George Orwell’s “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”
Like many committed anti-communists during the Cold War, James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) was a former Trotskyite. His published works include The Managerial Revolution (1941), The Machiavellians (1943), and The Suicide of the West (1964). His break from Marxism came prior to the publication of the first of the above works, when he resigned from the Workers Party in 1940 (Wikipedia ). In that work, The Managerial Revolution, Burnham theorized that both capitalism and socialism were being replaced by new economic and social arrangements. He argued that whether ownership was private and corporate or public and statist, a managerial class of managers and bureaucrats had superseded the capitalist entrepreneurial class in controlling the means of production. In the 1950s, Burnham’s theorizing took a turn to the right as he joined William F. Buckley in founding the National Review. His ideas were further elaborated by Sam Francis, former writer for Chronicles magazine and the Washington Times.
George Orwell wrote his essay, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” in 1946, prior to Burnham’s embrace of conservatism, and thus the focus was on a critique of Burnham’s ideas contained in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. Orwell wrote in a description of the former work: “What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society, which will be neither capitalist, nor in any ordinary sense of the word, democratic” (The Orwell Reader, 1956, pp. 335 – 36). Like Orwell in his 1984, which was published in 1949, Burnham predicted a totalitarian world divided into three super-states – Europe, America, and Asia – vying for control of the world. (In Orwell’s case, it was Oceania (Anglo-America), Eurasia, and East Asia.)
Burnham’s second book, The Machiavellians, in which he expounds a type of Machiavellian realpolitik, is aptly named because it is largely an elucidation of the ideas of Machiavelli and his modern disciples, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. For example, as Orwell explained, Burnham contended that “a democratic society has never existed” and “never will exist” because “Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests on force and fraud” (Ibid., p. 336). Thus, “All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another” (Ibid.). This is what Burnham calls an “iron law of oligarchy.” Coincidentally perhaps, the book that Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, reads in 1984, which is a sort of manifesto for the state is entitled, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” (1984, p. 185).
Back to Burnham: It is not the case that he denies the existence of “the good” in private life; it is rather that he conceives of the political realm as the struggle for power and nothing else. Burnham is not advocating a continuation of this realpolitik of force and fraud, but rather, he recommends that after accepting that a politics of decency does not exist, “A ruling class which recognized that its real aim was to stay in power would also recognize that it would be more likely to succeed if it served the common good” (Orwell Reader, p. 37). Such a ruling class would also constantly rejuvenate itself by recruiting able talent from the classes below. As Orwell explained, Burnham advocated retaining certain “democratic habits,” such as allowing political opposition, a free press, and union autonomy. In appraising our own political culture, it appears to this writer that we do much better with the latter democratic habits and fostering somewhat of a meritocracy than we do with the former. In other words, our ruling class makes great show of serving the common good, while to the acute observer, rather transparently going about their business of staying in power no matter what, in a manner that can only be construed as self-serving, and the common good of the republic be damned.
Much of Orwell’s critique of Burnham concerns Burnham’s poor record of historical predictions during the era of World War II. First predicting a Nazi victory until things began to go wrong for the Germans, after which a Russian victory seem inevitable, according to Orwell, Burnham appeared to be “fascinated by the spectacle of power” (Ibid., p. 337). Orwell maintained that
Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always appear invincible. (p. 348)
Interestingly enough, Orwell maintained that power-worship was probably the strongest motive for the pro-Soviet (“Russophile feelings”) stance of so many Western intellectuals (Ibid.). While I won’t argue with Orwell’s assessment of Burnham in 1946, writers can mature in a couple of decades, which I think is so in Burnham’s case. His Suicide of the West, written in 1964, predicted the downfall of Western civilization due to the policies of progressive “liberalism,” and this was before political correctness disarmed the West in its struggle with aggressive Islam. It was only due to the resurgence of conservatism in the United States and Great Britain in the 1980s that the West was able to counteract and overcome communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but this was before PC had sapped the West’s will to fight and survive.
Orwell’s essay on Burnham is also of interest because it gives us some insight into Orwell’s thinking on similar topics before his publication of 1984. Orwell had recently published Animal Farm in 1945, which was also critical of totalitarianism, but as a man of the left, Orwell remained a democratic socialist throughout his life. As he wrote in his essay “Why I Write” in 1946, the Spanish Civil War was the event most formative for his political thought:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. (Orwell Reader, p. 394)
Some argue that Orwell would be a conservative or Neo-conservative today, but who can predict such things, although I do think it fair to say that he would have been an opponent of political correctness in all its virulent forms. It is certainly true that Orwell has been embraced by conservatives for his valiant opposition to Stalinism and communism in general. As he wrote in his essay on Burnham, “Socialism . . . was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality, and internationalism,” while at the writing of that essay [t]here was not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere” (Orwell Reader, p. 339). With hindsight, his faith in democratic socialism seems naïve, but his pessimism was certainly warranted considering the rise of various totalitarianisms – fascism, Nazism, and communism – in the twentieth century. Like Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Orwell essentially saw fascism and communism as the two faces of the same political pathology, totalitarianism. Yet despite any deserved pessimism, Orwell took issue with Burnham’s thesis that there was an inevitable “drift towards totalitarianism” (Ibid., p. 338). As he said above, judgment suffers when one believes that the continuation of present trends is inevitable.
Finally, Orwell inquires why, with all Burnham’s talk about “the struggle for power,” he “never stops to ask why people want power”: “He seems to assume that power-hunger . . . is a natural instinct that does not have to be explained” (p. 351). But this is not the case, in Orwell’s view; nor is it the case that “the division of society into classes serves the same purpose in all ages” (Ibid.). History does not support this contention. Rather, he argues that in Machiavelli’s time, “class divisions were not only unavoidable, but desirable,” due to the more primitive methods of production, which required “exhausting manual labor” (Ibid.). In Machiavelli’s age, as in all ages prior to the industrial revolution, the majority of mankind was condemned to physical labor to provide society with the goods and sustenance needed for survival, while a few people were set free for other pursuits, “otherwise civilization could not maintain itself, let alone make any progress” (Ibid., pp. 351 – 52). I think this is an excellent point, which modern progressives would do well to consider when they castigate the ancients for the institution of slavery. Slavery or serfdom was ubiquitous in the ancient world, and everywhere there was a civilization until the nineteenth century. So for those so-called “progressives” who would like to return to more primitive methods of production, your moral superiority rests on the fact that machine production has replaced, to a large degree, manual production.
Orwell maintained that with “the arrival of the machine” — and I would clarify that assertion to specify the arrival of coal-powered steam machines and engines — “the justification for class distinctions . . . is no longer the same” (p. 352). This is largely true, although we still seem to have evolved into a class system with knowledge workers on the top and middle, and service and manufacturing classes in the lower middle, with an underclass largely dependent upon government largesse. According to Orwell, the question Burnham should have asked is: “why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when the dominion of man over man ceases to be necessary?” (Ibid.). Orwell refuses to believe that” human nature” or “inexorable laws” make “socialism impossible” (Ibid.). While I may have agreed with Orwell a couple of decades ago, I think that history has so far provided us with evidence that socialism does not work except on a very small scale. Once a large government apparatus is involved to rule a large nation, I think Burnham’s view is correct: the realm of politics becomes a struggle for power, and large impersonal bureaucracies begin the march towards totalitarianism, or what Hayek called “the road to serfdom.” (And following Hayek, it seems to me that only the rule of law, and free economic and political institutions can counter the trend of oppressive statism.) This may or may not be an inexorable law and it may or may not be a result of human nature: I don’t know the answer. Perhaps human beings can “evolve” as the New Age Left is so fond of saying, to the point that we’ll all be socialized into living in a Star Trek utopian ant hill. But will human beings be even more diminished in the process? That is the question.
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Comments
Intriguing material about Burnham, a writer who’s been recommended to me, but whose work I have yet to sample. Thanks!
Perhaps we could have a segment on Hilaire Belloc and his concept of Distributivism?
Thanks Francis. I’d recommend Burnham’s more recent work, The Suicide of the West. I haven’t read Belloc yet, although The Servile State is on my reading list.
Interesting stuff here Mark. Orwell’s early death was a travesty and it would be fascinating indeed to see what he might have to say about modern politics.
Thanks, moose. Glad you liked it.