George - the Other

James Burnham - The First Cold Warrior, by Francis P. Sempa

“In 1983, Ronald Reagan, who presided over the West’s victory in the Cold War, presented the United States’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to James Burnham, who had envisioned a strategy for that victory nearly forty years before. . . .”


James Burnham
(1905–1987)

"Often we remark that the convert exhibits an unusually devoted commitment to his or her new cause. Such evidently was the case with the subject of this essay. Remembered as an anticommunist American intellectual and dedicated foe of the Soviet Union, university professor James Burnham started his career at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The author, who recently wrote an appreciation of Halford Mackinder’s world view for this journal (Winter 2000), assesses Burnham’s scholarly approach to Cold War strategy as set forth over some three decades." ~ Ed. - American Diplomat.

More can be found about this remarkable American Hero, and "First Cold Warrior" in the article by Francis P. Sempa: http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_17/articles/sempa_burnham1.html

George

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http://www.medaloffreedom.com/JamesBurnham.htm

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Quotes from James Burnham: Suicide and the West - 1964

"Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow."

"The most important practical consequence of the guilt encysted in the liberal ideology and psyche is this: that the liberal, and the group, nation or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself."

"The judgements that liberals render on public issues, domestic and foreign, are as predictable as the salivation of Pavlovian dogs."

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Statement on the Death of James Burnham

July 29, 1987

"Nancy and I have learned with deep sadness of the passing of James Burnham. Mr. Burnham, the author of seminal works, like 'The Managerial Revolution' and 'The Suicide of the West,' and a senior editor of the National Review, was one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century: the journey away from totalitarian statism and towards the uplifting doctrines of freedom.

A Trotskyist and Communist at an early age, Mr. Burnham wrote of his rejection of communism in 1940: 'The basic reason for the break was my conclusion Marxism was false and Marxist politics in practice lead not to their alleged goal of democratic socialism, but to one or another form of totalitarian despotism.' Mr. Burnham later dismissed socialism as impossible 'of achievement or even of approximation,' and spent the remaining decades of his life as a skilled and fearless champion of human liberty.

For all the fierceness of his convictions, Mr. Burnham was a man both kind and gentle. He loved greatly his family, his friends, his country -- life itself. We extend our sympathy to the Burnham family and join them in mourning the death of a great American." - Ronald Reagan

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Other Links to articles about James Burnham:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/sept02/burnham.htm - "Burnham’s point, as pertinent today as when he uttered it, is that free speech cannot be understood in isolation, but only in the context of that which makes it possible, that is, in the context of democratic government and the functioning social community that supports it." - Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

http://www.quadrant.org.au/php/archive_details_list.php?article_id=553 - "Put with brutal but not unfair brevity, Burnham predicted that the Marxian proletarian revolution - still confidently awaited by left-thinkers of the 1940s - would not happen. The workers, so far from being emancipated, would continue to get the rough end of the pineapple, as they had from the beginning of time." - Peter Ryan, Quadrant Magazine

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=6&articleID=66 - "James Burnham was born in Chicago in 1905 to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. He finished his secondary schooling at Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, and in 1923 entered Princeton University, where he majored in English. He also took French, Latin, Greek, and all the available philosophy courses. As an undergraduate, Burnham regarded himself as a follower of T. S. Eliot. Graduating at the top of his class, he earned a second B.A. at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1929." - Joseph R. Stromberg, Ludwig von Mises Institute (Review for The Independent Institute)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham - "James Burnham (1905–1987) was an American popular political theorist, activist and intellectual, known for his work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, which heavily influenced George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Burnham's theories are thought to have been influenced by Bruno Rizzi's book La Bureaucratisation du Monde; it was published in 1939 and made many of the same arguments as Burnham's book. Burnham was of English Catholic stock. He graduated at the top of his class at Princeton before attending Balliol College, Oxford." - Wikipedia

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/library/lra-burnham.html - "Burnham was of English Catholic immigrant background and graduated at the top of his class at Princeton and then attended Balliol before starting his academic teaching career. By the early 1930s he was already a dedicated Marxist and friend of Sidney Hook and others on the Trotskyite left. Yet he was never doctrinaire and soon his differences came to the fore. By 1940 he was a member of the fourth International, helped found the Workers Party, and then broke entirely with Marxism, Trotskyite or otherwise, with the realization that the end-stage of capitalism was not socialism, but 'managerialism'. The result was his first important work, The Managerial Revolution, which showed the relationship of Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and New Dealism and of all of these to totalitarianism. It became a minor classic and may have had more influence on the intellectual Left than the Right. The Machiavellians may be Burnham's most important and most misunderstood book. Subtitled Defenders of Freedom, it analyzed the political theories of four non-marxist thinkers who greatly influenced Burnham: Sorel, Mosca, Pareto, and Michels. Despite his decade-long flirtation with Marxism, he recognized that ideologies were not scientific, but merely existed to provide a 'rationalization for the existence and power of the dominant minority'." - Samuel Francis, Claridge Press

posted by George - the Other @ 7:47 AM