Power and history: the political thought of James Burnham.

In 1969 a friend shoved his copy of Suicide of the West into may hands. "Read this," he said. "It explains everything that's appened in the last five years."

And everything since. In 1964, when the book appeared, liberalism, as Samuel T. Francis remarks, was enjoying "its most popular, dynamic, and powerful moment." So much so that the book was passed over in contemptuous silence by the great liberal organs. The title sounded shrill, the thesis seemed unduly gloomy, and liberals could almost be excused for ignoring James Burnham's masterpiece. After the sensation of his first book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham became less and less fashionable, and more and more profound. By 1964 the political culture had gone one way and he had gone the other.

He didn't seem to care. I met him when I came to national review in 1972, and I was awed by his absolute indifference to his critics, including one--"that English fellow, what was his name?"

"Not George Orwell," I suggested.

"Yes, Orwell, that's the one," he laughed. To this day I day I don't known if he was pulling my leg.

Actually, Orwell, after a much-reprinted early attack on Burnham, began to come around, and Nineteen Eighty-Four owes a lot to Burnham's vision of the postwar global alignment. But even Orwell never grasped all of Burnham's deeply ironic view of politics and power. Impressed though he was, he mistook the irony for simple cynicism, even as he granted most of its truth.

Francis calls The Machiavellians (1943) "Burnham's most important book." At least it is the key to the others, based as it is on the disjunction of "real" and "formal" meanings in political statements. Put simply, "formal" meaning expresses the abstract relation of a proposition to other propositions; "real" meaning is the power function of a proposition. Whatever Marx may have meant by the surplus theory of value, Burnham is interested in the way Communist elites make the idea work for them, as a basis for power and order, as an excuse to wipe out opposition forces, as propaganda. A purely formal system is what Burnham means by an "ideology." But an ideology is typically used successfully by those with an eye for real meaning, whether or not they believe in the formal meaning. That is why Stalin prevailed over Trotsky, and that is what the phrase "liberal hypocrisy" points to. In the terms of recent philosophy, Burnham is interested in "use" rather tan "meaning" and specializes in political "language games."

Burnham's central principle is so simple it is confusing to less incisive minds still caught in the tangle of formal meaning. It can be devastatingly reductive, out-Marxing Marx. In polemics like The Struggle for the World (1947), Burnham in fact turned his analysis on Communism and its modus operandi, not without a cold admiration for its undistracted mastery of the power-game. "The difference between Gromyko and [Henry] Wallace," he told an interviewer in 1948, "is that Gromyko knows what he's doing." That, for Burnham, is the most fundamental fault-line in politics: the line dividing those who know what they're doing (realists) from those bemused by words (formalists).

Burnham hoped to help bring the West to its senses by telling it how to play the power-game against the Communists. And his books had considerable influence in the Forties. Still, the West kept losing, despite its superior assets and despite the paucity of Western Communists. Why?

Burnham never really tried to give a final answer to this, but he turned his method on a new target in Suicide of the West: liberalism, which might be described as the ideology of men who prefer not to know what they are doing. Interestingly enough, the "real" level of liberalism seems to be appreciated far more clearly by Communists than by liberals themselves. So nowadays, as Tom Bethell once pointed out to me, we actually find Communists dropping their old Stalinera jargon and mastering the smoother lingo of liberalism. It works better.

As Francis observes, Suicide of the West doesn't even bother trying to prove that liberalism is "false." Such formalism is irrelevant to the book's purpose. Instead it merely shows how liberalism functions in a manner complementary to Communism and rationalizes every Western loss in the power-game as some sort of triumph for Western "ideals" (e.g., "self-determination"). As usual, Burnham sticks pretty much to the surface and keeps his tone ironically impersonal. He never denies that liberal propositions may have some sort of abstract truth, but he notes drily that they don't seem to have much to do with what we see going on around us. In fact they serve to explain away what we do see: "the contraction of the West" in sheer, simple "effective political control over acreage."

Unfortunately for a work of exposition, Power and History is written in a style less clear than that of its subject. It is too bad Francis sticks to a cautiously academic idiom when, after all, he is writing about a rebel against the academy whose writing is distinguished by colloquial grace. But this book does cover a lot of territory in a few pages, and its ambition requires it to confront certain difficjulties Burnham himself has been content to pass by.

In this ambition the book succeeds. Francis connects Burnham's early thought with his later and cogently explains the changes along the way. He notes correctly that Burnham is an anomaly in American conservatism; you might also say that Burnham differs from most political commentators as an astronomer differs from an astrologer. Ever the philosopher, Burnham can be uncertain without being confused. He knows what he knows.

Burnham is not so much at odds with other thinkers as he is engaged in a totally different style of analysis, one that can be baffling just because it simplifies so radically and refuses to give the sort of answers, or bogus answers, one has come to expect of political thinking. I knew this brilliant and quietly cojurageous man for years before I began to grasp what he was driving at. He gave us a new way of seeing, and found more on the surface than others can see in the depths.