The power of James Burnham.

The common-place critic ... believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.

--William Hazlitt, "On Common-Place Critics"

Americans have not yet learned the tragic lesson that the most powerful cannot be loved--hated, envied, feared, obeyed, respected, even honored perhaps, but not loved.

--James Burnham, Containment or Liberation?

"Who is James Burnham?" How often have I fielded variants of that question while pondering this essay! My informal survey suggests that almost no one under the age of sixty has even heard of him ("James who?"). And for most people over that magic age, Burnham is but an attenuated presence, a half-remembered, even vaguely embarrassing fashion that has failed to return--fins on the back of a model that was discontinued long ago for lack of sales. "Ah, yes," speak the glimmers of remembrance, "author of The Managerial Revolution"--Burnham's first and most famous book, published in 1941--"ardent Cold Warrior, helped organize the Congress for Cultural Freedom (remember that?), and ... wasn't he a supporter of Joseph McCarthy?" The answer is No--more on this below--but even the hint of an adumbration of a suspicion of "McCarthyite" leanings is sufficient to expel one from the ranks of civilized recollection, as Burnham learned to his cost.

The most notable exception to the oblivion surrounding Burnham is among people associated with National Renew, the conservative fortnightly that Burnham helped start in 1955 when he was fifty. For more than two decades, Burnham enlivened the magazine's pages with his spare but unsparing prose and editorial intelligence. He ranged widely, dilating on everything from foreign policy--his specialty--to (early on) the movies. William F. Buckley, Jr., the founding editor and perpetual genius loci of NR, called Burnham "the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding." In a just world, that would be patent enough for continued interest and recognition. But in this world, the combination of Burnham's ferocious intellectual independence and unclubbable heterodoxy long ago consigned him to the unglamorous limbo that established opinion reserves for those who challenge its pieties too forcefully.

I wish that I could predict that James Burnham and the Struggle for the World, (1) Daniel Kelly's meticulous biography of this sage political gadfly, would redress the injustice. But I suspect that Burnham is too idiosyncratic, too polemical, and too faithful to the dictates of intellectual integrity to enjoy anything like a general renaissance.