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Four Theories in Search of a Reality: James Burnham, Soviet Communism, and the Cold War

Right-wing and Left-wing attitudes toward the cold war are strikingly similar because in some cases the anti-communist is himself an ex-communist. This is particularly true of James Burnham, a former disciple of Leon Trotsky and presently the diplomatic columnist of William F. Buckley's National Review. Burnham's writings have had profound influence in America, especially at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War when officials in Washington saw in his books both an answer to “containment” and the first theoretical formulation of the new policy of “liberation-rollback.” Burnham's own views on the cold war, however, have undergone a number of significant changes and revisions. At different times in his career he has offered four different and often contradictory interpretations of communism: (a) first, the Soviet Union as a “managerial” state that marks the end of Trotsky's dream of “permanent revolution”; (b) next, communism as the latest expression of Machiavellianism that augers the eclipse of liberal democracy and seemingly the inevitability of Stalin; (c) then, during the early cold war period, managerialism and Machiavellianism are dropped and Soviet behavior is now attributed to a Marxist Weltanschauung that replaces power politics with ideological determinism; (d) finally, Burnham criticizes Kennan, Morgenthau, and Lippmann for failing to adopt a “dialectical” viewpoint in order to understand the “dual” nature of the Soviet Union-an ironic reinvocation of Trotsky's earlier message to the Old Left. The article attempts a critical analysis both of Burnham's shifting perspectives and of the ethical dilemmas in his political thought. It may also be read as a chapter in the intellectual history of the cold war.