James Burnham

The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power . . . the primary object, in practice of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege . . . No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leader nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power… Only power restrains power. . . . When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident.

James Burnham (1943)The Machievellians, Defenders of Freedom

Burnham has been described as "the first neoconservative," Giles Scott-Smith in a review of Daniel Kelly’s (2002) James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life, describes Burnham as “one of the most intriguing conservative intellectuals of the Cold War period”.

James Burnham's significance to Conservatism

James Burnham's (1905-87) influence on Conservatism can be traced to a series of books but it is mainly his (1941) The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, and the (1943) The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom: A Defense of Political Truth Against Wishful Thinking,which are cited as having had the greatest influence on the right and which are discussed below. Other works include: (1964) Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning & Destiny of Liberalism, (1949) The Coming Defeat of Communism, (1947) The struggle for the world, (1954) The web of subversion; underground networks in the U. S. Government, (1967) The War We Are In: The Last Decade and the Next, (1959) Congress and the American Tradition. Burnham was best known during his life as an anti-Communist theorist of the Cold War who was involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a founding editor of National Review.

Biography and History

Burnham has been described as "the first neoconservative," Giles Scott-Smith in a review of Daniel Kelly’s (2002) James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life, describes Burnham as “one of the most intriguing conservative intellectuals of the Cold War period”. Ironically, there is an ambiguity there whereby Burnham was engaged in intrigue rather than simply a beguiling subject for study:

In particular, there is the intriguing position he held for several years at the intersection between the U.S. state covert apparatus and the public role of the academic and intellectual.

Scott-Smith also offers a short biography:

Burnham came from a privileged background, his father rising rapidly within the railway business of the Great Northern line and able already in his mid-20s to provide a comfortable life in the Chicago suburbs for his family. Born in 1905, Burnham was the eldest of three sons, and his evident academic talents combined with sufficient financial backing soon set him up for the education fast-track: a private Catholic boarding school in Connecticut followed by graduation from Princeton in 1927 and two years at esteemed Balliol College in Oxford. By 1929 he had been taken on by New York University's philosophy department, a position he would hold for twenty years. At this stage Burnham had shown no particular interest in politics and had not taken any political science courses at university. At Princeton he had majored in English, at Balliol he had taken courses in medieval philosophy and literature under J.J.R. Tolkien, and his reputation began to grow in New York as a specialist in aesthetics. His initial pursuit of this path was confirmed by his role as co-founder and co-editor of the literary journal Symposium, which first appeared in 1930.

The review also follows Burham’s path through the 1930s Trotskyite vanguard, Sidney Hook’s ideas on how to adapt Marxism to the American experience, the American Workers Party, the Socialist Workers Party, New International and Socialist Appeal. For Scott-Smith Kelly's portrayal of Burnham as a master synthesizer of different intellectual standpoints is exemplified by the (1941) Managerial Revolution. In examining the trend towards increasing bureaucratization within all forms of government the work is redolent of Weber, but it is possibly the influence of writers such as Robert Michels’ (1911) Political Parties, and its conception of “the iron law of oligarchy” which would go on to influence factions of the US right. Burnham’s (1943) The Machiavellians, by drawing on the works of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Niebuhr, the intellectual drive moves towards ‘International Relations’. In pointing out the omissions of the biography Scott-Smith makes the observation that:

Christopher Lasch, in his seminal 1967 essay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), identified precisely what was going on when he pointed out the following: "Elitism was one of the things that attracted intellectuals to Leninism in the first place (more than to orthodox Marxism); and even after they had dissociated themselves from its materialist content, they clung to the congenial view of intellectuals as the vanguard of history.... " Other lapsed Trotskyites applied their elitism later by means of a cultural vanguard, as Melvin Lasky did with Der Monat and the CCF. Burnham, his fascination with the forces of history overshadowing his philosophical-cultural background, chose the political road.

Or should that be the para-political road, given that Scott-Smith notes Burnham’s alliance with the US covert state in 1944 with a paper he wrote for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA on the future aims of Soviet power. Here we are back to the intrigue:

Burnham's firebrand Cold War trilogy—The Struggle for the World (1947), The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950), and Containment or Liberation? (1953)—were all written with Burnham in close proximity to covert action circles, and his decision in 1949 to take long-term leave from NYU (he left formally in 1951) to become a political warfare consultant for Frank Wisner's newly-created Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) exemplifies how deep he was in that world.

But concrete connections between the standpoints in Burnham's books and the OPC's operations are hard to define, although resemblances are common. It is an odd comparison to which we will return below, but Burnham’s regular column in the National Review was taken over by Brian Crozier, another former leftist who put himself at the service of anti-Communist propaganda and the intelligence services with embarrassing over-eagerness. Of Burnham Scott-Smith adds:

His declamations that the U.S. must find the will to choose an aggressive stance against the pervasive determinism of Soviet expansion read as if they were taken word for word from NSC-68. Not only that but his outline of specific target areas such as Albania and the use of Eastern European exile movements are striking in how they offer intellectual justification and credibility for these covert strategies. Kelly notes in passing this side to Burnham's usefulness when he refers to how he was asked to join the planning for the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Mossadegh in Iran.

As is clear from Lasch’s account, "The Congress for Cultural Freedom," The Nation (11 September 1967), which we will return to, Burnham was being excluded already in 1951 due to his wishes being at variance with the developing OPC-CIA goals, the cancellation of Burnham's consultant role in April 1953, and the OPC's Frank Wisner's order to end all contact (with some contradiction) is again similar to Crozier’s path:

…one gets the strong impression that Burnham was by then too extreme for the CIA. By 1953, McCarthy, whom Burnham defended, was making inquiries about Agency personnel, something the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, would not tolerate. The no-holds-barred schemes of OPC's early years had also been brought under a stricter rein. Someone like Burnham, adept at taking a controversial line on principle, was definitely expendable.

The National Review

According to review of Kelly’s book by the American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik in Commentary (October 2002):

Burnham served as a mentor to the younger [William] Buckley, becoming, in Buckley's words, "the number-one intellectual influence on National Review."

Yet the National Review project aimed to be a broad church (or Bedlam depending on your point of view) to rally the right after the defeat of Goldwater in the mid-60s US presidential election; as Muravchik’s review notes, the other influence on Buckley’s (heavily subsidised) Review was Frank S. Meyer’s "fusionism," itself an attempt to reconcile disparate “philosophical sources” of the American Right, which he categorises as “a traditionalist strain tracing back to the thought of Edmund Burke and a libertarian strain tracing back to John Locke.” The attempts at "fusionism" was also an attempt to cover a multitude of sins including the religious factions and far-right elements such as Don Lipsett’s American Security Council (ASC). Originally a database of suspected communists the ASC was founded in the mid-1950s by Gen. Robert Wood and the Chicago Tribune’s Robert R. McCormick, and became a leading anti-Soviet nexus of several cold war organisations such as the Committee on the Present Danger.

According to Edward Herman & Gerry O’Sullivan’s (1989) The Terrorism Industry, the ASC came into existence as an anti-labour intelligence and propaganda agency, acquiring the files of the anti-semite/anti-labour spymaster, Harry Jung (the first major US distributor of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). It gradually extended its activities to serve the military industrial lobby as its anti-subversive focus broadened to include an ‘international red menace’, against which it urgently demanded accelerated weapons acquisitions and terrorism.

To return to Muravchik’s Commentary review, this describes Meyer as “famously doctrinaire” while Burnham’s “views were in a state of perpetual evolution”. This also notes that the Kelly book was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) which was set up by Frank Chodorov with William F. Buckley Jr., as ISI's first president and present day trustees such as Alfred S. Regnery the publisher of The American Spectator; Richard V. Allen Reagan’s first national security adviser from 1981 to 1982; Edwin J. Feulner Jr. President of the Heritage Foundation; Edwin Meese III now with both the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, Holland H. Coors of the brewing family which in turn funded the Heritage Foundation. The review also notes that:

Burnham and Meyer opposed the Supreme Court's 1954 decision against school segregation, opposed President Eisenhower's enforcement of integration in Little Rock in 1957, and then opposed the marches, freedom rides, and civil-rights legislation of the 1960's, including the Voting Rights Act. […] Burnham lamented that the high valence of the civilrights issue had rendered impossible "scientific and empirical investigation that might prove objectively, once and for all, whether and in what sense Negroes [were] inferior" — research whose likely purpose, considering the times, would have been to justify discrimination.

This also notes that Burnham called himself an "anti-anti-McCarthyite," and that Burnham said George F. Kennan, the author of the cold-war doctrine of containment, lacked a sufficient "hatred for Communism." Truman, at the encouragement of Kennan, had set up the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) on April 4,1952. The PSB document PSB D-33/2 remains classified and is said by Frances Saunders (1999) Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, to have called for lavishly funded worldwide "political warfare" on the Soviet Union in Europe. Saunders speculates that Burnham was the author of PSB D-33/2, indicating its resemblance to Burnham's The Machiavellians, which she also maintains was used as a “manual for CIA strategists”. Saunders suggests that Burnham was “usefully to hand” when PSB D-33/2 was drafted and quotes from a concerned PSB official, Charles Marshall, who questioned the reliance on “non-rational social theories” which emphasised the role of an elite “in a manner reminiscent of Pareto, Sorel, Mussolini and so on”. Marshall is also quoted as saying:

The supposed elite emerges as the only group that counts. The elite is defined as that numerically “limited group capable and interested in manipulating doctrinal matters", the men of ideas who pull the intellectual strings "in forming, or at least predisposing, the attitudes and opinions" of those who in turn lead public opinion."

According to Marshall, as quoted by Saunders, the PSB plan was to work on the elite in each area so as to predispose its members to the "philosophy held by the planners." The use of loacal elites would help conceal the American origin of the plan "so that it appeard to be a native development."

Saunders also quotes Burnham’s article in The National Review in 1967, written when the CIA had grown weary of subsidising the Non-Communist Left (NCL):

The CIA mounted most of these activities in the perspective of "the non- Communist Left." […] The CIA estimated the NCL as a reliably anti-Communist force [but] this political estimate is mistaken. The NCL is not reliable. Under the pressure of critical events the NCL loosened. A large portion — in this country as in others — swung toward an anti-American position, and nearly all the NCL softened its attitude toward Communism and the Communist nations. Thus the organizational collapse is derivative from the political error. The political error is the doctrine that the global struggle against Communism must be based on the NCL — a doctrine fastened on the CIA by Allen Dulles. Cuba, the Dominican Republic and above all Vietnam have put the NCL doctrine and practice to a decisive test. A large part of the organizations and individuals nurtured by the CIA under the NCL prescription end up undermining the nation's security.

Roger Kimball writing in the New Criterion notes that the publication of Burnham's The Struggle for the World happened to coincide with President Truman's speech announcing what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. This coincidence gained the work much publicity — much of it negative. It also aroused the interest of the newly formed CIA. Burnham, recommended by George F. Kennan was invited to head the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination which was itself a semi-autonomous covert branch of the CIA. According to Kimball Burnham took a leave from NYU — to do "research" the university explained — and moved to Washington.

Kimball, also responding to Kelly's biography, argues that Burnham's greatest contribution while working for the CIA was to help found the Congress for Cultural Freedom:

The liberal element of the Congress cannot be overemphasized: this was an effort to win over the liberal intelligentsia — forgive the pleonasm — to the cause of anti-Communism. Accordingly, in 1950 at the Congress's inaugural conference in Berlin, patrons and speakers included Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, A. J. Ayer, Ignazio Silone, Sidney Hook, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Burnham was one of the few hard-liners. In his talk, Burnham tackled head on "neutralism — what we have come to call "moral equivalence"- the "denunciation on equal terms of American and Soviet barbarism". Burnham admitted the demotic nature of American pop culture. But tawdriness was better than tyranny: Coca-Cola might be bad, he said, but "not quite in the same league with [the Soviet labor camp] Kolyma."

For Kimball, Burnham's tenure with the CIA came to an end over the issue of "McCarthyism," and Burnham's ambivalence represented an understanding that anti-McCarthyism was often "a screen and cover for the Communists and ... a major diversion of anti-Communist efforts." Reflecting on the phenomenon after McCarthy's death, Kimball states that Burnham noted that:

McCarthy became the symbol through which the basic strata of citizens expressed their conviction ... that Communism and Communists cannot be part of our national community, that they are beyond the boundaries: that, in short, the line must be drawn somewhere. This was really at issue in the whole McCarthy business, not how many card-carrying members were in the State Department ... The issue was philosophical, metaphysical: what kind of community are we? And the Liberals, including the anti-Communist Liberals, were correct in labeling McCarthy the Enemy, and in destroying him. From the Liberal standpoint — secularist, egalitarian, relativist — the line is not drawn. Relativism must be Absolute.

For some writers, when the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) disappeared, "the core group later came to be known as the neoconservatives," and there certainly are continuities between members of the CCF (and the UK's Information Research Department) and those who gathered round the National Review, The Philadelphia Society and the network represented by the Institute of European Defence and Strategic Studies and other organisations funded by or influenced by the Heritage Foundation. The founding circle of National Review was composed largely of former agents or men otherwise associated with the CIA, including Buckley, Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall, and Burnham. William Casey, rooted in OSS activities and later to be named director of the CIA, drew up the legal documents for the Review, Buckley also served under E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame.

Crozier & Burnham’s residue

According to Joseph D’Agostino Brian Crozier “is yet another ex-leftist who has dedicated his life to fighting communism [...] and met devout Communists who had a profound influence on him”. In an interview Crozier stated “Before World War II, I had a left-wing phase, unfortunately [...] So did Bob Conquest [...] But I never joined any Communist Party.” What dissuaded him is said to be James Burnham’s (1943) The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom, and ironically Crozier succeeded Burnham in writing the National Review column, ‘The Protracted Conflict’ (originally called “The Third World War”) in 1978 (Crozier would write the column for the next 18 years). D’Agostino writes:

Crozier ascribes an enormous amount of the credit for the fall of the Soviet empire to Ronald Reagan. “One of the turning points was the invasion of Grenada. It was the first strategic and tactical retreat of the Soviet Union,” Crozier said. “The effect of it was very startling.” He told a surprising story about British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “I had an appointment with Margaret on the day of the invasion,” he recalled. “She was furious with Ronald Reagan... ‘He didn’t even have the decency to ring me and tell me what he was doing.”’

David Rees’ (1985) Student of subversion, for the National Review, states that Crozier was a “self-acknowledged disciple of James Burnham”, and explores his debt to Burnham, which it argues comes from ‘The Machiavellians’, which it describes as Burnham’s fundamental contribution to political thought more than the Managerial Revolution, but again we return to Mosca and Pareto.

It was in this book that Burnham made his famous distinction between real and formal meaning [...] Thus, Crozier goes on, “it is the job of the political commentator or analysts to discern the real behind the formal meaning . . . the truth behind the rhetoric, the facts behind the myth, the intentions behind the promises.” In Burnham’s view, Machiavelli and his modern successors, such as Michels and Pareto, were “defenders of freedom,” because, as Crozier summarized, “it is only when the people are told the truth that their interests are safeguarded.” It was not for his cynical advice to his Prince “but for his scientific observation of political realities” that Burnham praised Machiavelli and the tradition he had originated.

This argues that Crozier borrowed Burnham’s method of analysis and contention in the introduction to (1947) The Struggle for the World,that “the Third World War” began with the Communist-sponsored mutiny in the Greek navy in Egypt in 1944, “waged by Moscow against the West in line with Leninist teaching.” Rees places Burnham’s and Crozier’s concern with the ‘politics of reality’ as part of a wider strand of modern political writing, common to both Britain and America, which he terms “conservative realism.” This may be traced back to:

Admiral A. T. Mahan, the famous analyst of sea power, to Henry and Brooks Adams, and to Walter Lippmann (in his younger years). It was Lippmann, for example, who pointed out during the First World War that President Wilson’s stated motives for entering the war, however idealistic, were in fact inseparable from the strategic necessity of preserving the “Atlantic system” linking American and British interests.

British counterparts, are given as “Milner or a Cromer [...] Sir Charles Dilke, J. A. Froude, and Sir J. R. Seeley” in terms of their work’s relation to the British Empire: with Dilke, for instance, arguing that “British rule in India rested not on force but on self-confidence.” Crozier’s (1970) Since Stalin, is presented as his “most able synthesis, accurate in diagnosis and prophetic in analysis:”

It is an examination of the power realities inherent in Soviet strategy at the end of the 1960s. Brushing aside the fashionable view that the cold war was over, Crozier looked at the new reality of Soviet global power. By the end of the decade, the USSR, having achieved nuclear parity with the United States, was ready to take advantage of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s readiness to improve relations with Moscow, and of France’s withdrawal from the integrated military machinery of NATO (though not from the treaty). Flexing its newly developed naval power, the USSR was already preparing to fill the impending American power vacuum in Southeast Asia. In the Western Hemisphere, the Soviets were bringing Fidel Castro more fully under their control in the interests of a more effective strategy in Latin America. The Soviet Union was thus now in a position to challenge the West in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

It is also argued that Crozier’s biography of Franco, makes the judgment that the order Franco “created in Spain in the 1950s and 1960s made possible modern industrial—and democratic—Spain”; His biography of De Gaulle argues that he “endangered France’s allies” and Crozier’s (1978) Strategy of Survival, explores the tension between East and West in terms of Burnham’s “Third World War,” although it also describes this as a polemical work. In Crozier’s view, Burnham’s ‘Third World War’ is a war of “politics and subversion, terrorism and psychological warfare” although it fails to mention Crozier’s connections to covert propaganda and the Secret Intelligence Service and the CIA.

In a review of Burnham’s “The Modern Machiavellians”, from a Marxist perspective when it appeared in the 1940s, Paul Mattick observed:

Mosca, like all Mechiavellians, Burnham says, rejects any monistic view of history because such theories do not accord with the facts. In his search for truth – which is the purpose of all Machiavellians – Mosca discovers as the primary and universal social fact the existence of two “political classes,” a ruling class – always a minority – and the ruled. And he believes that not only has this always been and is now the case, but that it always will be.

Mattick also observes that before dealing with Michels and Pareto, Burnham discusses Sorel and the function of myth and violence, arguing that Sorel thought that a socialist take-over of governmental power would lead to the substitution of a new elite as ruler over the masses, and is thus Machiavellian. A ‘real’ revolutionary program “could be carried out with the help of an all-embracing myth, which would arouse the masses to uncompromising action.” A true Machiavellian, Burnham argues according to Mattick, separates scientific questions concerning the truth about society from moral disputes over what type of society is most desirable. This is related to the assertion that it can be scientifically demonstrated that organising a classless society is impossible and that a tendency toward oligarchy is inherent in organisation itself and is thus a necessary condition of life:

The autocratic tendencies are neither arbitrary nor accidental nor temporary, but inherent in the nature of organization. This iron law of oligarchy holds good for all social movements and all forms of society. It makes impossible the democratic ideal of self-government.

Pareto’s general analysis of society contains distinctions he makes between “logical” and “non-logical” conduct which relates to his concepts of ‘residues and derivations,’ with ‘Residue’ meaning classes of stable, common elements in social actions, permanent human impulses, instincts, or sentiments. Pareto, according to Burnham, is not concerned with the question of where residues come from as with the fact that social actions may be analyzed in terms of them, whatever their origin. The derivations, according to this formulation of Pareto (and the question arises to what extent Burnham’s formulation has become the accepted formulation) are the verbal “explanations, dogmas, doctrines and theories with which man clothes the non-logical bones of the residues.”

Under the Lasch & grist for the Mills

Christopher Lasch's (1969)The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, argued that the former Communists who gathered at the first meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) expressed themselves in "formulations that were themselves derived from the cruder sort of Marxist cant." Of Burnham specifically, Lasch adds that The Managerial Revolution "passed for Marxism in left-wing circles of the thirties." Not all reactions to it were so trusting however. Richard Gillam's (1981) White Collar from start to Finish: C. Wright Mills in Transition, argues that Burnham's "mordant vision" of an emerging "managerial" society exerted a decisive if negative influence upon C. Wright Mills:

In his best-selling tract of 1941, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, ex-Trotskyist Burnham had proposed that a new kind of society-one beyond the ken of older social theory — was irresistably emerging within the world's superstates. Control of this future social order would rest in neither a ruling nor a working class but in a functionally indispensable elite of managers. This was of course only the most recent version of an argument previously advanced by Thorstein Veblen, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, Max Shachtman, and others before them. But The Managerial Revolution appeared at a crucial historical moment and had great influence as a frightful forecast of things to come. Burnham gave theoretical expression to the deepest apprehensions of the age; his vision fascinated even as it repelled. For it must be stressed that, despite his emphasis upon knowledgeable elites, he actually advanced a radically deterministic theory of power and intellect as deriving from a system both preordained and permanent. Burnham's managers were not the masters but the servants of a massive social mechanism that could not be changed in any basic way. This anti-intellectual variant of new middle class analysis thus negated the old liberal-marxist hope that the human lot could be rationally improved. History was to end not only in a social condition of permanent inequality between elites and masses but with people little more than mindless objects — cogs in a machine. For Mills as for many others this was less a theory than a nightmare, and it excited furious resistance.

Gillam also argues that the young Mills almost certainly conceived White Collar in direct response and opposition — as an "answer" — to the Burnham thesis. he also states that Mills' first published reference but one to "white collar groups" appears in the collaborative attack upon The Managerial Revolution he and Gerth had mounted in a 1942 review-essay, "A Marx For the Managers." Gillam adds that Mills often dated the inception of White Collar almost precisely from the moment of this essay and states that he believes this points to the anti-Burnham impulse — "the resistance to deterministic gloom" — as fundamental to his work and that Mills also identifies managerialism as "an analysis that had to be disproved".

Lasch's account of the CCF meeting also notes that it broke up in a 'spirit of rancour':

A resolution excluding totalitarian sympathizers 'from the Republic of the Spirit' was withdrawn, 'Professor Hook and Mr Burnham,' according to Trevor-Roper, 'protesting to the end'.

Lasch also amusing notes that Burnham resigned from the advisory board of the Partisan Review, because William Phillips and Phillip Rahv (adapting a cold war slogan) argued that there should be "no room on Partisan Review for neutralism about McCarthy."

Publications and Resources

Publications

Several of Burnham's book are available online:

• The managerial revolution (1941)

• (1959) Congress and the American Tradition, H. Regnery Co.

Resources

Books about Burnham include:

• James Gilbert (1972) Designing the Industrial State: The Intellectual Pursuit of Collectivism in America, 1880-1940 (see Chap. 10 "James Burnham: Collectivism Triumphant").

• Alan M. Wald (1987) The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s ("James Burnham: From Neo- thomism to Trotskyism" begins on p. 175).

• George Orwell's James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution Essay, originally from New English Weekly, (May 1946) and also published as "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" in Polemic No 3 in May 1946 and in various essay collections. It is thought that the Managerial Revolution was an influence on 1984. Orwell summarises Burnham's thesis thus:

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. 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.

• Francis P. Sempa (2000) The First Cold Warrior, American Diplomacy. This notes that:

From the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto, Burnham deduced that:

1. All politics is concerned with the struggle for power among individuals and groups;

2. genuine political analysis involves correlating facts and formulating hypotheses about the future without reference to what ought to happen;

3. there is a distinction between the "formal" and "real" meaning of political rhetoric, which can only be discovered by analyzing the rhetoric in the context of the actual world of time, space, and history;

4. “political man” is primarily a “non-logical” actor driven by “instinct, impulse and interest;”

5. rulers and political elites are primarily concerned with maintaining and expanding their power and privileges;

6. rulers and elites hold power by “force and fraud;”

7. all governments are sustained by “political formulas” or myths;

8. all societies are divided into a “ruling class” and the ruled; and

9. in all societies the “structure and composition” of the ruling class changes over time.

It also notes that:

The Machiavellians is the most complete exposition of Burnham’s approach to the study and analysis of politics. Samuel Francis judges it to be his "most important book,” and opines that “virtually all of Burnham’s writing since The Machiavellians must be understood in reference to it.” Brian Crozier agrees, calling The Machiavellians “the most fundamental of Burnham’s books,” and “the key to everything he wrote subsequently." Joseph Sobran calls the book “the key to Burnham’s thought.” John B. Judis believes that Burnham’s approach to analyzing power politics as set forth in The Machiavellians “informed his tactical understanding of the Cold War….”

• The Marxists Internet Archive has a page and links to Burnham's early writings (using the alias John West) at James Burnham (1905–1987). The Archive also includes Jack Weber's (1947) James Burnham, A Modern Cato: Portrait of an Irresponsible, From New International, Vol.13 No.8, October. This notes that:

Marx, incidentally, had a proper appreciation of Machiavelli as a thinker; but Marx placed him properly as a forerunner whose horizon was necessarily limited to the early beginnings of capitalism, even to the period of the rise of nations. Burnham, rejecting Marxism, has to go back for inspiration to Machiavelli and to those who continue on the sole basis of his thought in the modern period. It is the acceptance of the Machiavellian “theory” that leads Burnham to conclude that the next stage in history must yield the managerial society. All history of the past shows that there are rulers and ruled, that the power of the rulers is embodied in the state, which is nothing but organized force and fraud. (History is the study of organized force and fraud). Ergo: there will always be what has always been, rulers (an elite) and ruled, exploiters and exploited. Hence Burnham looks carefully around to see what the next type of rulers will be like, and he finds them among the “managers.” His “awe” before the managers is typical of intellectuals who have never been inside a factory, do not know its organization and how it runs in reality, and attribute truly magical powers to the administrators at the top. The true nature of the social cooperation involved in modern industry evades him, and that includes the “planning” which Burnham attributes, entirely erroneously, to the tops alone. In any case, Burnham was being perfectly “objective,” in his own view, when, he predicted the new managerial “social” revolution. He did not even take sides, he merely observed; it was not a question of desire or morality, it was a question of inexorable fact. All forms of government” were undergoing the same inner changes, the tempo alone varying. The administrative “letter” bodies used by Roosevelt under the New Deal were interpreted as the counterpart of Hitler’s corporate state and Stalin’s planning commissions. Burnham predicted boldly that these war measures of the New Deal would become permanent aspects of American life. Never again would there be a return to “free enterprise.” Possibly Burnham considers it a mistake on the part of the American rulers (are they bourgeois or managerial?) to have dissolved these bodies. Let it be again emphasized that Burnham disowned all responsibility or preference for what was happening; he was a mere reporter recording without prejudice objective truth.

• Denis Boneau (2005)The New York Intellectuals and the invention of neoconservatism, The Voltaire Network.

• Richard Pipes (2005) James Burnham: Dissecting Modern Liberalism, National Review, Dec 19. This argues that:

Burnham depicts liberalism as more than a set of ideas: It is a syndrome that holds its adherents in a tight grip and prevents them from understanding either reality or the mindsets of those who are not liberals.

• James Burnham (1956) End of the Masquerade, National Review, July 18. This contains elements of Burnham's attacks on Kennan:

And as they rolled over Polish bodies the Communist tanks flattened also the soft rhetoric of our George Kennans and Stewart Alsops, our experts and smug journalists, who have been telling us how the Soviet regime has come to be accepted by its subjects, how (in Kennan's servile words) "there is a finality, for better or worse [sic], about what has occurred in Eastern Europe."

• Chilton Williamson (2005) Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism By James Burnham (1964). This argues that:

Had his career extended through another decade, Burnham might well have prevented NR's slide leftward into neoconservatism, where the magazine is presently moored.

This also draws comparisons with Burnham's Suicide of the West, first published in 1964, to Kenneth L. Minogue's The Liberal Mind, released a year earlier in the UK.