on the world.
Lots to wrestle with here for sure. If you have an interest in the intellectual history and foreign policy of the 20th century this is a book worth reading.
I enjoyed the book and it is thought provoking to think of both neoconservatism and paleo conservatism as legacies of Burnham. Anti-communism was the element that held the conservative coalition together and once the Soviet Union was gone the two sides (Neo and Paleo) went in very different directions.
And anti-communism seems to be the dominant theme of Burnham’s thinking and writing once he broke with Marxism. The other through-line seems to be the need for action and for seeing the world as it is rather than how one wants it to be. Burnham was seemingly a materialist, a realist and a positivist. Which left me wondering how his role at National Review played out. He loved to argue and engaging in the battle of ideas which certainly made sense at NR. However, he was not traditionally conservative in economics or faith, so he was somewhat unique.
One could argue that Burnham finally saw his influence pay off with the election of Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War. But the pessimistic side of Burnham seemed to think America, and the West, were losing right up until they weren’t. Did Reagan finally push the Soviets by aggressive action and the arms race to the point they could no longer function? Or did containment finally work; thanks in part to the prodding of proponents of liberation.
I think it is clear that Burnham often underestimated the strength of America and the West, its vibrancy and ability to adapt, while at the same time overestimating the unity and overarching drive of Communists around the world. Even so, he was a consistent and forceful critic of the widespread desire to wish away the ugly truth of communism and its impact on the world.
Lots to wrestle with here for sure. If you have an interest in the intellectual history and foreign policy of the 20th century this is a book worth reading.
March 11, 2025
James Burnam is not well-known, but he should be. As Byrne shows in his book, Burnham is an important twentieth century thinker. James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography describes how Burnham's ideas have shaped different conservative sects, such as Neo-conservatism and paleoconservatism. Burnham seems to have particularly influential in influencing some Cold War policies. To call him anti-communist would be an understatement. He was one of America's foremost anti-communists. And before this, he wrote two books of political philosophy called The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. Byrne's book discusses these too. Overall, a solid book that is worth reading!
April 30, 2025
David Byrne traces Burnham’s evolution from a young communist in the 1930s to a Cold War anti-communist. The biography highlights Burnham’s multiple books as well as his work as a co-founder of the National Review. His writing influenced many others including Ronald Reagan, Samuel Francis and George Orwell. This book ties together the evolution of his beliefs and how they manifested in the world in ways that one wouldn’t necessarily attribute to Burham, himself.
October 13, 2025
A very accessible intellectual history that doesn't make you feel that the author is rooting for the paleo-conservative version of the title subject, nor does it lead you to believe that Burnham's evolution from Trotskyism to (Irving Howe's words) “geopolitical strategist in charge of World War III for the National Review” was an aberration.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews