Burnham was an idiosyncratic Marxist. It’s not that he lacked fervency. On the contrary, as Kelly reports, he fell “head-over-heels” for Marxism and “labored mightily for the Trotskyist cause.” Under Hook’s guidance, he joined the American Workers Party and petitioned, agitated, organized, and above all wrote to further its aims. He helped edit and contributed innumerable broadsides to publications like The New Militant, Socialist Appeal, and The New International. His efforts did not go unnoticed. Before long he was in regular correspondence with “the Old Man,” with Trotsky himself; and although they never met, Burnham became a trusted lieutenant in Trotsky’s left-wing anti-Stalinist movement.
At the same time, Burnham always regarded the utopian strain of Marxism with a suspicion bordering on contempt. He had too low—too accurate—an opinion of human nature to be seduced by the promise of perfection. And while he did not repudiate violence, he was always alert to Marxism’s (or any bureaucracy’s) sweet tooth for totalitarian strategies. Burnham was also a social oddity among the comrades. In 1934 he married Marcia Lightner—like him, a Midwesterner—and moved from New York’s Greenwich Village (bohemian paradise) to Sutton Place (adult respectability), where he entertained in a style appropriate to that address. (For her part, Burnham’s wife always seemed to regard her husband’s adventures in Trotskyist radicalism with bemused distaste.) It is likely, as Kelly notes, that Burnham was “the only Trotskyist to own a tuxedo.” When he summered with his family in Biarritz, he perused Marx and Engels during the day and played chemin de fer at night. His acquisition of a summer house in Kent, Connecticut, completed the contrast.
Of course, Burnham was hardly the only privileged beneficiary of capitalism to embrace communism while holding fast to his bank account. But his intellectual independence made him an unreliable militant. Burnham happily immersed himself in Aquinas, Dante, and the Renaissance one moment, Marx and bulletins from Comrade Trotsky the next. It was a giddy but unstable amalgam. Unwilling, as Kelly puts it, to sacrifice intellect to militancy, Burnham became an increasingly restless recruit. The break came in 1939 when the Soviets, fortified by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, attacked Poland. Trotsky justified the action as a step toward the abolition of private property (and how!), but Burnham saw it for what it was: a brutal land grab by a totalitarian power. He wrote as much and in short order found himself expelled from the Socialist Workers Party and the object of Trotsky’s rage: overnight Burnham went from being a favored if sometimes wayward collaborator to being an “educated witch-doctor,” “strutting petty-bourgeois pedant,” and (the coup de grâce) an “intellectual snob.” Burnham’s response was to gather his correspondence with Trotsky and dump it into the incinerator.
By the end of the 1930’s, Burnham was a minor but respected public intellectual. In 1938 he began a long association with Partisan Review, the premier intellectual organ of the anti-Stalinist left. But he did not become an intellectual celebrity until 1941, when The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World became a runaway bestseller—much to the surprise of its publisher and the chagrin of the several houses that had turned it down. Written at the moment when Hitler’s army seemed poised to overrun Europe, the book is a grim exercise in dystopian prognostication. It is not, I think, one of Burnham’s better books. As he himself later admitted, it is full of “remnants of Marxism,” above all the depressing aroma of economic determinism and praise for the superiority of central planning. But The Managerial Revolution certainly is a bold, an impressive book. Its vision of the rise of an oligarchy of experts and alignment of world powers into three competing superstates made a deep impression on many readers, not least on George Orwell.
Orwell wrote about Burnham at least three times, reviewing The Managerial Revolution in 1944 and then in long essays about his work in 1946 and 1947. As Kelly notes, Orwell found The Managerial Revolution both “magnetic and repellent.” Orwell criticized Burnham for “power worship,” for being “fascinated by the spectacle of power” (and hence contenting himself with analyzing rather than condemning Hitler’s early military successes). Burnham’s essential intellectual failing, Orwell thought, was in “predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening.” Nazi power is on the rise, ergo it will continue irresistibly; American capitalism is in crisis, ergo it will necessarily disintegrate—except that the rude, unkempt force of reality intervenes, transforming those ergos into “might have beens.”
With hindsight, we can see that Orwell was right that Burnham underestimated “the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country.” His neat, schematic intelligence lulled him into believing that the (apparently) better-organized nation was going to be the victorious nation. Burnham undervalued the advantages of the ad hoc, the unexpected reversal, the sudden inspiration. His “besetting sin,” Orwell said, was to overstate his case: “He is too fond of apocalyptic visions, too ready to believe that the muddled processes of history will happen suddenly and logically.” (Orwell makes the arresting observation that during the Second World War, the smarter Brits were often the more pessimistic: “their morale was lower because their imaginations were stronger.”) At the same time, Orwell repeatedly underscored Burnham’s “intellectual courage” and willingness to deal with “real issues.” And it is clear that, whatever his criticisms, Orwell was deeply influenced by The Managerial Revolution. In 1984, he adopted wholesale Burnham’s idea that the world was reorganizing itself into three rival totalitarian states. The Managerial Revolution itself appears in Orwell’s novel under the title The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism.
From 1939 to 1941, the communists worked mightily to keep America “neutral.” Good Trotskyist that he aspired to be, Burnham, too, was opposed to America’s entry into the war. His opposition persisted after his break with Trotsky. But it did not survive Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on the Pacific Fleet precipitated a political metanoia. Overnight, Burnham became a vociferous supporter of all-out war against the Axis powers.
This hardening, or clarifying, is evident in his next book—considered by many critics to be his best—The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. Published in 1943, The Machiavellians is ostensibly an exposition of, and homage to, some modern followers of Machiavelli. Its larger purpose is to distinguish between the sentimental and the realistic in politics. Dante (in De Monarchia), Rousseau, and the architects of the French Revolution are prime examples of the former; they represent “politics as wish”: noble, optimistic, ultimately futile—indeed, ultimately “reactionary and vicious” in Burnham’s judgment.
Machiavelli and his heirs belong to the latter camp. They saw things as they really were and faced up to unpleasant facts about human nature. Because they saw humanity as it was—in its imperfection, its treachery, its unceasing desire for power—they were the true friends of liberty. They did not exchange real freedoms for pleasant-sounding but empty idealities. They understood that all political freedom is imperfect freedom, won through struggle, preserved with difficulty, constantly subject to assault and diminution.
Burnham’s political thought is often described as “hardboiled.” The Machiavellians is the cauldron in which the promised firmness is achieved. “All societies,” he writes, “including societies called democratic, are ruled by a minority.” Although the minority, the ruling “élite,” naturally seeks to legitimize its power in the eyes of society, in the end “the primary object of every élite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege,” an aim that is sought largely on “force and fraud.” Burnham had high hopes for “an objective science of politics”; at the same time, he believed that “logical or rational analysis plays a relatively minor part in political and social change.” The true friends of freedom budget heavily for the imperfection of humanity and acknowledge the relative impotence of reason in political affairs. Above all, they understand that the possession of power is inseparable from its intelligent exercise.