James Burnham: Foreseeing Our Managerial Domination

“This depoliticization of the public realm extends to the selection of the managerial class itself. Elections matter not at all. The managers perpetuate themselves…”

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a two-part essay.

The American right in particular, and the Anglo-right more generally, has lost itself in abstractions and pretty ideas that serve to distract and deflect from engagement in the real-world issues of social and political structures, alongside physical environment and geography. This obsession with ideas exemplifies the “idealist fallacy,” which means conservatives have little chance of seeing what passes for their vision for government being implemented. This has been a problem with post-war conservatism in both the United States and in the United Kingdom.

The man who saw this most clearly was the one-time Marxist and friend of Trotsky (and later anti-Communist) James Burnham. Burnham’s thought holds pertinent lessons for today, and the Right should heed them. We need more Burnham and less Buckley, if for nothing else because class, ideology, and the conflict when the two connect and collide is still with us. Conservatives are in a class war whether they like it or not, and it might help if they realized this and actually started contesting it. Burnham’s work—dated though parts of it undoubtedly are in their diagnoses and analyses—is still a good place to start in understanding and appreciating today’s landscape.

Early Life, Marxism, and Tragic Modernism

Burnham was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 22, 1905. His father, Claude George Burnham, was an English immigrant and executive with the Burlington Railroad. The family was Catholic, and Burnham practiced his cradle faith until college, rejecting the transcendent faith of Christianity for the secular faith of atheism. His education was impressive and showed his intellectual powers. He attended Princeton, graduating top of his class. He then went to Oxford, studying at Balliol College where his professors included J.R.R. Tolkien. He gained a professorship at New York University in 1929, teaching philosophy.