James Burnham (1905-1987) was by all odds the dominating intellectual presence at National Review from the magazine’s founding in 1955 until his mental incapacitation by a stroke in the fall of 1978. Therefore, it is unsurprising to find the neoconservatives, who appropriated NR (along with the rest of the conservative political-intellectual establishment in the 1980s and ’90s), attempting to claim Burnham for their own.

Daniel Kelly, in James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life, argues, “[D]espite the differences on particular issues, [Burnham’s] general stance—secular, empirical, modernist, resigned to the welfare state as inevitable in a mass industrial society, emphatic on the need for victory in the struggle for the world—afforded a preview of the neo-conservatism of the 1970s.” In a foreword to the biography, Richard Brookhiser—a National Review senior editor who as a pup in the mid-’70s can scarcely be said to have “known” Jim Burnham—endorses Kelly’s claim. The ghost of James Burnham has obvious uses for a journalistic fraternity seeking to rewrite American intellectual and political history and justify a war by claiming the imprimatur of a major Cold War intellectual and historical philosopher. But was James Burnham truly a forerunner of neoconservatism? And would he really be on Sunday morning television, an elder statesman who knew Trotsky personally, arguing alongside Bill Kristol and Richard Perle that the security of America depends on the political, social, and economic transformation of the Cradle of Civilization?

Samuel Francis has included more than enough argument and evidence in his monograph Thinkers of Our Time: James Burnham and also in “Burnham Agonistes” (Chronicles, July 2002) to explode Proposition One. “To anyone at all familiar with Burnham’s writing and thought,” Francis says, “the … thesis that Burnham approximated neoconservatism in the ’70s is simply preposterous; Mr. Kelly is able to sustain this claim only by blatantly skimming over, dismissing, or simply ignoring most of Burnham’s writings that do not fit the neoconservative ‘foreshadowing’ on which he insists.”

Thus, Kelly gives short shrift to Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition (in which the author tilts against the neoconservative predilection for foreign-policy-making by the executive branch) and concentrates on his anti-communist books instead. Francis also points to Burnham’s aversion for the New York intellectual circle that developed neoconservatism in the first place, citing his savage review of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It in 1968, his distaste for Commentary and the Public Interest, and his exchange with Peter Berger in National Review, where in 1972 Burnham charged the neocons with having retained “the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sensitivity and temperament.” Homing in on Berger’s complaint against what he perceived to be the “selective humanism” of conservatives, Burnham retorted that the word “humanism” is a part of the abstract habit of thought that leads rationalist liberals to think in terms of “Man” rather than of “men” and to “deduce [their] universalistic imperatives and … equalitarian tendencies.” Selectivity is an inherent part of conservatism, Burnham argued. All conservatives are tribal. “In real life men are joined on a much less than universal scale into a variety of groupings—family, community, church, business, club, party, etc.—which on the political scale reach the maximum significant limit in the nation.” Far from being an enthusiast for what today is called “diversity,” Burnham even defended racial segregation on constitutional grounds in the 1950s and ’60s. As for the Third World, James Burnham regarded the population explosion and political activization there to be one of three chief threats to the United States, the other two being the encroachment of “the jungle” at home and the Communist drive for world domination abroad.

Clearly, such views make it difficult to treat Burnham as a premature neoconservative. The fact remains that Burnham was, indisputably, an internationalist, an interventionist, and—in some degree at least—an imperialist. It is not entirely fanciful, therefore, to argue that, following the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union and its own empire in 1989, Jim Burnham would have sympathized with George H.W. Bush’s vision of a New World Order, Charles Krauthammer’s and Joshua Muravchik’s dream of a global democratic-capitalist system, William Kristol’s National Greatness Conservatism, George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, Norman Podhoretz’s “World War IV,” and their subsequent program of nation-building in the Middle East.

A passage in Suicide of the West (first published in 1964) appears to support the claims of both the traditional and the neconconservative camps to have a stake in James Burnham. “Quite specifically,” Burnham writes, “[what the West needs is] the preliberal conviction that Western civilization, thus Western man, is both different from and superior in quality to other civilizations and noncivilizations … .[Also it requires] a renewed willingness, legitimized by that conviction, to use superior power and the threat of power to defend the West against all challenges and challengers.”

The first of these two sentences is patently one no neoconservative could ever write. Neoconservatives do not believe Western civilization to be—intellectually, culturally, and above all, perhaps, religiously speaking—different from and superior to all other civilizations and noncivilizations, its democratic and capitalistic features excepted. Because neocons do not regard these advantages as being culturally specific but rather latently universal attributes, they must be considered accidental rather than inherent virtues for which the West is not entitled to take credit, apart from its willingness to “export” them to (i.e., impose them upon) the rest of the world. Neoconservatives believe that the necessary effect of imposing democratic capitalism globally would be the eventual erasure of those culturally specific attributes it is prepared to recognize, while intensely disliking. It is equally true that James Burnham’s anti-communist and anti-globalist thought was founded on an appreciation of what he called the “variety of groupings” characteristic of the human race from time immemorial. According to Francis, Burnham’s “rejection of universalism and his defense of cultural and national particularity and variety sharply distinguish his thought from the [universalistic social democratic] ideas at the root of ‘exporting democracy’ as well as of communism.” For Burnham, the ideal of a democratic world order was nothing in the world but purest liberalism. He is explicit about this in Suicide when he writes, “Modern liberal doctrine tends naturally toward internationalist conceptions and the ideal of a democratic world order based through one mode or another on the majority will of all mankind. … To the liberal it has become self-evident that ‘national sovereignty is an outworn concept’ that must be drastically modified if not altogether abandoned.”

So far, the traditionalist understanding of James Burnham seems to be winning out over the neoconservative one. We turn now to the second sentence in the paragraph in question, in which Burnham endorses the use of “superior power and the threat of power to defend the West against all challenges and challengers”—a phrase that might have been scripted by George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisors (except that they would have substituted “democracy” for “the West”) and does, indeed, have the familiar neocon ring.

Understood in both the historical and intellectual contexts, however, the defensive Cold World militancy Burnham’s words connote is drastically different both in nature and in purpose from the imperialist kind advocated by American hegemonists. James Burnham, to begin with, was an internationalist, not a globalist—a distinction he insisted upon. (He never believed the United States could, or should, pursue an isolationist course since modern technology, communications, and the organization of modern trade and industry made isolationism not only impractical but also impossible.) Internationalism means the co-operative interaction of sovereign states ruling over distinct peoples, not the consolidation of many governments into a centralized bureaucratic behemoth enforcing its will upon a single, forcibly homogeneous population. Burnham, as we have seen, regarded the nation-state as “the maximum significant limit” in human groupings, the final collective expression of human nature and human reality. His concern was for the survival of the United States and of the West from which it was inseparable—not for the welfare of the world. To that end, he wished the lesser civilizations and all uncivilized societies to be controlled, when and where necessary, in the West’s interest: controlled, not reformed in the Western image, since Burnham never suspected most, if any, non-Western societies of having the capacity to Westernize themselves in any significant degree. For him, Western survival and indeed revival was the proper and necessary goal of American foreign policy and that of its European allies; yet the survivalist instinct was continually being confused, and often negated, by the moralistic and ideological tendencies endemic to liberalism—and now to neoconservatism, which is a variation on liberalism. Moreover, though Burnham worked for the preservation (though not the exportation) of Western civilization, there is absolutely no evidence that he, a polished gentleman and even an aristocrat, considered consumer capitalism and mass culture to be among its glories. Also unlike the neoconservatives, Burnham did not believe the Founding Fathers to have shared the optimism of the European Enlightenment in respect of the liberal doctrine of perfectible human nature. Instead, he thought John Adams to have spoken for his colleagues when he wrote that “human passions are insatiable”; that “self-interest, private avidity, ambition and avarice will exist in every state of society and under every form of government”; and that “reason, justice and equity never had weight enough on the face of the earth to govern the councils of men.”

Finally, James Burnham cultivated the tragic view of history, one that separates him by a vast divide from the shallow triumphalism and naïve neo-Wilsonian moralism neoconservatives displayed in their clamor for war against Iraq and on other occasions. (Essentially a neutralist on the Middle Eastern situation, Burnham, who before and after the Six Day War urged that Washington adopt a less biased diplomatic stance in that region, would probably not be swayed by any alleged threat to Israel but rather continue to insist that the Middle East is “one jungle American troops should stay out of.”) Far from believing that the United States and the West must and will prevail against all challenges and challengers, he seems to have expected the U.S., and with it the Western world, to degrade itself to something less than the West—and thus to perish. Burnham was a realist rather than an optimist, a thinker not a careerist. He never told you what he thought you wanted to hear, or what should make him influential, powerful, and wealthy to say. Instead, he gave you the truth as he saw it and went on to write another book.

Yet Burnham was not without the theological virtue of hope. Baptized a Catholic, he returned to the Church only on his deathbed. But he was never, beyond his Trotskyite period at least, a determinist. “The past is determined,” he wrote in the epilogue to the reprint edition of Suicide of the West, “but, for human beings, the future is free. It is too early to publish the West’s obituary.” 
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