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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, February 11, 2021

James Burnham has the last laugh

One of the central issues bothering the elite a century ago was that of how “the masses” might be “controlled” in the “new age of democracy”….Writers such as Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion 1922) and Ortego y Gasset (Revolt of the Masses 1930) conjured up frightening narratives about the dangers of the great unwashed masses. Lippmann’s full book can be read here

The scintillating prose of Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was a favourite of mine at University – with his theory of the “circulation of the elites” reassuring the elites of the post-war period that all would be well…. 

Of course the rebellious 60s got them worried – but a combination of the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 report on The Crisis of Democracy and, as Perry Anderson has recently and very usefully reminded us, the European Commission soon saw the plebs off...... 

But the populism evident since the start of the new millennium has sparked new anxieties about the masses amongst the liberal elites – and indeed raised the question anew as to whether capitalism is consistent with democracy

One guy whose words are worth reading on that question is SM Wolin – whose book on the history of political thought - Politics and Vision - held me spellbound in the 1960s. In his 90s he produced this great critique of the US system – Democracy Inc – managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (2008). And this is an interesting recent article, Why Elites always Rule which reminds the new generation of the significance of Pareto’s work….. 

In 1941 James Burnham produced his magisterial “The Managerial Revolution” against which George Orwell wrote in 1946 a devastating essay Second thoughts on James Burnham. Orwell clearly had some agreement with Burnham about the oligarchic direction in which political forces were pushing society and faulted Burnham more for his fatalistic assessment of the probability of Nazi success.

Not so well known was Burnham’s next book The Machiavellians – defenders of freedom (1943)  which examined the work of such theorists as Mosca, Pareto and Sorel

And also forgotten is a book he produced in 1964 - by which time he had turned from the fiery radical and "friend" of Trotsky to a full-blown liberal - Suicide of the West 

That sort of title has become a fairly common theme this past decade or so. In these myopic times, a bit of respect for long-dead writers is overdue!  

2 comments:

  1. Burnham was never actually a friend of Trotsky, despite his brief sojourn within the Fourth International. Trotsky perceptively described his political trajectory, which saw him, in the 1960's, of course fully behind the US carpet bombing of the people of Vietnam and Cambodia.

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    1. Touche, Boffy! Sharp-eyed, as always. I meant to say only that they had contact.....

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