Framing neo-conservatism

‘A neoconservative is a person brought up as a person of the left, who grew dissatisfied with the ideas and the spirit of the left.’ So wrote Michael Novak in 1986.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite an emerging body of literature on the subject of neo-conservatism, the doctrine, and its origins remain patchy in both definition and origin. Michael Harrington suggests a critique that grounded the movement in its opposition to the welfare state and the emergence of a bureaucratic New Class.Footnote ¹⁹ The original premise of neo-conservatism was its repudiation of liberalism by a set of mainly New York intellectuals in its supposed failure in achieving its social and foreign policy goals. Pessimistic schools took root amongst the pages of the protean magazine Partisan Review, and those of the ‘end of ideology’ line of thought. Irving Kristol, founder of the magazine Encounter, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary and those associated with the Public Interest all played key roles in the formation of the ideology. Wolfowitz, formerly a student of Strauss, offers his own discussion on the subject, while the account by French journalists Daniel Vernet and Alain Franchon remains pertinent to the discussion.Footnote ²⁰

Discerning the attributes of the doctrine proves to be a somewhat slippery exercise. Fukuyama, who has himself been bracketed as a neo-conservative, argues that the movement is far from uniform. He nonetheless sketches four principal canons that animate it. The first is that a state's foreign policy reflects liberal democratic values. The second is that US power should be placed at the disposal of moral objects. The third, that social engineering projects (the Great Society programmes of the 1960s, for instance) are to be regarded with suspicion. Finally, the movement fostered an incurable scepticism about the legitimacy of international law and institutions.Footnote ²¹ While it is tempting to place the Bush doctrine within this schema, it is by no means certain whether it would agree with the way democratisation is meant to take place in the doctrine. Within the circle of ‘vulcans’, as James Mann terms them, was a policy cleavage on such matters as the use of force. An otherwise hawkish Jeanne Kirkpatrick at stages condemned the use of direct force to impose democracy on a state, seeing it as a ‘political temptation’ with ‘totalitarian’ tendencies,Footnote ²² a contradiction that is worth remembering.

Fukuyama's categories are useful in framing the analysis of Burnham's writings, though such tools are only rough guides. The insistence on an aggressive, radical posture to targeting threats to security is typical of this approach, whether through a total negation of the enemy or the deployment of such traditional models of power as imperialism. This article also suggests two further categories that help us explain the parallels between Burnham's thought and neo-conservative dogma: the presence of envy for the enemy being fought, accompanied by a contempt and suspicion for law and international institutions which traditional conservatives would normally be expected to defend.

In the first place, Burnham's work demonstrates the curious anomaly in how liberal democracies can effectively project foreign policies which reflect their typical, internal characteristics. It is fitting to note (something to bear in mind when looking at Burnham) that the fourth principle may well contradict the first, a classic tension that neo-conservatives have never quite resolved. If a country's principles inexorably drive its external policies, we must assume that a liberal democracy will inherently respect international laws rather than subvert them. As the record shows, this was far from the case under either the Reagan administration or that of George W. Bush. Burnham, in fact, suggests that certain laws are only useful to a degree, limited, as they are, by considerations of state interest and power. International treaties are not useful if they, for instance, facilitate appeasement.

There is also an issue about what exactly is meant by ‘liberal democracy’ in its neo-conservative appraisal. After the frequent attacks made on the ‘liberal’ aspect of democracy by Burnham, one is left wondering whether the term is even useful as a tool of analysis and policy. In an illuminating address to the Aspen Institute on the subject of ‘democracy’, Burnham gives us a sense of this contradiction, something which recurs in the foreign policies of the Bush administration. The over-arching aim of that administration was to ‘actively bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world’, facilitated with the belief of the US being ‘the sole pillar upholding a liberal world order that is conducive to the principles [the US] believes in’.Footnote ²³

The personal portrait

Burnham was a keen political theorist who dabbled in soothsaying. One indignant correspondent wrote that he favoured finding ‘a hob-goblin under every bed’.Footnote ²⁴ His intellectual pedigree was minted by study at Oxford and Princeton, where he proved unusually interested in philosophy, a less popular subject in the syllabus. During the Second World War, he served in the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Service, the Office of Strategic Services. For numerous years, he was professor of philosophy at the New York University, after which he assumed a contributing editorial post with William Buckley, Jr.'s conservative National Review. He was a keen student on the subject of totalitarianism during the 1940s, while being an enthusiastic theoretician of Trotskyite principles, at least till 1940. Till then, he had been involved first in the secretariat of the Socialist Workers Party, then the breakaway Socialist Party of Max Shachtman. Famously, the break with the movement took place over what seemed to be Trotsky's classification of the Soviet Union as a worker's state, albeit ‘a bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state’.

While taking issue with Trotsky at stages, Burnham never entirely abandoned allegiance to his ideas. While disagreeing with the revolutionary's analysis of the Soviet state, he considers the kernel of the Revolution worth defending. The revolutionary legacy had to be guarded – to not do so would result in the Soviet state falling to some imperialist power.Footnote ²⁵ A revolutionary defence of the Soviet Union was, however, impossible without cogent resistance against Stalinism.

Burnham subsequently produced important works that provided the force of a conservative undercurrent. The Managerial Revolution, despite being seen as a descriptive rather than prescriptive work, can be paired with an assortment of other studies during that same period that focused on features of totalitarianism that would prove seminal in the work of George Orwell.Footnote ²⁶ As Orwell himself summarised it, Burnham's analysis focused on those elites who would control the means of production: ‘business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers’ all comprised ‘managers’ in this revolution.Footnote ²⁷ Writers prior to Burnham, including Waclaw Majechski and Max Nomad, neither of whom feature in the Managerial Revolution, posited an elite who would assume power once the ‘masses’ had overthrown capitalism.Footnote ²⁸ But the triumphant power would be anything but a socialist one. What becomes clear in Burnham's writings is the persistence of oligarchy in society, whichever political system is employed. His The Machiavellians provides a defence of various political theorists who saw oligarchic tendencies in society: Georges Sorel, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfred Pareto and Robert Michels. If we are pessimistic about the myths that gird society, Burnham argued, one will not be deceived by them.Footnote ²⁹ These Machiavellians are thus defenders of freedom, illuminating in their observations of social problems.

The 1947 publication Struggle for the World, written initially as a survey study for the Office of Strategic Services during the war, was a genuine polemic urging the consolidation of US power to not merely counter but defeat global communism. It read as the counter-weight to the containment doctrine advocated by US State Department official and former Charge d'Affaires to the Soviet Union, George F. Kennan. Three years later, the theme was re-iterated and expanded in The Coming Defeat of Communism.

This belligerent tone would continue throughout the Cold War. His Suicide of the West was a ‘Spenglerian observation of the decline of a whole civilization’, ostensibly at the hands of a soporific liberalism which had rendered the ‘West’ complacent.Footnote ³⁰ In an article intended for the British Sunday Telegraph, he saw liberalism as a body contaminated by communism, providing false comforts for the defeated. ‘The new conservatives most simply identified’, by way of contrast, ‘are those not willing to accept suicide.’Footnote ³¹

Burnham's movement to the right follows a distinct formula that would characterise the neo-conservative pedigree. Starting on the far left, and more particularly, as a Trotskyite, he effectively defected to the conservative movement for the duration of the Cold War. As we shall see, not all the Trotskyite vestments were abandoned in this move. In such an attitude, he betrayed that curious tendency of the neo-conservative to envy certain aspects of the enemy, one scornful of the very democratic institutions he was supposedly defending. His commitment to frustrating the efforts of global communism provides the ground that would be in time appropriated by the so-called Straussians.

Appeasement, hegemony and empire

Empire-chat came to dominate aspects of the neo-conservative movement after the attacks of September 2001.Footnote ³² Podhoretz extolled from the Commentary pulpit that ‘World War IV’ was at hand, and the necessary primacy of American power would wage it. Various foundations and think tanks, notably the American Enterprise Institute, churned out papers suggesting that an empire might not be such a bad idea after all. There was even advice from British sources, notably Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, on how the US might firstly admit its imperial credentials, then get on with the job of fulfilling them.Footnote ³³

While one has to accept that not all commentators on that side of the political spectrum agreed with this (some, in fact, were much against the imperial concept, notably Robert Kagan), the thought of an empire of democracies centred on Washington became a recurrent theme. Those with an aversion for the imperial term found hegemony more appropriate.Footnote ³⁴ In the 1990s, notably in the shadows of the Clinton administration, neo-conservative scribblers were taking their various positions on the retention of global unipolarity. Consider Kagan and Kristol: ‘The task for America at the start of the 1990s ought to have been obvious. It was to prolong this extraordinary movement and to guard the international system from any threats that might challenge it [with benevolent global hegemony].’Footnote ³⁵ This, it was argued, was the sure way that threats to America could be eliminated altogether. They were all in agreement with the principles, disagreeing merely on the methods.

All of this is not new when considering Burnham's views in the early Cold War years. They read as psychological signatures of the neo-conservative mind: an abhorrence of containment and a willingness to seize the offensive moment and a respect for ‘empire’. The apocalyptic language that resounds through much neo-conservatism is expressed rather well in works such as The Struggle for the World. From the start, Burnham opposed containment in favour of an offensive model of engagement, whether it be through an empire or some super state. To that end, he drew on the geopolitical theories of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. Such entities were the only, perhaps inevitable solution. The British would fall by the way side, becoming at most an appendage of US power.Footnote ³⁶ The US would, in turn, become a world empire:

One reviewer found such opinions distastefully journalistic. ‘In times of strain fearful souls take refuge in melodramatic dilemmas, and these have what Lord Salisbury once called journalistic reverberations.’Footnote ³⁹ Moral and religious categories in global affairs were downplayed in favour of an abstract calculus of power. And one did not need an empire to assure security. Even Burnham's colleagues had some trouble with the tag of empire. The writer and cultural critic Max Eastman, who had flirted with communism only to repudiate its tenets by the late 1930s, suggested that the word be dropped altogether in a condensation of Burnham's work for broader distribution. Their relationship had been an intellectually close one, marked by various tense exchanges touching on the nature of dialectical materialism. Eastman, for one, described the concept as ‘a disguised metaphysical realism’. Astutely, he observed that Burnham's Trotskyite convictions might fail to accept that appraisal, seeing as Trotsky himself might have excommunicated him.Footnote ⁴⁰

This tension between political rhetoric and scientific rigour was a recurring theme in Burnham's work, and one spotted early by Eastman. The resort to the imperial label was of similar import. Eastman noted ‘a confusion in [Burnham's] motivation between scientific definition and persuasive speech.’ Nor was Burnham entirely clear what form this empire would take: an American imperium, or an Anglo-American empire which was ‘a good deal different from an American empire’.Footnote ⁴¹

Burnham had, in fact, resuscitated ideas of ‘Anglo-Saxony’ that had been circulating during the late 1930s and early 1940s, effectively a union of English-speaking states. Such an idea had been entertained at various parts of history on both sides of the Atlantic. Burnham thought this entirely natural in combating what he saw as an ‘imperialist’ force in different vestments. The language of revolution and anti-imperialism was simply code for ‘extreme imperialism’ which exploited nationalist sentiments.Footnote ⁴²

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., a renowned Hollywood actor who had staunchly favoured assisting Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, reacted warmly to the Struggle for the World. Note was made of Burnham's suggestion that ‘some sort of Anglo-American political affiliation be formalized’. Fairbanks proceeded to remind Burnham of his involvement with Dr. James Shotwell of Columbia University and Clark M. Eichelberger, and, in a less formal capacity, the then Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1940, Fairbanks spoke with Shotwell, Harding, Roosevelt and Hull about the prospects of extending ‘honorary American citizenship to the citizens of the British Commonwealth’. The issue was also raised with Lord Halifax, and the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, ‘regarding the possibility of the British introducing similar legislation in our favor’. A draft bill had been made by Fairbanks, Shotwell and Harding, though the entry of the US into the war, adding to the ‘delicate political atmosphere obtaining at that time, precluded anything more being done about it’.Footnote ⁴³

Burnham continued the uncompromising theme in The Coming Defeat of Communism, which endorsed an all out offensive against world communism short of preventive war. While approving the jettisoning of the appeasement policy in favour of containment, he saw the latter as purely temporary. Containment would in time prove inadequate in the face of an enemy seeking the destruction of Western institutions through a sustained, global conflict. Such a policy ignored the economic, political, sociological and ideological dimension to the struggle; was crippling in its defensiveness, and lacked the clear objective of eliminating communism.Footnote ⁴⁴

In Containment or Liberation?, the foundations of containment outlined by US State Department's foremost Soviet expert George Frost Kennan in 1947 was assailed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Kennan had prescribed a formula of ‘long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’. With some derision, Burnham sums up the international situation, as viewed by Kennan, as one where getting ‘panicky’ through shifting from ‘butter to guns’ will not be required, and matters may well be left in the hands of ‘foreign service officers of the type of George Kennan and his colleagues.’ There is no account provided by Kennan of the innately subversive nature of communist doctrines. (Where to with those forces who are unofficially under Soviet control and eager to commit local acts of sabotage, whether politically or militarily?)Footnote ⁴⁶

The US was, for Burnham, a patient narcotised by ‘social workers, fellow travelers and Soviet agents who penetrated the public opinion industry, and assembled in Washington under the careless scepter of Franklin Roosevelt.’Footnote ⁴⁷ In advocating containment, the US was posing no threat to ‘the big bully loose on the block’. One is struck by the contemporary resonance Burnham generates in Containment or Liberation, the kind of aggressive, Manichean language one might find in a press release from the Project for the New American Century. Larger strategic plans had to be conceived off in offensive terms.

The enemy itself, the Soviet Union, was behind the most ‘dynamic’ expansive drive since early Islam, a character ill suited to standard containment theory.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Soviet state had no border to speak off, with the immense power to move men and materiel through a global network into every country. In this, one gets those mirrored images of post-2001 American strategy: the borderless, transnational enemy in a shadow-filled world; the unreliability of rigid international agreements and ineffectual bodies to deal with it. Strengthening non-communist states could only work with the internal destruction of the communist movement; meanwhile, the Soviets were happy to see containment as a consolidation and affirmation of their own territories, knowing that the West would not infiltrate or challenge them, and have been given a free hand to act internally. A policy of liberation ‘throws the Soviet Empire on the defensive, and captures the initiative for the free world.’ It is essentially ‘offensive, just as containment and appeasement are essentially and unavoidably defensive’. In adopting an offensive policy, the West was admitting in was in this contest ‘to win’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Empire, then, is a system that is hard, if not impossible to do away with, the corollary, it would seem, of having elites. Burnham's fear was that the West (the US and Europe), was losing interest in imperial concepts in the face of global post-colonial movements. There is much in The Suicide of the West to suggest this. ‘What is ending in our age is not empire but merely the empires of the West.’ The West might have avoided this dilemma by accepting some imperial context to their security through a Pax Americana and the development of ‘a second nuclear capability’. Some reviewers of the work sensed a nagging racial consciousness, a suspicion on the part of Burnham that ‘negroes’ might ever have true civilising potential.Footnote ⁵⁰ Another, somewhat more charitable review, did not think Burnham racist or even nationalist, preferring to see his views as reflecting ‘the undeniable effects race, religion and nationality have upon a man's behaviour’.Footnote ⁵¹ Burnham did not leave his readers in any doubt about the belief that cultural equality, not to mention that between states, was nonsensical.

Just as modern neo-conservatives developed an innate hostility towards the multicultural state and the tenets of liberalism, Burnham could explain in the 1960s how the latter was incapable of appreciating pressing global problems: the issue of population growth and world communism.Footnote ⁵² ‘The new conservatives, most simply identified, are those not willing to accept suicide.’Footnote ⁵³ Burnham refused to accept the nuances of world communism or post-colonial nationalism, a habit neo-conservatives would generally come to share in their assessments of political forces. Liberalism did no favours in comforting the defeated – one should be worried about Arab fanatics armed with the weapons of communist states at the Suez Bridge instead of favouring their triumphs as blows against reactionary imperialism in favour of ‘one-universal-law-for-all-mankind’. Besides, liberalism was itself infected by communism – the enemies of both, in terms of people and principles, were more or less the same.Footnote ⁵⁴

With enthusiasm and fear, readers found his thesis in Suicide of the West Spenglerian in its emphasis, dismissing the West as doomed to ‘a rising force of a somewhat barbarian nature’, as much as the liberal, who would pass, like the pagan Symmachus, into history without mourning from those it has served.Footnote ⁵⁵ It was hoped that his tract would awaken the American public from its somnambulism, the result of those ‘political nostrums prescribed by the Liberal Establishment’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In truth, a state of global permanent struggle, even revolution, enchanted Burnham. His dark admiration for communism does much to cast the atmosphere of mourning an able foe after the Cold War in context. It also sounds much like the Trotskyite doctrine of permanent revolution in reverse. The Cold War, preferably one not inclined to policies of containment, procures good effects. It was ‘the greatest social invention since the creation of governments’. Major conflict could be avoided, and ‘adequate expression’ given ‘to both human combativeness and human altruism’. Economic advances had been made across the globe; the common market had been created; and foreign aid programmes initiated. An end to the Cold War would lead to enervating restlessness and a moral slump.Footnote ⁵⁷

Envy for totalitarianism

An acute envy for the enemy, and a certain suspicion about democracy itself, is a persistent feature of neo-conservatism that finds voice in Burnham's writing. While the targeting of such totalitarian states like the Soviet Union, or the somewhat more amorphous threat of Al-Qaeda is based on official chest beating, encouraging self-love (‘our’ institutions, our ‘way of life’), it is also done with a degree of envy and cant. The enemy, after all, has a revolutionary mobility, a means of instigating terror, obedience and servitude that a democracy can never have. It exploits the democratic framework at the expense of the open society, undermining it from within. In this sense, Burnham betrays, more than any other proto neo-conservative, an admiration for the totalitarian personality and system of government that he is bent on combating. Go easy, he suggested, on persecuting figures like the anti-Communist Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. He might chill expression, destroy reputations, undermine democratic safeguards, yet prove effective in removing any corrosive Fifth Column.

The mimicry of authoritarianism in combating despotic, even totalitarian threats (though it is questionable whether ‘Islamic fascism’ amounts to that), the effort to legally subvert international law in order to attain political justice (Guantánamo Bay, the labelling of the Taliban and terrorist suspects as illegal combatants), seemingly follow a clear pattern established in Burnham's thought.Footnote ⁵⁸

The author to spot this tendency with such devastating insight was George Orwell. Noting various tendencies in Burnham's work towards ‘homage’ and even ‘self-abasement’ before the totalitarian threat, Orwell hit upon a recurring pattern.Footnote ⁵⁹ As long as the Nazis were winning, writes Orwell, Burnham had little problem with them. ‘Naturally, from the point of view of the old, they are monsters. If they win, they take care in due time of manners and mores.’Footnote ⁶⁰ The same might be said of Stalin. ‘There are curious passages in which it seems to be suggested that Stalin is to be admired because of the limitless suffering that he caused.’Footnote ⁶¹ This was the Burnham of the Machiavellians – one of geopolitical opportunism, seeing states as entities carving spheres of influence in an endless tussle for power.

The doubling of empire and democracy in neo-conservative dogma is a tendency foreshadowed in Burnham's work. Democracy, in truth, is a weak institution that is bound to fail before stronger enemies who are less constrained by accountability. It will fail before such historical figures as Stalin, a ‘great man’ at the centre of a movement that can only be appraised in a pseudo-religious way:

The passage has been dismissed as a purely ironic take on the Stalinist message, bait which was duly snapped up by alarmed critics.Footnote ⁶³ But it becomes very clear that Orwell had identified a pattern that would not be shaken.

Such tendencies provide the cooking mixture critical to both Burnham's oeuvre and the approach of modern neo-conservative dogma and practice. The strategy is typical. Condemn the US and Allied approaches to international security (namely communism) as weak or unduly conciliatory; admire the opponents as brutal and effective. ‘Democratic’ institutions like Congress are to be regarded with suspicion:

Conscience becomes a liberal, weakening aberration. The response to the revelation of the My Lai massacre of March 1968 in Vietnam by the forces of the Americal Division sickened Burnham not because it took place, but that it had been a minor infraction relative to the assassination policies of the Viet Cong in the south. My Lai, was ‘trivial’, an excuse for ‘an obsessed orgy of guilt’. The incident paled in comparison to ‘the torturing and assassination by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese of an estimated fifty thousand South Vietnamese civilians.’ And what of booby traps and aerial bombing? War was, despite utopian writings and meditations, an obscenity with few limits. ‘The civilized man believes that even in a war a line must be drawn somewhere. Under a global searchlight may not always be the best place for drawing it.’Footnote ⁶⁵

Burnham was certainly open to the necessary calculus of human suffering, a trait not uncommon amongst the neo-conservative following who would happily have entertained a degree of carnage in the fulfilment of security goals. Again, this would be evident in assessing US foreign policy towards China, recognising the Nationalist Kuomintang government in Taiwan at the expense of the People's Republic of China. US policy ‘saved the inhabitants of Taiwan, both native Taiwanese and refugees from the mainland, from conquest by Mao.’ To have not been firm about Taiwan would have resulted in Mao's capture of it by 1950, and, Burnham unduly speculates, the fall of Indonesia to communism. While admitting that Chiang Kai-shek's regime was far from a ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ it had resisted the policies of ‘mass slaughter’, employing only ‘a negligible amount of terror as regimes go nowadays’.Footnote ⁶⁶ A few eggs must be expended for that precious omelette, whether in Taiwan or Indonesia.

Burnham, in truth, never believed in a democracy in any strict sense. Societies will evince a tendency to move towards bureaucratic oligarchies, and that, he argued, would also eventually take place with the proletarian dictatorship. While he disagreed with the premise of historical materialism, he could not abandon his interest in the dialectical triumph of the managing class. His admiration for the students of elite theory was undiminished through his life, despite his warning to fellow communists in 1940 to be wary ‘of anyone or any doctrine that tells you that any man, or group of men, holds a monopoly on truth, or in the ways of getting truth’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Despite this, it was the social theorists who had discovered the inexorable predisposition of societies towards elites, the inevitable outcome of a society's expression of power.

This was made abundantly clear by Burnham in The Machiavellians, titling them as defenders of freedom while ignoring certain distinct authoritarian tendencies. One is being a bit naïve to assume that the distinction between analyst and sympathiser is ironclad. Intellectuals and thinkers do have their part to play in the overthrow of the status quo, notably in critiques and qualified support for authoritarian or totalitarian panaceas. Gaetano Mosca himself admitted as much in a notable speech.Footnote ⁶⁸

For Burnham, all governments were oligarchies in accordance with Michels' iron law of oligarchy. This was a fact he found indisputable, having been established by Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Max Weber, Gugliemo Ferrero and Arnold Toynbee.Footnote ⁶⁹ What mattered was how the oligarchy was constituted. In an address to the Aspen Institute in the early 1950s, he would put it thus: ‘Though government by the people is psychologically and mechanically impossible, government can nevertheless be more and less for the people.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The admiration Burnham was to feel for these thinkers endured. To a Finnish graduate student keen on writing about his work, Burnham would admit to feeling ‘most sympathetic to Mosca – though I greatly admire the writings of all three [Mosca, Pareto and Michels]’.Footnote ⁷¹

It is hard to dismiss such works as purely analytical efforts on Burnham's part, a mere quest to examine objective social laws and identify a ‘science’ of politics.Footnote ⁷² The sense that one need merely be sceptical and clear-sighted about the myths that gird society is not something necessarily felt by the writers Burnham so admired, let alone himself.Footnote ⁷³ Orwell was not the only writer to have identified a distinctly totalitarian residue in his writings. As Edward Crankshaw would write in 1951, Burnham reflected the catastrophic nature of the totalitarian political tradition. Both he, and the Hungarian ex-communist Arthur Koestler, ‘are still seeking short cuts through violence and trying to drag us with them’. What they were attacking was neither communism nor fascism, but life itself.Footnote ⁷⁴ Perhaps a gentle, if somewhat devastating putdown, came from dissident Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Burnham was an important figure in consulting immigration authorities on expediting the procedure of obtaining a US visa for Miłosz, something he only did as a crucial contact within the political warfare unit, the Office of Policy Coordination. From existing records, it seems that Burnham's primary function was one of counter-intelligence and establishing contacts within anti-communist émigré communities. His assistance to Miłosz only came after an interview with the anti-Stalinist writer to dispel suspicions that he might be a Communist agent.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the ensuing correspondence with Burnham, the dissident explained how he could never be an American conservative, despite feeling ‘esteem for your [Burnham's] work’. Conservatism, in truth, became ‘in the Soviet empire aninstrument of the rulers (tradition exploited for the likes of “national communism”’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this observation, Miłosz puts the finger on the modern neo-conservative legacy: essentially revolutionaries of the left who veered towards conservatism while never abandoning the rhetoric of bolshevism.

Suspicious of law

Burnham's critical stance towards international institutions and laws seem strikingly similar to stock neo-conservative appraisals, notably from such sceptics as the Bush administration's ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. ‘White knight containment will merely stand up for the internationalist's version of hearth and home: collective security, peace, legitimate rights and the UN.’Footnote ⁷⁷ While never conceding as much, Burnham acted as a Marxist theoretician sceptical of bourgeois laws, regarding such creations as a manipulation of ideological rules (in this case, liberalism) aimed at masking power conflicts within a superstructure of relations.Footnote ⁷⁸ ‘We hide our verbal fetishism, more adroitly than do primitive cultures, under an elaborate net of abstractions; but we remain charmed by the magic.’ Problems, claimed Burnham, could not be solved by a mere ‘correct definition of terms’. Such an error was evident in ‘overestimating the causal importance of documents – treaties, charters, declarations, constitutions, and so on’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But in so criticising them and lessening the importance of such documents, Burnham comes very close to a position where they can be avoided altogether. Bills of rights are not binding in certain cases; international treaties are voidable at the discretion of signature powers who have less obligations and more interests. ‘Treaties and similar international documents, as well as instrumentalities that may issue out of and implement the treaties, should, I think, be analyzed primarily as records and as symptoms. A treaty does not, to any significant degree, initiate historical changes.’Footnote ⁸⁰

His writings and presentations single out the UN for rough treatment. He remained suspicious of what he termed ‘one-universal-law-for-all-mankind’ and the ‘equality of the races’, mere chimerical devices perfected by propaganda functionaries of Communism.Footnote ⁸¹ On a programme broadcast in San Francisco in March 1960, he tackled the US Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, and ex-ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge. Listeners took note of it, some being rather impressed by his performance. How little Burnham's sparring mates knew, wrote a retired navy admiral Charles M. Cooke, demonstrating much ignorance in promoting freedom and development in the US and globally, ‘including those savages who are emerging, or who need to emerge into a future of world freedom’.Footnote ⁸² Another reacted to a similar display on the programme Keep Posted. ‘You are to be commended for your activity in exposing the true nature of the UN’, wrote an enthusiastic Charles O'Hara of The Keep America Free Council.Footnote ⁸³ The society was itself dedicated to exposing ‘commies and world government addicts’.

Burnham's neo-conservative legacy

The affinity with the revolutionary, if not the authoritarian personality, comes full circle in the ‘Leninist’ tendency of the neo-conservative movement, which involves a habit of picking tips and tactics from the very enemy it hopes to eliminate. Scholars such as Robert Kagan and William Kristol adhere to the idea that the use of force (or at least American power) as a means of promoting democracy is far from utopian, being, in fact ‘eminently realistic’. It was in fact ‘perverse’ to argue otherwise.Footnote ⁸⁴

While there are issues with this characterisation, the refusal to let history stand still in favour of giving the forces of global democracy a push, follows a Leninist, if not a Trotskyite recipe. ‘In the irony of ironies, the Bush administration's identification of regime change as critical to its anti-terrorist policy and integral to its desire for a democratic capitalist world has led to an active “Leninist” foreign policy in place of Fukuyama's passive “Marxist” social teleology.’Footnote ⁸⁵

But it is questionable whether Fukuyama has got his labels right. Might it, in fact, be Trotskyist in manner, and thus indicative of Burnham's thinking, so decidedly against containment and restrictive rules of engagement with the enemy? Some writers have ventured this line of thinking, at least when commenting on the doctrine of permanent revolution.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ian Buruma and Michael Lind have made various observations to that effect: that the doctrine has been taken to apply to the wars in the Middle East in an effort to roll back Islamic ‘fascism’, a term that is itself highly problematic.Footnote ⁸⁷ These have echoes of Burnham's insistence that containment in US foreign policy could only ever be a stopgap approach. The Bush administration could be seen as a manifestation of that tendency.

There is something to even suggest that the person critics have misattributed responsibility to in advocating the telling of lies to the public for the sake of security is not Strauss but the Machiavellian-inspired Burnham. Works such as Drury's suggest links with Irving Kristol, and that such ideas are crucial to the foundation of neo-conservative thinking or policymaking.Footnote ⁸⁸ Kristol himself insisted on the Straussian link, though evidence on the connection is skimpy at best.Footnote ⁸⁹ More convincingly, Burnham may be the inspiration for Orwellian ‘double think’, providing a possible ‘blueprint’ for Kristol and the initial founders. Leaders had to ‘profess, indeed foster, belief in the myths, or the fabric of society crack and they will be overthrown’.Footnote ⁹⁰

The political outlook Burnham endorses here is elaborated in The Machiavellians. In the work, we find political theorists whose work focuses on elite theory, oligarchy the crucial role myths can play. The enduring power of myth is a feature that has Sorelian overtones, and Burnham's endorsement of their necessity is a feature that marks a crucial aspect of the neo-conservative canon.Footnote ⁹¹ Leaders have this appointed function to concoct deceptions, small and grand, to keep the state intact. Strauss, it seems, was misunderstood by both neo-conservatives and critics from the left as the originator of this tendency.Footnote ⁹² It is Burnham, with his insistence on turning the theorists of elitism on oligarchy on their head, that this somewhat sophistic role is attained. Machiavelli, functioning within the real-world limits of politics as the art of the possible and the privileged, is more likely to contribute to freedom than the idealist assertions of democracy which distort the nature of power relations.

The sum effect of Burnham's views and writings is a body of work that acts as a precedent for neo-conservative practice in American political thinking. It paved the way for an apocalyptic appraisal of politics, a tendency heavily criticised by Gray for not merely the cruelties it entailed but its endorsement of unattainable goals. Employing terror and methods of barbarism become matters of necessity for social improvement. Trotskyite's dialectical materialism, however mystical, continued to offer its attractions, even for radical conservatives, into the twenty first century. This was exemplified by the refusal by neo-conservatives within the Bush administration to accept the paucity of evidence on the existence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 invasion. The ideology of democratisation through force had proven the great solvent to reason. Whatever the merits of Burnham's work, they provide a substantive platform from which stock-standard neo-conservativism could derive its key tenets. Traditional views will have to be amended to incorporate Burnham's legacy. Assumed stars of the movement might have to be dimmed.

Importantly, the limits and considerable dangers entailed by this millenarian vision will have to be acknowledged. This is particularly so in light of the refusal by the Obama administration to completely abandon the neo-conservative emphasis on the use of force to impose values and reform societies. American politicians persist in seeing their country as a ‘redeemer nation’. Such statements as Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 2009 suggest a more finessed version of America's use of force when needed. Neo-conservatives such as Kagan argue that Obama has ‘signaled that the world had better get ready for a tougher, less forgiving, more quintessentially American approach from a man who certainly gave the soft touch a try.’Footnote ⁹³ The temptations of liberation over containment, something Burnham was keen to impress on his Cold War audience, remain.