On Samuel Francis on Burnham, and what it means to read outside the intellectual Overton window.
Regular readers know by now that I am a cautious admirer of James Burnham’s 1940s period: The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941), and especially. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943). There is good evidence that these works captured Orwell’s imagination, and that Raymond Aron was also an admirer of the latter (see this paper by Drochon).
It’s always odd to write admiringly about someone whose work has both contemporary valence and seems to fall outside the Overton Window of serious scholarship. (This seems less odd about writing about authors in the more distant past.) I doubt, for example, that Rawls mentions Burnham anywhere. Of course, Isaiah Berlin made a whole career of writing about people he officially disagreed with, but in nearly all such cases his interest was not wholly disinterested. And perhaps disinterest would be boring: what makes Kantians, Thomists, and (Calvinist friendly) Reid-ians writings on Hume so much fun is the animus behind them.
Recently, Damon Linker (quite rightly) called attention to the writings of Samuel Francis as “Trumpism's Prophet: On Samuel Francis’ diabolical vision” (recall this subsequent post of mine). Do read Linker’s post because it is quite arresting. The very first thing you learn from Wikipedia about Samuel Francis (1947 – 2005) is that he “was an American white supremacist writer.” (My view is that in the essays i read this sense of supremacy is cultural in character and not rooted in ‘scientific’ racism, but there is plenty of evidence he embraces the latter, too, as Josh Cherniss reminded me after I published an initial version of this post.)
If you read Francis’ collection of essays (as I recently did), Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, you quickly notice and somewhat awkwardly, then, that Francis is a perceptive admirer of Burnham, including the two books I admire, too. Now I have read Burnham’s (1964) Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, so I will not pretend to be surprised or shocked that Francis the White Supremacist finds much to admire in Burnham.
Back in 1988, a former direct colleague of Burnham, Sydney Hook (by then a man of the right), started a profile on Burnham as follows:
James Burnham's The Machiavellians, written in 1943, is the least known and most important of his books. It is the most important because it contains a clear expression of his social philosophy of freedom. He also defends his belief in a pluralist society, in which power restrains power and "the right of public opposition to the rulers," whoever they are, is the heart of freedom and is sustained forever. Many of his critics and his admirers are unaware of the actual nature of James Burnham's commitment to freedom in a book whose very title seems to suggest something quite different. Society p. 68*
Hook rightfully suggests that a key conclusion from Burnham’s argument is this: “the public acceptance of the perennial right of opposition as an absolute sine qua non of a free society.” (p. 69) This is, as Hook notes, a necessary condition for democracy in Burnham. (And to what degree this can survive scrutiny as a characterization of democracy even if one allows that democracy comes in degrees and kinds is, of course, worth wondering.) It is important to note explicitly that this acceptance is not formulated in terms of rights or constitutions (or a procedure); this is represented as a political doctrine that ultimately rests on the conflicting social forces that generate a kind of imperfect balance of power in a society. This gets something important right about Burnham and the nature of political life. Hook himself notes critically that this makes educating the public a vital activity and he chides Burnham for lacking warmth in this cause of mass education.
Now, Burnham was on the original masthead and regular contributor to National Review. And in our political landscape we don’t view the National Review as champions of pluralism and (even less convincingly) democracy. In fact, in the 1940s and 50s, Willmoore Kendall (who also was associated with National Review, but less central, I think) published a very fine (and underappreciated) book (recall here) on Locke (1941) [1959] John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule. This treats Locke as a common good constitutionalist in which majoritarian democracy establishes the good. Kendall clearly endorses this in his own voice, too.
Kendall’s book went completely against the spirit of his own age which found it much more useful (despite the anachronism and perversions of the text) to canonize Locke as a liberal or the father of liberalism and overlook the mercantilist-imperialist strains in Locke. (Kendall’s argument is marred by his inability to give Locke’s social contract doctrine a good place, and so ends up unconvincing.) Burnham is not a democrat in Kendall’s majoritarian sense. (I leave it to others to figure out to what degree either’s commitment to democracy survived the 1964 civil rights act.) Neither Burnham nor, as Francis notes (without mention of the Locke book in an essay on Kendall), Kendall fit well in the fusionism (of classical liberal/libertarian and religious/traditionalist views) that (retrospectively) became dominant in second half of the twentieth century on the American political right (pp. 79-86 from 1986).
Back to James Francis. Francis has written a biography of Burnham that I have not read, so what follows is a more than usual preliminary digression. If you read Beautiful Losers with some attention, you see that there are four different strands to Francis’ admiration of Burnham.
First, for Francis, Burnham (in the 1970s) is a clear critic of the ascendant neo-conservative take-over of the label ‘conservative’ in the service of “economic opportunity through one kind of social engineering (enterprise zones, for example) and the establishment of an ethic that regards equality (usually disguised as “equality of opportunity”), economic mobility, affluence, and material gratification as the central meaning what their exponents often call “the American experiment.” (p. 223; this is from a 1991 essay that gave the collection its title.) That is, Francis takes Burnham to have diagnosed what we are now likely to call the neoliberal ingredients in ascendant neo-conservatism of the twentieth century.+ (Some other time I will return to this material in Burnham.)
Second, Francis treats Burnham’s Managerial Revolution as the diagnosis of a ‘civilizational crisis.’ This involves,
the liquidation of the middle class and its bourgeois cultural order….which does not consist only in the material dimension of the rolling up of comparatively small owner-operated business enterprises and farming units by colossal corporate organizations and the replacement of local, legislative, and constitutionalist government by centralized, executive bureaucratic regimes. It also consists, in its cultural dimensions, in the delegitimization an eventual extirpation of bourgeois culture—first on the grounds that the culture is the product of a selfish “capitalist” oligarchy, and later, in our own times, that is the institutional framework by which a “white, male heterosexual, Christian” ruling class maintain hegemony.— p. 202 “The Secret of the Twentieth Century” (1990) [see also, e.g., p. 92; 96]
Here we can discern the political and cultural themes that unite the first Pat Buchanan campaign and Trumpism. Francis himself is quite eloquent on (and presents himself as a spokesperson for) the “middle American” (or Anglo-American) culture that he (correctly) foresees will turn against the coastal elites and will form the basis of a coalition between declining rustbelt and ascending sunbelt [and if you think about how Ohio went from classic swing state to firmly MAGA, this is quite prescient. (Go read the linked Linker piece for a flavor of this.)
For Francis, Burnham’s theory/analysis helps diagnose how “the technically skilled managerial elites” have destroyed “the cultural basis of bourgeois power, which acts as a constraint on the power of the new elite.” (p. 202) Lurking here is, of course, more than a little bit of Gramsci (and this helps explain Gramsci’s recent popularity on the alt-right). Crucially, Francis takes from Burnham (and Schumpeter) the idea that capitalism undermines bourgeois culture. (See also, p. 196 in a perceptive (1990) essay on Whittaker Chambers.)
As an aside, throughout his writings we see Francis merge these two points in his criticism of American neoconservatism which he (not implausibly) accuses of accommodating itself to the ‘corporate managerial elite.’ (p. 114 from a (1986) essay review of Irving Kristol.) For Francis’ Burnham the neocons are the products of the same environments as the new corporate managerial overlords (e.g., p. 94) The effect is that neoconservatives help consolidate the managerial revolution and also make it difficult to develop a coalition against it (in a two-party system). Another way to put this is that just about the only welcome effect of Trump’s rise is the return of real political choice about the status of (what we may call) the ‘credential economy.’
There is also a very important, third, related significance that is rooted in the forementioned diagnosis of the Managerial Revolution, but only drawn out in Burnham’s (1959) Congress and the American Tradition. (Some other time I will discuss this book.) This book analyzes the rise of the imperial presidency with concentrated power as an effect of the managerial revolution. (This also has roots in Schumpeter who I find more convincing on this process.) On Burnham’s view Caesarean despotism is a natural (albeit not inevitable) byproduct of the managerial revolution. (See also, p. 173 from (1989) “Imperial Conservatives”.)
For Burnham qua Machiavellian the rise of Caesareanism and risk of despotism was wholly deplorable. (This is a very strong contrast with neoconservatism, which has not had a proper reckoning with its own facilitation in the rise of the potential for Caesareanism.) In Francis there is, however, a clear strain that welcomes Caesereanism as a way to fight and turn back the managerial revolution (see, especially, the introduction p. 11). This is, alas, the connection with Trumpism.
Fourth, and most important, because there is a strain of a-moralism about the analysis of politics in Burnham (in common with Nietzsche and Marx), Francis treats Burnham as a modernist. His (1987) “The Other Side of Modernism” is entirely devoted to this theme (and also involves the most extensive references to the Machiavellians). My use of a-moralism may be a bit imprecise because what Francis really admires in Burnham is his distance from “the ethical absolutes around which premodern and contemporary traditionalist ideas center.” (p. 133) In so far as ruling powers promote such absolutes, its functional in character (to preserve their rule).
Strikingly, for Francis it is this embrace of a-moralism that makes Burnham so unpalatable to his would-be readers on the American right who are rooted in Christian or traditionalist veneration for a moral absolutes. I think this is based on a surprising misunderstanding on the nature of Church political theory. But that’s for another time.
Francis gets mostly other things out of Burnham than I do. I tend to emphasize Burnham’s agonistic pluralism. (For me Burnham is the social theorist who most clearly sees the dangers of concentrated powers.) But I recognize that his Burnham is as echt as mine. So why read Francis? There is, after all, a real risk of being tainted by his views since some of the starting points overlap. I don’t think the Millean answer — that my own views will be more robust if I let myself be challenged by criticisms that share some common ground — fully convinces.
In a partisan environment, if one is naturally and tribally connected to one party or another, the differences in the other coalition may seem merely cosmetic. But reading Francis one gets a sense of what the intellectual and, thereby also, social differences within American ‘conservative’ and ‘Right’ political thought are. For while Trump is mortal, the forces and coalitions he has unleashed will stay with us for some time.
*Hook’s summary of the earlier and much more famous Managerial Revolution is also worth quoting: Burnham “argues that Marxism had misconceived the nature of the true revolution of our time and that the effective ruling class in all industrialized societies was the managers--the technologists, engineers, and bureaucrats--without whom no economy could function.” (p. 68)
+It is worth noting that this is not very far from how somebody like Melinda Cooper reads the technocratic turn on the American right.