James Burnham James Burnham |Born||November 22, 1905| |Died…

James Burnham
James Burnham
|Born||November 22, 1905|
|Died||July 28, 1987 (aged 81)|
Kent, Connecticut, U.S.
|Spouse||
|
Marcia Lightner
(m. 1934)
|Relatives||David Burnham (brother)|
|Academic background|
|Education|
|Influences|
|Academic work|
|Discipline||Philosophy|
|Sub-discipline||Political philosophy|
|School or tradition|
|Institutions||New York University|
|Notable students||Maurice Natanson|
|Notable works||The Managerial Revolution (1941)|
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943)
|Notable ideas||Managerial class|
Managerial state
|Influenced|
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 most famous book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), speculated on the future of an increasingly proceduralist hence sclerotic society. 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]
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 the rest of his life.[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.[citation needed]
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:
I reject, as you know, the "philosophy of Marxism," dialectical materialism. …
The general Marxian theory of "universal…