Four Theories in Search of a Reality
James Burnham, Soviet Communism, and the Cold War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9438775 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John F Diggins (University of California, Irvine, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1976 |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 492-508 |
| Publication date | 1976-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Political Science Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1959653 |
| OpenAlex | W2328044988 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
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
Communism · Dialectic · Economic history · Epistemology · Expansionism · Ideology · Left-wing politics · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Law · Philosophy · War, Ethics, and Justification
Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, by Ralf Dahrendorf
Politics and Vision
Mussolini and Fascism
Class and Conflict in an Industrial Society
Containment or Liberation
The Coming Defeat of Communism
Reflections on the Cold War
The Coming Defeat of Communism
Revolt in Athens
My Philosophy and other essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time
The Modern Prince and Other Writings
The managerial revolution
Fate and Will in the Marxian Philosophy of History
The Study of International Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows
| Highly cited | No |
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