Suicide of the West. James Burnham
Injustice and folly no longer amuse him; they enrage him. This is the unbuttoned Burnham. And the result may not be his best book, but it surely is his most inspired.
What inspired him, then? Let me suggest three things.
First, as Roger Kimball’s fine and informative introduction establishes, Burnham’s life was a succession of different moral, political, and artistic commitments until he reached a permanent haven in the 1950’s. He was an aesthete in the 1920’s, a Trotskyist in the 1930’s, a theorist of oligarchic collectivism (see Orwell) in the first half of the 1940’s, an anti-communist strategist in the second half, and a founder of a new American conservatism in the 1950’s. These are the conversions of a man highly attuned to the spirit of the age even when he was sharply opposed to it. As such, he divined in the early 1960’s what was to happen in the later Sixties. And this shaman-like sensitivity transformed the tone of his arguments even when he was rehashing older material from his lecturing days.
Second, the contradiction between the objective realities of the early 1960’s and the response of liberal policymaking must have been infuriating to an observer of Burnham’s insight and ability. Though the West and in particular the United States were dominant economically, militarily, and morally, they were everywhere faltering, uncertain, or even in retreat—over Hungary, Suez, Algeria, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and so on. Burnham had argued for a form of political warfare designed to undermine the Soviets; he thought containment inadequate, and even that was being feebly enforced.
Third, even while he was helping to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1940’s to win Europe’s liberal intelligentsia to the side of anti-communism, he had glimpsed that liberal intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic would bolt toward a morally equivalent “neutralism” as soon as the United States had to take some action internationally that could not be justified in simplistic liberal terms.
He knew by now that the Western order of global power was the freest, most prosperous, and most just order available to mankind in that era. He had looked into the soul of American liberalism and seen the vacancy there. He could guess what was coming. And in response, he cast aside his customary restraint and indicted liberalism as the doctrine that reconciled the West to its own needless defeats and eventual dissolution.
We should probably read Burnham’s other works in the light of Suicide of the West. But we should also follow the light that it casts forward to illuminate his final years. On his deathbed, Burnham returned to the Catholic Church that he had left in his twenties without, as Kimball notes, any apparent soul-searching. What prompted his return to faith? Any man’s reasons for turning to faith can only be known fully to God. But it would hardly be surprising if someone who saw clearly that injustice is the way of this world while also finding injustice intolerable should seek—and find increasingly necessary—a world in which the wicked no longer flourish and the good no longer suffer and the intelligent analyst can find more pleasurable pursuits than indicting crime and folly for what they really are.
— John O’Sullivan
I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
The common-place critic . . . believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.
—William Hazlitt, ‘On Common-Place Critics’
Americans have not yet learned the tragic lesson that the most powerful cannot be loved—hated, envied, feared, obeyed, respected, even honored perhaps, but not loved.
—James Burnham, Containment or Liberation?
‘WHO IS JAMES BURNHAM?’ How often did I field variants of that question while pondering this essay! My informal survey suggests that almost no one under the age of sixty has even heard of him (“James who?”). And for most people over that magic age, Burnham is but an attenuated presence, a half-remembered, even vaguely embarrassing fashion that has failed to return—fins on the back of a model that was discontinued long ago for lack of sales. “Ah, yes,” speak the glimmers of remembrance, “author of The Managerial Revolution”—Burnham’s first and most famous book, published in 1941—“ardent Cold Warrior, helped organize the Congress for Cultural Freedom (remember that?), and . . . wasn’t he a supporter of Joseph McCarthy?” The answer to that last question is No—more on this below—but even the hint of an adumbration of a suspicion of “McCarthyite” leanings is sufficient to expel one from the ranks of civilized recollection, as Burnham learned to his cost.
The most notable exception to the oblivion surrounding Burnham is among people associated with National Review, the conservative fortnightly that Burnham helped start in 1955, when he was fifty. For more than two decades, Burnham enlivened the magazine’s pages with his spare but unsparing prose and editorial intelligence. He ranged widely, dilating on everything from foreign policy—his specialty—to (early on) the movies. William F. Buckley, Jr., the founding editor and perpetual genius loci of NR, called Burnham “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” In a just world, that would be patent enough for continued interest and recognition. But in this world, the combination of Burnham’s ferocious intellectual independence and unclubbable heterodoxy long ago consigned him to the unglamorous limbo that established opinion reserves for those who challenge its pieties too forcefully.
In 2002, the late Daniel Kelly published James Burnham and the Struggle for the World, a meticulous and thoughtful biography of this sage political gadfly. If any book could resuscitate Burnham’s reputation, this was it. But Burnham is too idiosyncratic, too polemical, and too faithful to the dictates of intellectual integrity to enjoy anything like a general renaissance. As I write, in the summer of 2014, all of Burnham’s ten or so books are listed as “Out of Print” or being of “Limited Availability,” i.e., more limited than available.
I am doubly grateful, therefore, that the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale suggested bringing out a new edition of Burnham’s classic admonition, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. First published in 1964, Suicide of the West provides an acute anatomy of that species of self-infatuated sentimentality we continue to misname “liberalism” (is there anything less liberal than contemporary liberalism?). The book also, fifty years on, speaks powerfully to a broad range of current deformations, moral or existential as well as political.
James Burnham (who died in 1987 after a decade’s incapacity) was an astonishing writer. Subtle, passionate, and irritatingly well read, he commanded a nimble style that was sometimes blunt but unfailingly eloquent. Burnham was above all a rousing writer. Immanuel Kant paid homage to David Hume for awakening him from his “dogmatic slumbers” about metaphysical questions. Burnham performed a similar service for the politically complacent. If he occasionally exaggerated the extent or imminence of the evils he described—Burnham was liberally endowed with what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster”—he was fearless in opposing and exposing the totalitarian temptation. Which is to say that he was fearless in opposing and exposing the most corrosive, most addictive, most murderous ideology of our time: communism.
Today, Burnham is best known—to the extent that he is known at all—as an anti-communist crusader. He was that. But he did not confine his criticism to communism. On the contrary, he understood that the impulse to totalitarian surrender comes in many guises. That is part of what underwrites his contemporary relevance. The “managerial revolution” that he warned about in the book of that title was a revolution aiming to repel freedom for the sake of bureaucratic efficiency and control. That revolution has not—not yet—succeeded in the monolithic fashion that Burnham envisioned. He did not, as his subtitle promised, so much tell us “what is happening in the world” as what might happen should certain tendencies be left unchecked. But who can gaze upon the ever-increasing routinization