This classic work of political theory and practice offers a…

This classic work of political theory and practice offers an account of the modern Machiavellians, a remarkable group who have been influential in Europe and practically unknown in the United States. The book devotes a long section to Machiavelli himself as well as to such modern Machiavellians as Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham contends that the writings of these men hold the key both to the truth about politics and to the preservation of political liberty.
James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years, as his thinking developed, he left Marxism and produced his seminal work The Managerial Revolution. He later turned to conservatism and served as a public intellectual of the conservative movement. He also wrote regularly for the conservative publication National Review on a variety of topics.
One of the greatest books on political theory one can have the pleasure of reading, elucidating the Machiavellian realist or amoral analysis of politics. Both an analysis of it's chief figures, their theories and a contrast of the "politics as wish" as represented by Dante. This should be in the curriculum of all political theory/philosophy/science classes, it's brevity and clarity are to be envied.
The American Right, like all outsider political movements, has long been susceptible to Gnosticism. This usually manifests as the belief that a small group of wise initiates can see through rationales for political action and find hidden knowledge, of the real reasons men and societies act as they do. Sometimes those reasons are the machinations of the Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or the Lizard Men. More often, they are prosaic, and although economic Gnosticism is the most frequent type, another common gnostic belief is that power is the only real driver of the actions of men, and all other rationales in politics mere epiphenomena, lies designed to conceal the hidden centrality of power. The Machiavellians is James Burnham’s exposition of this latter Gnosticism.
In order to understand this book, one must first understand Burnham. He was a repentant Communist, of the Trotskyite variety, prominent on the Right in the middle of the twentieth century, and the fierce urge to leave his past behind made him hyper-aware of the dangers of ideology. I, in fact, always use his definition of what an ideology is, “a more or less systematic and self-contained set of ideas supposedly dealing with the nature of reality . . . and calling for a commitment independent of specific experience or events.” But in truth, Burnham elevated his Gnosticism to something approximating a new ideology. Perhaps such stridency, such a desire to find the key to certainty, was in his nature, driving the beliefs of both his youth and his maturity. Yet the aim of his new ideology is technical, not utopian—it is to prove that politics can be a true science, that he understands that science, and that this allows him to recommend the optimal system for mankind.
This book, written in 1942 (and slightly revised in 1963) has experienced a renaissance on the Right in recent years, driven in part by Curtis Yarvin, who refers to it often, and has nothing but the highest praise for the book. This is no surprise; as I have analyzed at some length, Yarvin is both Gnostic and a proponent of instrumentalism, the idea that no transcendent moral principle has any relevance in governance, such that men can and should be used as tools to accomplish rational goals. And like Burnham, he claims that only stupid people believe other than him. (Both Yarvin and Burnham rely heavily on insulting opponents who are intellectual equals, never a good sign. Occasional insults are amusing; constant insults imply either insecurity or a rage problem.) Until very recently, however, The Machiavellians was hard to obtain; it’s still under copyright, but a small press has reissued the 1963 edition of the book (and Burnham’s other work), so now one can buy a hard copy cheaply and easily.
To talk about politics as science, Burnham begins with—Dante Alighieri. Not with the Divine Comedy; Burnham has no use whatsoever for religion. Rather with Dante’s little-known De Monarchia, translated as On Monarchy. Burnham compares Dante’s book to—the 1932 platform of the Democratic Party. His basic claim is that both documents are lies, which mean nothing on their own terms, and in fact are often diametrically opposed to reality. They are instead covers for their authors’ real motivations and intents, and he cleverly chooses these two disparate documents to illustrate his point.
De Monarchia is an entry in the then-current debates, of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, about the relative power of the Pope and secular monarchs, in particular…