National Review's Most Important Writer
Nov. 19 marks the 60th anniversary of National Review, the fortnightly conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. In the inaugural issue, Buckley wrote that his new opinion journal “stands athwart history, yelling stop.” The magazine brought together some of the best writers drawn from the three main branches of intellectual conservatism: free market economic theorists; Burkean traditionalists; and anti-communists. The most brilliant and important of those writers was James Burnham.
Burnham, the son of a railroad executive, was born in Chicago in 1905, studied philosophy at Princeton University, where he graduated first in his class, and Baliol College, Oxford University, and taught at New York University where he emerged as a leading theoretician of the Trotskyist wing of the international communist movement. With Philip Wheelwright, he wrote his first book, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1932), and edited a journal called Symposium. Burnham wrote for The New International and other Marxist publications during the 1930s, and helped organize the Socialist Workers Party.
In May 1940, Burnham formally broke with the international communist movement. In a letter to the Socialist Workers Party, he explained his intellectual break with Marxism whether of the Leninist, Stalinist, or Trotskyist variety. Marxian economics and the Marxist theory of “universal history,” he wrote, were false. “Stalinism,” Burnham further explained, “must be understood as one manifestation of the same general historical forces of which fascism is another manifestation,” and he hinted that Leninism and Trotskyism were no different.
Burnham began writing for Partisan Review, then a leading journal of the non-communist Left. During the Second World War, he authored two important books: The Managerial Revolution (1941), which foresaw the rise of the “managerial state” and envisioned the United States playing a crucial geopolitical role in the post-war world; and The Machiavellians (1943), a brilliant work of political philosophy that synthesized the writings of Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels. He also worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the wartime precursor to the CIA), where in the spring of 1944 he wrote an analysis of Soviet post-war goals that anticipated—two years before George Kennan’s Long Telegram—the emerging Cold War.
After the war, Burnham wrote a Cold War trilogy: The Struggle for the World (1947), The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), and Containment or Liberation? (1952), which combined classical geopolitics with an unparalleled understanding of Soviet communist goals and tactics.
The Cold War trilogy was followed in 1954 by The Web of Subversion, a highly-detailed analysis of communist penetration of the U.S. government. Burnham also wrote for post-war conservative journals, including The Freeman and The American Mercury, which also featured the writing of a brash, young conservative named William F. Buckley, Jr.
When Buckley looked to found a new journal of conservative opinion, one of his first recruits was Burnham, who became and remained an active Senior Editor of National Review until sidelined by a stroke in 1978. Buckley would later write that Burnham was “the dominant intellectual influence in the development of” National Review. George Nash, the preeminent historian of the conservative intellectual movement in America, wrote that without the efforts of Burnham and other ex-radicals such as Frank Meyer and Willi Schlamm, “National Review would never have succeeded.”
Burnham’s most important and lasting contribution to National Review was his regular column on the Cold War, originally titled “The Third World War” and later changed to “The Protracted Conflict.” Burnham described the column as “a kind of notebook of running commentary on the events, problems, methods, and prospects of” the geopolitical struggle between the West, led by the United States, and international communism, led by the Soviet Union. In his books and his National Review columns, wrote George Nash, “Burnham supplied the conservative intellectual movement with the theoretical formulation for victory in the Cold War.”
Burnham brought to his column a lifetime of learning and analysis, combining a shrewd understanding of global geopolitics with a hard-headed Machiavellian analysis of power politics and human nature. His geopolitical analyses borrowed generously and astutely from the theories and concepts of Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, while his political analyses reflected his brilliant synthesis of the writings of the Machiavellians who understood how and why men wielded and used political power. This enabled Burnham to fit seemingly unrelated political events into a larger geopolitical context, and gave his work a prophetic quality that eludes most writers on global affairs.
In both his books and columns in National Review, Burnham urged U.S. and Western leaders to escape from their “self-imposed strategic prison” of containment, and implement a policy of “liberation” to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Soviet empire. The elements of Burnham’s proposed policy of liberation included assisting dissident and resistance groups within the Soviet empire; launching an ideological and propaganda offensive against the Soviets; using the West’s technological and economic strength to impose strains on the Soviet economy and political system; and forcing the Soviets onto the geopolitical defensive. This was essentially the strategy used by the Reagan administration to achieve victory in the Cold War. It is no coincidence that in 1983, President Reagan awarded Burnham the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The medal’s citation reads:
As a scholar, historian and philosopher, James Burnham has profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world. Since the 1930s, Mr. Burnham has shaped the thinking of world leaders. His observations have changed society and his writings have become guiding lights in mankind’s quest for truth. Freedom, reason and decency have had few greater champions in this century than James Burnham.
Burnham’s last book was Suicide of the West (1964), a penetrating and insightful examination of the tenets of modern intellectual liberalism, which Burnham called “the ideology of Western suicide.” Burnham showed that since 1914, Western global influence and political hegemony had gradually receded, referencing an historical atlas to depict Western civilization’s retreat. This was happening even though the West far outstripped other civilizations in science, technology, military power and economic well-being. The cause of the West’s retreat, therefore, had to be internal.
In the book’s final chapter, Burnham identified the causes of the West’s global retreat as “the decay of religion, … an excess of material luxury, … and … getting tired, worn out, as all things temporal do.” Liberalism, he explained, could not be blamed for the West’s contraction, but it intellectually enabled Western Civilization “to be reconciled to dissolution,” and therefore could not help to reverse the process. Liberalism was unequipped to defend and save Western Civilization, Burnham further explained, primarily because liberals no longer believed in the relative superiority of their civilization.
Western Civilization, Burnham knew, would only be saved when the West—most importantly the United States—reacquired the pre-liberal conviction that its civilization “… is both different from and superior in quality to other civilizations and non-civilizations ….” Furthermore, he continued, “there would have to be a renewed willingness, legitimized by that conviction, to use superior power and the threat of power to defend the West against all challenges and challengers.” Liberalism, by its own tenets, “is not allowed to entertain that conviction or to make frank, unashamed and therefore effective use of that power.”
Burnham died in 1987, and National Review, fittingly, devoted an entire issue to his life and career. As the editors and writers of National Review celebrate the 60th anniversary of the magazine, they must know that they stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants like James Burnham.
