James Burnham | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 22, 1905 |
| Died | July 28, 1987 (1987-07-29) (aged 81) Kent, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Spouse | |
| Relatives | David Burnham (brother) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Philosophy |
| Sub-discipline | Political philosophy |
| School or tradition |
|
| Institutions | New York University |
| Notable students | Maurice Natanson |
| Notable works | The Managerial Revolution (1941) The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943) |
| Notable ideas | Managerial class Managerial state |
| Influenced | |
James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired theNew York University Department of Philosophy.
His first book wasAn Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominentTrotskyist 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 rejectedMarxism and became an influential theorist of thepolitical right as a leader of theAmerican conservative movement.[1] Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor toWilliam F. Buckley's conservative magazineNational Review on a variety of topics. He rejectedcontainment of the Soviet Union and called for therollback of communism worldwide.[2][3]
Born inChicago,Illinois, on November 22, 1905,[4] James Burnham was the son of Claude George Burnham, an English immigrant and executive with theBurlington Railroad.[5] James was raised as aRoman Catholic but rejected Catholicism as a college student, professingatheism for the rest of his life.[6] He graduated at the top of his class atPrinceton University before attendingBalliol College, Oxford, where his professors includedJ. R. R. Tolkien andMartin D'Arcy. In 1929, he became a professor ofphilosophy atNew York University.[7]
In 1934, he married Marcia Lightner.[8]
In 1933, along withSidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize theAmerican Workers Party led by the Dutch-bornpacifist ministerA. J. Muste.[9][10] Burnham supported the 1934 merger with theCommunist League of America which formed theUS Workers Party. In 1935, he allied with theTrotskyist wing of that party and favored fusion with theSocialist Party of America. During this period, he became a friend toLeon Trotsky. Writing forPartisan Review, Burnham was also an important influence on writers includingDwight Macdonald andPhilip Rahv.[11] However, Burnham's engagement with Trotskyism was short-lived: from 1937 a number of disagreements came to the fore.
In 1937, the Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party, an action which led to the formation of theSocialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year. Inside the SWP, Burnham allied withMax Shachtman in afaction fight over the position of the SWP's majority faction, led byJames P. Cannon and backed by Leon Trotsky, defending theSoviet Union as adegenerated workers state against the incursions ofimperialism. Shachtman and Burnham, especially after witnessing theNazi–Soviet pact of 1939 and the invasions ofPoland,Latvia,Lithuania, andEstonia byJoseph Stalin's regime, as well as theSoviet invasion of Finland 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.[citation needed]
In February 1940 he wroteScience and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky, in which he broke withdialectical 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 toPrincipia Mathematica byRussell andWhitehead and "the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the newEncyclopedia of Unified Science".[12]
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.[13] 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 theWorkers 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 fromMarxism:
I reject, as you know, the "philosophy of Marxism,"dialectical materialism. ...
The general Marxian theory of "universal history", to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.
Marxian economics seems to me for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical structure of the economics.
Not only do I believe it meaningless to say that "socialism is inevitable" and false that socialism is "the only alternative to capitalism"; I consider that on the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive society (which I call "managerial society") is not only possible but is a more probable outcome of the present than socialism. ...
On no ideological, theoretic or political ground, then, can I recognize, or do I feel, any bond or allegiance to the Workers Party (or to any other Marxist party). That is simply the case, and I can no longer pretend about it, either to myself or to others.[14][15]
In 1941, Burnham wrote a book analyzing the development of economics and society as he saw it, calledThe Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. The book was included inLife magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.[16]
DuringWorld War II, Burnham took a leave from NYU to work for theOffice of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of theCentral Intelligence Agency. Recommended byGeorge F. Kennan, Burnham was invited to lead the semi-autonomous "Political and Psychological Warfare" division of the Office of Policy Coordination.[7]
Subsequently, during theCold War, he called for an aggressive strategy against theSoviet Union. A contributor toThe Freeman in the early 1950s, he considered the magazine too focused oneconomic issues, though it presented a wide range of opinion on the Soviet threat. InThe 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.[17]
In 1955, he helpedWilliam F. Buckley Jr. foundNational Review magazine, which from the start took positions inforeign policy consistent with Burnham's own. In theNational Review, he wrote a column titled "Third World War," which referred to the Cold War.[18] Burnham became a lifelong contributor to the journal, and Buckley referred to him as "the number one intellectual influence onNational Review since the day of its founding."[7] His approach to foreign policy has caused some to regard him as the first "neoconservative," although Burnham's ideas have been an important influence on both thepaleoconservative andneoconservative factions of the American Right.[19]
In 1983, PresidentRonald Reagan awarded him thePresidential Medal of Freedom.
In early November 1978 he suffered a stroke which affected his health andshort-term memory.[20] He died of kidney and liver cancer[21] at home inKent, Connecticut, on July 28, 1987.[22] He was buried in Kent on August 1, 1987.[23]
Burnham's seminal work,The Managerial Revolution (1941), theorized about the future of world capitalism based upon its development in the interwar period. Burnham begins by saying that "It is a historical law, with no apparent exceptions so far known, that all social and economic groups of any size strive to improve their relative position with respect to power and privilege in society". He then weighed three possibilities: (1) that capitalism was a permanent form of social and economic organization and would continue indefinitely; (2) that it was temporary and destined by its nature to collapse and be replaced by socialism; (3) that it was currently being transformed into some non-socialist future form of society.[24][25] Since capitalism had a more or less definite beginning in the 14th century, it could not be regarded as an immutable and permanent form.[26] Moreover, in the last years of previous economic systems such as those ofAncient Greece and theRoman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished."[27] The worldwide mass unemployment of thedepression era thus indicated that capitalism was itself "not going to continue much longer."[27]
Burnham agreed with Marxists that the capitalist class would inevitably lose the class struggle, but disagreed that they would lose to the working class due to this class being too disorganized and weak. He instead argued that a new class called the managerial class would win against the capitalist class. Burnham defines this new class as the individuals responsible for "the tasks of the technical direction and coordination of the process of production." The managerial class is responsible for directing technical experts, including "operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government ... administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on." According to Burnham, the managerial class has risen due to the increasing complexity and large scope of modern economies. Because doing certain tasks requires hyper specific technical knowledge, the capitalist class cannot perform all of the necessary tasks by themselves. This means that the capitalist class has to employ individuals who manage other individuals engaged in technical work. By doing this, the capitalist class has made themselves obsolete, since the managers are the individuals who actually control production. Although the managerial class is still employed by the capitalist class, Burnham argued that this arrangement was irreconcilable. This would eventually result in the managerial class who actually owns production seizing it from the capitalist class who owns it in name only. According to Burnham, the managerial class would seize power by implementing state ownership of production. Due to the complexity and large scale of modern economies, Burnham argues that this form of state ownership would prove more efficient than rule by individual capitalists. The "managerial revolution", according to Burnham, would result in the decline of capitalist democracy and the rise of managerial control of production while using "the unlimited state" as a vehicle.[25]
Analyzing the emerging forms of society around the world, Burnham saw certain commonalities between the economic formations ofNazi Germany,Stalinist Russia, and America under Roosevelt'sNew Deal. Burnham argued that in the short period since theFirst World War, a new society had emerged in which a social group or class of "managers" had waged a "drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class."[28] For at least the previous decade, there had grown in America the idea of a "separation of ownership and control" of the modern corporation, notably expounded inThe Modern Corporation and Private Property by Berle and Means.[29] Burnham expanded this concept, arguing that whether ownership wascorporate and private orstatist and governmental, the essential demarcation between the ruling elite (executives and managers backed by bureaucrats and functionaries) and the mass of society was not ownership so much as control of the means of production.
Burnham emphasized that "New Dealism", as he called it, "is not, let me repeat, a developed, systematized managerial ideology." Still, thisideology had contributed to American capitalism's moving in a "managerial direction":
Burnham argued that the power of the capitalist class would decline, while a new managerial class would rise to take its place, directing the state and industry. He described both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as having a managerial class based on an economic model he considered to be superior to liberal capitalism. Because of this, he incorrectly predicted that the Nazis would win World War II.[25]In its own more confused, less advanced way, New Dealism too has spread abroad the stress on the state as against the individual, planning as against private enterprise, jobs (even if relief jobs) against opportunities, security against initiative, "human rights" against "property rights." There can be no doubt that the psychological effect of New Dealism has been what the capitalists say it has been: to undermine public confidence in capitalist ideas and rights and institutions. Its most distinctive features help to prepare the minds of the masses for the acceptance of the managerial social structure.[30]
InThe Machiavellians, he developed his theory that the emerging new élite would prosper better if it retained some democratic trappings—political opposition, a free press, and a controlled "circulation of the élites."
His 1964 bookSuicide 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 andanti-communism. He defined political ideologies as syndromes afflicting their proponents with various internal contradictions. His works greatly influencedpaleoconservative authorSam Francis, who wrote two books about Burnham, and based his political theories upon the "managerial revolution" and the resultingmanagerial state.
British writerGeorge Orwell was inspired by Burnham'sThe Managerial Revolution and his explanation of power,[31] which informed Orwell's 1949 novelNineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell noted in 1945, "For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires ...".[32] The superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in the novel are partly influenced by Burnham's assessment ofRoosevelt's America, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as being managerial states. In 1946 Orwell, summarized Burnham's managerial revolution and outlined the geopolitical landscape ofNineteen Eighty-Four:
The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of 'managers'. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new 'managerial' societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom."[33]
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 ofO'Brien, who talks about power and regimes inNineteen Eighty-Four.[34]
Books
Book contributions
Pamphlets
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Selected articles
Quotations related toJames Burnham at Wikiquote
