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1. Betrayal of the Old Right,
Lecture 4
The National Review Conservatives,
Part 2

2. Burnham and Kendall
• Buckley started as a follower of Nock and
Chodorov, but he thought that libertarian policies
had to be put aside until the end of the Cold War.
The struggle against communism required drastic
measures, in his view.
• James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall were
Senior Editors of National Review who were not
libertarians in theory. Both had worked for the
CIA.

3. Burnham
• James Burnham (1905-1987) was the most
influential writer on foreign policy for
National Review. Buckley respected his
intellect greatly.
• Burnham was a philosophy professor at
NYU before WWII and, with Philip
Wheelwright, wrote An Introduction to
Philosophical Analysis.

4. Burnham and Trotsky
• Burnham during the 1930s was associated
with the Socialist Workers Party, a
Trotskyite group. Trotsky criticized Stalin
for his “socialism in one country” policy.
• Burnham knew Trotsky, but Trotsky
attacked him because Burnham didn’t
consider the USSR under Stalin a socialist
country .

5. Burnham and Morality
• The key to Burnham’s thought can be found in his
1943 book, The New Machiavellians.
• Burnham contrasts Dante and Machiavelli. Dante
had unrealistic ideas about a peaceful society
under the Holy Roman Empire.
• Machiavelli was a realistic analyst of power. He
wanted to unify Italy, and he considered what
would be needed to do this and, more generally, to
gain and keep power.

6. Burnham and Morality
Continued
• Dante asks, “what is the way the world
ought to be?” He does not ask, “what does
reality indicate the world is going to be?”
• Burnham was influenced by Pareto and
Mosca in denying the independent influence
of morality and ideas on history. Ideas are
just ideological reflections of people’s
interests.

7. More Morality and Ideas
• Burnham was also influenced by the logical
positivist movement in philosophy. Ayer,
Stevenson, and others said that judgments
of morality aren’t regular propositions with
a truth value. They are statements or
expressions of approval. They are used to
urge people to action.

8. Burnham and Power
• If morality and ideas in general don’t determine
history, what does?
• Burnham answered that the struggle for power is
the primary factor in history.
• He explains this in his most famous book, The
Managerial Revolution, which appeared in 1941.
He applied his view of power to try to explain the
coming course of history.

9. The Managerial Revolution
• As George Orwell noted, Burnham believed that
he could foretell history. He tended to portray
what he wanted as an inevitable trend .
• Burnham thought that technological developments
meant the rise of a new ruling class, composed of
corporation managers, engineers, scientists, and
government bureaucrats.

10. The Managerial Revolution
Continued
• Burnham was influenced by Berle and Means, The
Modern Corporation and Private Property. This
book argued for a separation of ownership and
control in the modern corporation. Mises rejects
this.
• Burnham that a new system, neither capitalism nor
socialism, would come to prevail. It would
resemble fascism. Burnham claimed to be
describing what would happen, rather than
approving or condemning it, but Orwell thinks he
clearly likes what he foresees.

11. Burnham After WWII
• During WWII, Burnham became convinced
that the US and the Soviets would be
engaged in a struggle for world power.
• He favored a preventive nuclear war, if
needed, to win this struggle.
• George Orwell may have modeled the
struggle in 1984 between Eurasia, Eastasia,
and Oceana on Burnham’s ideas.

12. A Problem for Burnham
• Burnham obviously wants the US to win the
Cold War. But on his own theory of power,
why should he care? Aren’t the systems in
America and Russia essentially the same,
according to The Managerial Revolution?

13. Problem Solved
• We can answer this problem by considering
The New Machiavellians. A system that
allows some civil liberties and democracy
may be better, from a power point of view,
than one that doesn’t. Further, this was in
accord with Burnham’s own preferences. Of
course, the people will never really rule.

14. The Later Burnham
• As Burnham got older and was associated
with National Review, he became more
attached to the traditional American way of
life. This comes out in his book Congress
and the American Tradition (1959).

15. Later Burnham Continued
• He thinks there is a place for Congress,
even though his own theory of the
managerial revolution seemed to go against
this. He likes the older America, even
though his theory says its doomed. This was
also a problem for his paleo disciple, Sam
Francis.

16. More Burnham
• Burnham never abandoned his belief that power is
primary and ideas secondary.
• In Suicide of the West (1964), he argues that
liberalism is the ideology of American suicide.By
“liberalism”, he means the contemporary left, but
he includes such things as belief in universal
human rights and opposition to torture as
examples of weakness.

17. Burnham and the Neocons
• The emphasis on power rather than ideas is
a crucial difference of Burnham from the
neocons.
• Another is that Burnham tended to be pro-
Arab and anti-Israel, in large part because
of the importance of oil from the Middle
East for America.

18. Willmoore Kendall
• Kendall (1909-1967) was Buckley’s teacher at
Yale.
• He contrasted the beliefs of alleged experts with
the common beliefs of the American people.
Liberal experts tend to be tolerant of communists
and other radicals. The common people are not.
• The common people believe in a public
orthodoxy.

19. Kendall and Mill
• People who oppose a public orthodoxy often
appeal to the arguments in John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty.
• Mill thought that the contest of ideas, even ideas
we hate, is the best way to achieve truth.
• Kendall denies this. He points out that scientists
only listen to their fellow scientists, not to
everybody.

20. Kendall and Rousseau
• Suppose that there is a public orthodoxy in
America that is intolerant, just as Kendall thinks.
Why should we go along with what this orthodoxy
mandates?
• Kendall accepts Rousseau’s idea of a “general
will”. Kendall translated The Social Contract.
• If the people deliberate, special interests will
cancel out and the result is likely to be true.
Wisdom resides in the people, not the experts.

21. Kendall and Majority Rule
• Kendall’s belief in the general will did not make
him a majority-rule democrat.
• He thought that one needs to consult the
“deliberate sense of of the American community”.
This required more than a bare majority in a
presidential election. He thought that local
communities, voting for their member of
Congress, were more likely to reflect the general
will.

22. Rothbard and Kendall
• Rothbard offers a devastating criticism of
Kendall’s belief in the wisdom of the
community.
• Rothbard asks, wouldn’t Kendall have to
side with the Athenian assembly against
Socrates and with the mob against Jesus?
• Kendall admitted that he would have sided
against Socrates.

23. Kendall and Rights
• Kendall tended to be suspicious of
individual rights. It is the deliberative
community that is important, not the rights
of individuals, considered apart from one
another.
• He thought that Locke was a majority-rule
democrat.

24. Kendall and National Review
• Although Kendall was very influential in the early
years of NR, he quit the magazine and quarreled
with Buckley.
• In part this was personal. He had a very
cantankerous personality.
• There was a serious issue at stake. He thought NR
had become too elitist. The American people
wouldn’t die for the abstractions professed by
most of the NR writers. Instead, one should appeal
to the common beliefs of the American people.