James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution.
14th January 2026
At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.
At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”
Yet Burnham was too intelligent and humane to remain impressed with the Soviets for very long. In 1940, his life took a decisive turn when he broke with Marxist-Leninism. Trotsky and his acolytes denounced him as a nefarious traitor. But Burnham would go on to compose what Byrne correctly identifies as “two of the most successful political works of the 1940s”: The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943). He became a public intellectual, appearing regularly in journals of the Left-liberal New York intelligentsia such as the Partisan Review. He was even recommended by George Kennan to help with anti-Communist efforts at the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.