James Burnham: A Visionary Like No Other
15th September 2018
James Burnham was one of the greatest thinkers of modern times — seriously under-appreciated.
The similarities between Hitler and Stalin inspired Burnham’s first book, The Managerial Revolution (1941). Its subtitle, in oracular prose, promised an explanation of “what is happening in the world.” What was happening, Burnham said, was the displacement of both capitalism and socialism by an authoritarian system of technocratic managers.
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The theme of The Machiavellians is the irrationality of ideologies and the pretense of democracy. Elites rule in every society and in every state, Burnham said, and “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.”
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It was George Orwell who became Burnham’s most famous interlocutor. “Burnham has real intellectual courage,” Orwell wrote in a review of The Struggle for the World, “and writes about real issues.” But Orwell could not embrace Burnham’s thought without qualification: The American, he wrote, was too deterministic, reductive, and catastrophic in his pronouncements. “The tendency of writers like Burnham, whose key concept is ‘realism,’ is to overrate the part played in human affairs by sheer force,” Orwell said. However, despite this objection and others, Burnham’s dark vision fascinated Orwell to such an extent that he incorporated it into Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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Burnham also sought, over the objections of some of the other editors, to endow National Reviewwith a sense of maturity, ecumenism, and acceptance of American culture that he believed it on occasion lacked. He did not always succeed. However, so devoted was he to this new project that he produced just one major work in the 1950s: Congress and the American Tradition (1959), the result of four years of research into the relationship between Congress and the presidency.
What Burnham identified in this book was a dramatic modification of the way Americans understood democracy. The constitutional system designed by the Founders established Congress as the first branch of government, the mediating institution between the people and the state bureaucracy under the chief executive. Beginning in the 19th century, however, and accelerating under Wilson and FDR, the executive branch acted not with reference to the Constitution but in the name of “the people.” Congress lost its primacy, its powers, and its prestige. Government was no longer constitutionalist. It was Caesarist.
Sound familiar?