James Burnham / 1905–1987 / Chicago, Illinois, USA / Political Scientist
Democracy
Democracy is not a good in itself; it is a political technique, a means to an end.
The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941).
A genuinely democratic political system requires a democratic culture, and the development of such a culture is a slow and difficult process.
The Struggle for the World (1947).
Geopolitics
In the realm of geopolitics, nations act in their own self-interest, and power is the ultimate currency.
Source unknown.
Ideology
Political ideologies often serve as rationalizations for the pursuit of power.
Source unknown.
Intellectuals
Intellectuals like to imagine themselves as the clerks of society, but they are more often its critics, parasites, and saboteurs.
The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941).
The intellectuals who complain that the system does not live up to its principles are, in fact, complaining that it does not live up to their misconceptions and fantasies.
Source unknown.
Liberalism
Liberalism can do nothing to cleanse or halt this Augean wave; can only, in fact, smooth its advance. The secular relativism and permissiveness to which liberalism is committed provides no metaphysical foothold on which a stand might be taken.
“Notes on Authority, Morality, Power,” National Review, December 1, 1970.
The Managerial Revolution
Private-capitalist ownership of the economy meant a dispersion of economic power and a partial separation between economic and other social forces in a manner that prevented the concentration of an overwhelming single social force. Today the advance of the managerial revolution is everywhere concentrating economic power in the state apparatus, where it tends to unite with control over the other great social forces—the army, education, labor, law, the political bureaucracy, art, and science even. This development, too, tends to destroy the basis for those social oppositions that keep freedom alive.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
Morality
The line between good and evil is not a fixed, immoveable barrier between the two, but a shifting one.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
Power
In the real world, power is always on the side of the strongest.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
The struggle for power and influence is the driving force behind political dynamics.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the limitless human appetite for power.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
For a nation, the supreme moral task and responsibility is to make the right use of power.
“Ideology and Common Sense,” National Review, October 8, 1960.
The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power. . . . The primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. . . . No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. . . . Only power restrains power. . . . When all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).
The Ruling Class
From the point of view of the theory of the ruling class, a society is the society of its ruling class. A nation’s strength or weakness, its culture, its powers of endurance, its prosperity, its decadence, depend in the first instance upon the nature of its ruling class. More particularly, the way in which to study a nation, to understand it, to predict what will happen to it, requires first of all and primarily an analysis of the ruling class. Political history and political science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes, their origin, development, composition, structure, and changes.
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943).