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.
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