James Burnham

James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 22, 1905, James Burnham was the son of Claude George Burnham, an English immigrant and executive with the Burlington Railroad.

James was raised as a Roman Catholic but rejected Catholicism as a college student, professing atheism for much of his life (although returning to that faith shortly before his death).

He graduated at the top of his class at Princeton University before attending Balliol College, Oxford, where his professors included J. R. R. Tolkien and Martin D'Arcy.

The book was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.

During World War II, Burnham took a leave from NYU to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Recommended by George F. Kennan, Burnham was invited to lead the semi-autonomous "Political and Psychological Warfare" division of the Office of Policy Coordination.

In 1929, he became a professor of philosophy at New York University.

Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s.

He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement.

He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931).

In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the American Workers Party led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A. J. Muste.

In 1934, he married Marcia Lightner.

Burnham supported the 1934 merger with the Communist League of America which formed the US Workers Party.

In 1935, he allied with the Trotskyist wing of that party and favored fusion with the Socialist Party of America.

During this period, he became a friend to Leon Trotsky.

Writing for Partisan Review, Burnham was also an important influence on writers including Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv.

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 the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year.

Inside the SWP, Burnham allied with Max Shachtman in a faction fight over the position of the SWP's majority faction, led by James P. Cannon and backed by Leon Trotsky, defending the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state against the incursions of imperialism.

Shachtman and Burnham, especially after witnessing the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 and the invasions of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia by Joseph Stalin's regime, as well as the Soviet 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.

In February 1940 he wrote Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky, in which he broke with dialectical 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 to Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead and "the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science".

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.

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 the Workers 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 from Marxism:

"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."

His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism.

Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics.

He rejected containment of the Soviet Union and called for the rollback of communism worldwide.

In 1941, Burnham wrote a book analyzing the development of economics and society as he saw it, called The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World.