This dual commitment made Burnham an equal-opportunity scourge. He was almost as hard on what Tocqueville called democratic despotism—the tendency of democracies to barter freedom for equality—as he was on communism. Burnham was a connoisseur of insidiousness, of the way benign—or seemingly benign—intentions can be enlisted to promulgate malevolent, illiberal policies. He descried this process as accurately in Western democracies as he did in communist tyrannies, and he was tireless in his excoriation of what he called “that jellyfish brand of contemporary liberalism—pious, guilt-ridden, do-goody—which uses the curious dogma of ‘some truth on both sides’ as its principal sales line.”
Kelly observes in his biography that Burnham was “the living embodiment of what would later come to be known as political incorrectness.” Kelly is right. Consider, to take just one example, Burnham’s observation that most African nations were really “half-formed pseudo nations.” Now, as then, that is indisputably the case, but how many accredited intellectuals have the forthrightness to apprise Robert Mugabe of this inconsiderate fact? (Burnham was refreshing on many subjects, not least the United Nations and its disapproving resolutions about U.S. policy: “Why in the world,” he wondered, “should any sensible person give a damn what some spokesman for cannibalistic tribes or slave-holding nomads thinks about nuclear tests?”)
It would be easy to multiply such crisp interventions. Nevertheless, I hesitate to apply the label “politically incorrect” to so insightful and spirited a critic as James Burnham. In many quarters, calling someone “politically incorrect” has become a popular method of discounting his opinions without the inconvenience of allowing them a hearing. It is a clever, if cowardly, rhetorical trick. It allows you to ignore someone by the simple expedient of declaring his arguments to be beyond the pale, “extreme”—that is, unworthy of a place in the forum of public exchange. At bottom, the procedure is a form of political ostracism. The goal is to silence someone not by forbidding him to speak but by denying him an audience. This technique is especially effective with writers, like Burnham, who specialize in telling truths that most people would rather not hear.
James Burnham cut an odd figure in the world of intellectual polemics. He impressed his peers as both unusually pugnacious and curiously disengaged. His background had a lot to do with the mixture. The eldest of three sons, he was born in 1905 to a prosperous Chicago railway executive. His father, Claude, was a classic American success story. At fourteen, he was a poor English immigrant delivering newspapers at the head office of James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway. Two decades later he was a vice president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (among other lines), traveling with his family in a private railway car. In later life, Burnham objected to the description of his father as a “minor railway magnate,” but the epithet does seem to cover the facts.
Even moderate wealth can be a segregating force, and it was one factor that set Burnham apart from many of his fellows. Religion was another. Burnham’s father (who died of pneumonia in his late forties in 1928) was Protestant but his mother, in Kelly’s phrase, was a “rigorous Catholic.” Burnham grew up Roman Catholic in a world still mildly suspicious of papist influence. Society did not snub the Burnhams, exactly, but neither did it welcome them without reserve. And if Catholicism was grounds for distance, so was culture. The Burnhams were a cultivated family. Art, literature, and argument were staple goods in the Burnham household. Young James was musical, like his mother, and delighted throughout life in playing the piano. He enjoyed an expensive education. When the Burnhams understood that their local parochial schools discouraged their charges from applying to Ivy League colleges, they decided to send James and his brother David to the Canterbury School, a tony Catholic institution in New Milford, Connecticut. Burnham performed well, brilliantly in English and math, and matriculated at Princeton in 1923. He majored in English, graduated at the top of his class, and went to Balliol to study English and medieval philosophy. Among his teachers were an unknown professor of Old English called J.R.R. Tolkien—I wonder if Burnham ever recorded his opinion of Hobbits? I doubt that it was flattering—and the suave Jesuit philosopher Martin D’Arcy, who had a magnetic effect on nonbelievers such as Evelyn Waugh. But while Burnham gloried in theological argument, D’Arcy’s example and tutelage did not salvage Burnham’s religious commitments, which he shed without noticeable struggle while at Balliol.
Being an ex-Catholic is not the same thing as being a non-Catholic, and an ex-Catholic with a taste for theological argumentation is a decidedly strange hybrid. Burnham did not return to the Church until the very end of his life, but his Catholic up-bringing and intellectual training served to inflect his intelligence in distinctive ways. In 1929, he went to teach philosophy at New York University—a task he discharged for some two decades—and he stood out not only because of his brilliance but also because of his tone, a combination of passion, polish, and polemic. One of Burnham’s students, Joseph Frank, the future biographer of Dostoevsky, remembered him as “very sophisticated, very serious, and very intense.”
Among Burnham’s early colleagues at NYU was the philosopher Philip E. Wheelwright, whose book The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism made a deep impression on generations of students. Wheelwright had been one of Burnham’s teachers at Princeton. The two had corresponded for some time about starting a new literary-philosophical magazine, and in January 1930 (one year after the debut of Lincoln Kirstein’s Hound and Horn) the first issue of Symposium: A Critical Review appeared. The first issue of the quarterly contained essays by John Dewey, Ramon Fernandez (the French literary critic who is probably best known today as a figure in Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West”), and the philosopher Morris R. Cohen. Burnham contributed a long review of I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. It is a canny essay. Burnham judged Richards’s book to be “the most considerable and the most formidable study of poetry . . . which has appeared in America during the past year.” But he also noted that he could “not help feeling . . . that Mr. Richards’s Defense of Poetry is more ‘inspired,’ more ‘stirring,’ and more desperate than any Sidney’s or Shelley’s.”
To those of us who, however ardent may be our affection for poetry, do not look to it so entirely for the organization of our lives, Mr. Richards’s defense may seem most damaging to poetry itself; and poetry may appear through his efforts, as in the old twist of Pope’s, faint with damned praise.
That is pretty good stuff.
Symposium had a run of three years. It was an impressive, if sometimes discursively academic, achievement. Burnham and Wheelwright snagged essays by Lionel Trilling (on D.H. Lawrence), Frederick Dupee (on Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle), Allen Tate (on Emily Dickinson), and Sidney Hook (on Marxism). Ezra Pound wrote for Symposium, as did Herbert Read, John Middleton Murry, Harold Rosenberg, and G. Wilson Knight. The first bit of Ortega y Gasset to appear in English—a portion of The Dehumanization of Art—appeared in Symposium, as did important essays on Eliot (a major influence on Burnham’s thinking at the time), Valéry, and other modernist figures.
In general, the magazine lived up to its announced ambition “not to be the organ of any group or sect or cause,” which may be one reason that Burnham let it fold in 1933. In one of the last issues, Burnham contributed a long review of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. He was deeply impressed. That “remarkable book,” the reading of which was “an exciting experience,” had strengthened his conviction that “a major transition [was] taking place” in the world. As for the lineaments of that transition—perhaps “revolution” is the apt word—Burnham was more and more coming to see it in Marxist terms.
Whatever