James Burnham
James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. A year before he wrote the book, he rejected Marxism and became an influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement.[1] 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.[2][3]
James Burnham
July 28, 1987 (aged 81)
David Burnham (brother)
- Trotskyism (early)
- American conservatism (late)
The Managerial Revolution (1941)
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943)
Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 22, 1905,[4] James Burnham was the son of Claude George Burnham, an English immigrant and executive with the Burlington Railroad.[5] 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).[6] 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. In 1929, he became a professor of philosophy at New York University.[7]
In 1934, he married Marcia Lightner.[8]
Trotskyism[edit]
In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the American Workers Party led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A. J. Muste.[9][10] 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.[11] 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".[12]
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.[13] 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:
Ideas[edit]
The Managerial Revolution[edit]
Burnham's seminal work, The Managerial Revolution (1941), theorized about the future of world capitalism based upon its development in the interwar period. Burnham begins by saying that "It is a historical law, with no apparent exceptions so far known, that all social and economic groups of any size strive to improve their relative position with respect to power and privilege in society". He then weighed three possibilities: (1) that capitalism was a permanent form of social and economic organization and would continue indefinitely; (2) that it was temporary and destined by its nature to collapse and be replaced by socialism; (3) that it was currently being transformed into some non-socialist future form of society.[24][25] Since capitalism had a more or less definite beginning in the 14th century, it could not be regarded as an immutable and permanent form.[26] Moreover, in the last years of previous economic systems such as those of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished."[27] The worldwide mass unemployment of the depression era thus indicated that capitalism was itself "not going to continue much longer."[27]
Burnham agreed with Marxists that the capitalist class would inevitably lose the class struggle, but disagreed that they would lose to the working class due to this class being too disorganized and weak. He instead argued that a new class called the managerial class would win against the capitalist class. Burnham defines this new class as the individuals responsible for "the tasks of the technical direction and coordination of the process of production." The managerial class is responsible for directing technical experts, including "operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government… administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on." According to Burnham, the managerial class has risen due to the increasing complexity and large scope of modern economies. Because doing certain tasks requires hyper specific technical knowledge, the capitalist class cannot perform all of the necessary tasks by themselves. This means that the capitalist class has to employ individuals who manage other individuals engaged in technical work. By doing this, the capitalist class has made themselves obsolete, since the managers are the individuals who actually control production. Although the managerial class is still employed by the capitalist class, Burnham argued that this arrangement was irreconcilable. This would eventually result in the managerial class who actually owns production seizing it from the capitalist class who owns it in name only. According to Burnham, the managerial class would seize power by implementing state ownership of production. Due to the complexity and large scale of modern economies, Burnham argues that this form of state ownership would prove more efficient than rule by individual capitalists. The "managerial revolution", according to Burnham, would result in the decline of capitalist democracy and the rise of managerial control of production while using "the unlimited state" as a vehicle.[25]
Books
Book contributions
Pamphlets
Public speaking
Selected articles
