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James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy.
His first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. His most famous book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), speculated on the future of an increasingly proceduralist hence sclerotic society. A year before he wrote the book, he rejected Marxism and became an influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics. He rejected containment of the Soviet Union and called for the rollback of communism worldwide. James Burnham, 82, National Review Editor , Washington Post
In 1934, he married Marcia Lightner.
In 1937, the Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party, an action which led to the formation of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year. Inside the SWP, Burnham allied with Max Shachtman in a faction fight over the position of the SWP's majority faction, led by James P. Cannon and backed by Leon Trotsky, defending the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state against the incursions of imperialism. Shachtman and Burnham, especially after witnessing the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 and the invasions of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia by Joseph Stalin's regime, as well as the Winter War in November 1939, came to contend that the USSR was a new form of imperialistic class society and was thus not worthy of even critical support from the socialist movement.
In February 1940 he wrote Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky, in which he broke with dialectical materialism. In this text he responds to Trotsky's request to draw his attention to "those works which should supplant the system of dialectic materialism for the proletariat" by referring to Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Whitehead and "the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science".Burhham J. (1940) Science and Style A Reply to Comrade Trotsky, in In Defence of Marxism by Leon Trotsky, London 1966, pp. 232–56.
After a protracted discussion inside the SWP, in which the factions argued their case in a series of heated internal discussion bulletins, the special 3rd National Convention of the organization in early April 1940 decided the question in favor of the Cannon majority by a vote of 55–31.James P. Cannon, "The Convention of the Socialist Workers Party," The Fourth International, v. 1, no. 1 (May 1940), p. 16. Even though the majority sought to avoid a split by offering to continue the debate and to allow proportional representation of the minority on the party's governing National Committee, Shachtman, Burnham, and their supporters resigned from the SWP to launch their own organization, again called the Workers Party.
This break also marked the end of Burnham's participation in the radical movement, however. On May 21, 1940, he addressed a letter to the National Committee of the Workers Party resigning from the organization. In it he made it clear the distance he had moved away from Marxism:
In 1941, Burnham wrote a book analyzing the development of economics and society as he saw it, called The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. The book was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.Canby, Henry Seidel. "The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944". Life, 14 August 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine's editors.
Subsequently, during the Cold War, he called for an aggressive strategy against the Soviet Union. A contributor to The Freeman in the early 1950s, he considered the magazine too focused on economics issues, though it presented a wide range of opinion on the Soviet threat. In The Struggle for the World (1947), he called for common citizenship between the United States, Great Britain, and the British dominions, as well as a "World Federation" against communism. Burnham thought in terms of a hegemonic world, instead of a balance of power:
A World Federation initiated and led by the United States would be, we have recognized, a World Empire. In this imperial federation, the United States, with a monopoly of atomic weapons, would hold a preponderance of decisive material power over all the rest of the world. In world politics, that is to say, there would not be a balance of power.James Burnham, The Struggle for the World (Toronto: Longmans, 1947), 190, 210.
In 1955, he helped William F. Buckley Jr. found National Review magazine, which from the start took positions in foreign policy consistent with Burnham's own. In the National Review, he wrote a column titled "Third World War," which referred to the Cold War. Burnham became a lifelong contributor to the journal, and Buckley referred to him as "the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding." His approach to foreign policy has caused some to regard him as the first "Neoconservatism," although Burnham's ideas have been an important influence on both the paleoconservative and Neoconservatism factions of the American Right.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In early November 1978 he suffered a stroke which affected his health and short-term memory. He died of kidney and liver cancer at home in Kent, Connecticut, on July 28, 1987. He was buried in Kent on August 1, 1987.
His 1964 book Suicide of the West became a classic text for the post-war conservative movement in American politics, proclaiming Burnham's new interest in traditional moral values, classical liberal economics and anti-communism. He defined political ideologies as syndromes afflicting their proponents with various internal contradictions. His works greatly influenced paleoconservative author Sam Francis, who wrote two books about Burnham, and based his political theories upon the "managerial revolution" and the resulting managerial state.
While Orwell partly agreed with Burnham's analysis, he never fully accepted Burnham's attitude towards Machiavellian managerial power. This unresolved thought helped to inspire the character of O'Brien, who talks about power and regimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Book contributions
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Public speaking
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