James Burnham’s Realist Conservatism – Matthew Continetti

Guests at James and Marcia Burnham’s dinner table during the 1930s were often interrupted by a knock on the door.

One minute they’d be talking in a tony Manhattan apartment. The next they’d be watching Burnham, dressed in formal attire, huddle with a seedy-looking fellow in the entryway. The two would exchange conspiratorial gossip. Suddenly the stranger would depart, and Burnham would return to his friends, acting as if nothing had happened. The party would go on.

The dapper Burnham, a professor of philosophy at NYU, was at the time a Marxist revolutionary. A leading figure in the Workers Party of the United States, he was not your typical bohemian. Burnham was happily married, had three children, held a steady job, and lived in a well-appointed home. All while serving as point man for Leon Trotsky—Bolshevik hero, founder of the Red Army, and Soviet exile.

“There was something bizarre,” recalled Burnham’s friend and colleague Sidney Hook, “about this scion of a wealthy Midwestern Catholic industrialist, a product of Princeton and Oxford, who had delivered his oration as a class valedictorian in Latin, entering the lists as a protagonist of the working class.”

The contrast between Burnham’s outward convention and inner radicalism remained, even after he left Marxism and joined the American Right. Burnham’s cool exterior always contained a sweeping, apocalyptic mind.

In James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography, historian David T. Byrne traces the philosopher’s path from The New International to National Review. This is a useful introduction to Burnham’s thought. While not a definitive treatment, Byrne’s concise and accessible survey illustrates Burnham’s enduring appeal to conservatives, decades after he died in 1987.

Burnham was born in Chicago in 1905. His father was in the railroad business, and family wealth gave him access to travel, sports, and education. He was an excellent student. He began writing short stories while at Catholic boarding school and fell in love with philosophy while at Princeton. After graduating in 1927, he went to Balliol College, Oxford. He studied literature.

In 1929, Burnham returned to America to teach at NYU. He gave no indication during these early years that he would swerve to the left. His interests were literary, aesthetic, moral. He emulated the syllogistic reasoning of St. Thomas Aquinas. Burnham’s radical turn, Byrne speculates, may have been caused by a traumatic breakup in 1932.

The simpler explanation is that Burnham, like many of his peers, was shocked and dismayed by the Great Depression. Conventional explanations for economic collapse and mass unemployment didn’t satisfy him. For young intellectuals such as Burnham, radical solutions were not just plausible. They were necessary. He read Sidney Hook’s essay “Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx” and was convinced that the communist revolution had to result from political activism.

Conservatism is the rejection of ideology, and the facing of reality—which is why Burnham joined the Right.

Hook taught Burnham that power was essential to politics, both national and international. “And this seizure of power,” writes Byrne, “primarily depended on ‘will and organization.’ Determined individuals must lead.” Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, recently translated into English, reinforced these lessons. Power and force of will became key concepts in Burnham’s writing.

In 1933, Burnham announced that he was a Marxist. Within a year, he had joined the American Workers Party and sided with Trotsky against Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. By examining sectarian debates over nationalism, imperialism, and Stalin, Byrne identifies emerging themes in Burnham’s work.

The Depression ended laissez-faire capitalism, Burnham argued. “Democracy” was a slogan, acting as cover for rule by FDR’s brain trust. And the left’s peace camp was silly. “For Burnham,” writes Byrne, “disarming in the midst of a raging struggle benefited only the enemy. He would always believe this.”

Burnham’s encounter with Marxism defined him. The ideology supplied analytical tools that he would apply, briefly, to advancing revolution—and then, for far longer and more effectively, to rolling it back.

Over time, Burnham became disillusioned with “scientific socialism.” Marxism couldn’t be tested, he said. It was impervious to fact. Soviet depravity provoked second thoughts as well. In 1937, Stalin’s purges and show-trials put the lie to fellow-traveling propaganda. When the Soviets, along with their Nazi allies, invaded Poland in 1939, Burnham attacked Stalin as an imperialist. He disputed that the Soviet Union was a “worker’s state.”

Such heresy made Burnham enemies. He broke with Trotsky. He left the Workers’ Party in May 1940.

By then, Burnham was at work on The Managerial Revolution, published to great acclaim in May 1941. His thesis was that free-market capitalism was moribund because ownership of business had become separated from control. Capitalists were at the mercy of boards, managers, and government. The New Deal, fascism, Nazism, socialism, and Stalinism were just different names for the same thing: rule by centralized bureaucracies.

The Managerial Revolution made Burnham’s reputation. It also exemplified his strengths and weaknesses as an analyst. No one could argue with Burnham’s polemical verve and intellectual chops. Yet, as George Orwell observed, Burnham tended to exaggerate the strength of whichever nation-state appeared most powerful at a given moment. His forecasts simply extended current trends.

In The Machiavellians, published in 1943, Burnham studied the authors who had shaped his method of political analysis. What at first reads as a dry study in Italian elite theory—that all forms of government, including democracy, serve as masks for elite manipulation—is in fact a playbook for the defense of liberty in a managerial society. Freedom, Burnham argued, is the right to oppose authority. And free societies are superior to totalitarian ones, such as the Third Reich and USSR, because they encourage innovation and adaptation.

By 1947, Nazism and Japanese militarism were gone. But the Soviet Union remained. Burnham threw himself into describing the new world situation while advocating for American victory in the Cold War. Beginning with The Struggle For the World, his “Cold War” trilogy painted a bleak picture. Communism was advancing along every front. US elites neither perceived the threat accurately nor possessed the will to defeat such an all-consuming ideology. To win, Burnham argued, America must maintain its monopoly on nuclear weapons. It must embrace empire.

In subsequent volumes—The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950) and Containment or Liberation? (1953)—Burnham said that America must adopt new tactics. Military power was necessary but not sufficient. What Burnham called political warfare—also known as psywar—was required. Using psywar, America could pressure the Soviets with propaganda. It could encourage dissent within the communist ruling class. Financial and rhetorical support for nationalist groups within the Soviet Empire would promote liberation.

Burnham quickly became known as one of America’s foremost thinkers. His work took him to the CIA, where he met a recent Yale graduate named William F. Buckley Jr. Publicly, Burnam joined the Committee for Cultural Freedom, a group of anti-communist liberal intellectuals fighting Stalinist influence on Western thought.

Some Americans were uncomfortable with the implications of psywar. But communists were not. Propaganda, infiltration, and subversion were among their favorite tools. Espionage had brought the Soviets the atom bomb.

In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin announced that he had identified communists working inside the State Department. For the next four years, McCarthy was the focal point of American politics. His populist crusade rattled Democrats and forced anti-communist intellectuals to choose sides: Were you for or against McCarthy?

Burnham chose the Tail Gunner. Disapproving of the senator’s tactics, he nonetheless believed that McCarthy was serious about communism in ways that liberals were not. “In my opinion those anti-cs who consider themselves to be anti-McCarthyites have fallen into a trap,” he wrote to a friend in 1954. “They have failed so far to realize that they are, in political reality, in a united front with the Communists, in the broadest, most imposing united front that has ever been constructed in this country. As in all united fronts, only the Communists can benefit from it.”

Just as he had broken off from Trotsky over the USSR, Burnham split with liberals over McCarthy. To Burnham, neither the Old Man nor historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. correctly perceived reality. Trotsky was caught in the vision of the revolution betrayed, while Schlesinger’s liberalism blinded him to communist evil. Burnham’s estrangement from the Left, then from liberalism, alienated him from mainstream institutions. He quit the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He stopped writing for the prestigious Partisan Review.

And he joined Buckley’s fledgling National Review. From its debut in 1955 until his retirement in 1978, Burnham was, in Buckley’s words, “the dominant intellectual influence” at the magazine. His status underscored the paramount importance of anticommunism on the American Right. As Byrne notes, “Burnham never considered himself a conservative Republican.” He was a Machiavellian, a dispassionate strategist whose chief concern was foreign policy. On several domestic issues, Burnham was a moderate. He had no objection to limited intervention in the economy. Libertarianism left him cold.

Yet Burnham held many conservative positions. His last major works took aim at modern liberalism and the welfare state. Congress and the American Tradition (1959) defended federalism, the Constitution, and the first branch of government against unwieldy presidential power, which Burnham dubbed “Caesarism.” Five years later, Suicide of the West diagnosed modern liberalism as an ideology tailored for managed decline, a guilt complex that sapped the will to resist armed doctrines such as communism and anticolonialism. “When the Western liberal’s feeling of guilt and his associated feeling of moral vulnerability before the sorrows and demands of the wretched become obsessive,” Burnham wrote, “he often develops a generalized hatred of Western civilization and of his own country as part of the West.”

A stroll through any elite campus today confirms his diagnosis.

Burnham was in his mid-60s when Suicide of the West was published. His final decade as a writer was devoted to National Review. His columns dealt with US entanglement in Vietnam and the protracted conflict with the Soviet Union. He criticized President Nixon’s foreign policy of détente with the USSR and wrote Senator James Buckley’s March 1974 speech calling for Nixon to resign over Watergate. In 1978, on a special episode of Firing Line, he joined Buckley to defend the Panama Canal Treaties. On the other side of the debate was Ronald Reagan.

Freedom, Burnham argued, is the right to oppose authority. And free societies are superior to totalitarian ones, such as the Third Reich and USSR, because they encourage innovation and adaptation.

A series of strokes forced Burnham to put down his pen. When President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, Burnham might not have realized the full extent of his reach. “Throughout the years traveling the mashed-potato circuit I have quoted you widely,” Reagan joked.

That was an understatement. Reagan put into practice anti-communist strategies that Burnham had outlined long ago. Reagan’s military buildup, his addresses to the British parliament and to the National Association of Evangelicals, his Strategic Defense Initiative, and his support for anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan—all these can be traced to Burnham’s writings in the ’40s and ’50s.

Burnham died at his home in Kent, Connecticut, in 1987, two years before the Tiananmen Square uprising and the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, Marxism was tossed into the ash heap of history. Or so it seemed.

Burnham’s intellectual legacy is most clearly visible in Reagan’s presidency. Yet Daniel T. Byrne seeks to draw connections between Burnham and a subsequent GOP president: Donald Trump. Grappling with contemporary divisions in American conservatism, Byrne argues there were two James Burnhams: “one an embryonic neocon, and the other a paleoconservative paragon.” Burnham’s neocon side, according to Byrne, believed in the utility of force. His paleocon half dwelt on democracy’s problems and the managers’ faults.

This distinction is forced. From the perspective of 2025, it may seem as if support for foreign intervention runs against skepticism of democracy and its elites. But that is not necessarily the case. Burnham did not find his thought to be contradictory—that would have violated his commitment to logic, reason, syllogism, and fact. As he liked to tell young National Review staffers, “He who says A must say B.”

Nor is it right to say that “Burnham was an ‘America Firster,’” in the context of that term’s current meaning. Burnham may have opposed US entry into World War II, along with his fellow Trotskyists, but he quickly dropped his objections after Pearl Harbor. And he backed direct and indirect interventions for the rest of his life. The biggest stars in Burnham’s intellectual cosmos were not Charles Lindbergh and Russell Kirk, but Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. Aligning with conservatives in a shared cause did not mean that he fit in with them. Indeed, Burnham never fit in with anyone.

To Burnham, managerialism, elite theory, and power politics were simply the way the world works. Operating within the system he described, he recommended policies that would advance American interests and thwart communist ones. So closely was he associated with communism, for and against, that it is impossible to say for certain where he would have landed in post-Cold War foreign policy debates. Much less in contemporary ones.

“Having come to know something of the gigantic ideology of Bolshevism,” Burnham wrote in 1963, “I knew that I was not going to be able to settle for the pigmy ideologies of Liberalism, social democracy, refurbished laissez-faire, or the inverted, cut-rate Bolshevism called ‘fascism.’” Conservatism is the rejection of ideology, and the facing of reality, which is why Burnham joined the Right.

There may have been two James Burnhams in the 1930s, when the upright professional welcomed revolutionaries into his home. Yet in the end there was just one Burnham: Brilliant, penetrating, and implacably dedicated to the destruction of the communist enterprise.