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American political theorist James Burnham (1905–1987) was one of the most influential anticommunist thinkers of the cold war era. Like many anticommunists, he started out as a Trotskyite, but eventually he moved away from Trotskyism and began a slow journey to the right. He became a mentor to American conservative political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. and a founding editor at the conservative National Review, where he remained until he was felled by a stroke in 1987. He has been described by Richard Brookhiser, an American journalist and historian, as the “first neoconservative.”

Burnham was unique among conservative thinkers. Unlike other conservatives who based their theories on religion, tradition, or natural law, he was rigorously empirical and influenced by the so-called realist school of politics. He sought to discover universal laws of politics and apply them to foreign policy and cultural change. He was generally supportive of free enterprise and limited government. He was neither a member of the old right nor the neocon right and was not a doctrinaire believer in laissez-faire. Burnham’s views on congressional supremacy; his partial support for Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. senator who made accusations that the U.S. government had been infiltrated by communists; and his views on race place him broadly on the pale conservative spectrum.

From 1930 to 1934, Burnham and American philosopher Philip Wheelwright co-edited a review entitled Symposium. In 1932 he and Wheelwright published a textbook titled Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. At this time Burnham became acquainted with philosopher and Marxist Sidney Hook, his colleague at New York University. Burnham’s articles in Symposium impressed Hook and Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. After The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, in which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to settle any differences amicably without war, Burnham broke with the Socialist Workers Party.

Burnham’s next intellectual phase began in 1941 with the publication of The Managerial Revolution, a study in which he theorized that the world was witnessing the emergence of a new ruling class, the managers, who would soon replace the capitalists and the communists. The Managerial Revolution was a political and socioeconomic work, but it was also Burnham’s first foray into global geopolitics. In it he sketched that the world would become tripolar with three strategic centers: (1) North America; (2) north-central Europe; and (3) west Asia, North Africa, and East Asia, including Japan and China. He predicted that Russia would break up, the British Empire would be liquidated, and the United States would become a superpower. In 1943, as his ideas expanded, he published his first analysis of political science, The Machiavellians. Based on the study of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, Burnham deduced that (1) all politics is a struggle for power among individuals and groups; (2) political analysis is concerned with things as they are, not what they ought to be; (3) there is a distinction between formal meaning and real meaning; (4) political person is driven by self-interest and instinct, not by logic; (5) political elites are concerned only with the aggrandizement of power and they hold power by force and fraud; (6) all societies are divided into the rulers and the ruled; and (7) the ruling classes shift over time in their membership and goals.

After World War II (1939–1945), Burnham became the chief critic of the policy of containment, which was devised by advisor George Kennan for President Harry S. Truman’s administration in an effort to curtail the spread of communism. Burnham criticized containment from the ideological right, arguing for a more aggressive strategy that called for the liberation of Eastern Europe to undermine Soviet power. Decades later President Ronald Reagan adopted Burnham’s confrontational approach, which resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Empire and thus vindicated Burnham’s views.

Burnham wrote The Struggle for the World (1947) and The World We Are In (1967), both of which were broad comprehensive analyses of the beginning of the cold war, the nature of the communist threat to the world, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s ambitions, and the strategy for a U.S. victory. He expanded his ideas in The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950) and Containment or Liberation? (1952). As early as 1962 he predicted a U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War (1959–1975). Burnham was also broadly pessimistic about the future of the West. In his Suicide of the West (1964), he argued that the West had passed the apex of its power and would decline soon.

Bibliography:

Francis, Samuel. Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984.
Thinkers of Our Time: James Burnham. London: Claridge, 1999.
Kelly, Daniel. James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life. New York: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002.