Beware of the GeeseMy short overview of the life and career of James Burnham is now up at AFF Brainwash. We are in a moment when the conservative movement is humiliated by the the achievements wrung from their electoral success. And so there is an opportunity to go back and look at our movement and recover any wisdom we might find in it. James Burnham is just one of the major thinkers the conservative movement left behind. Lucky for him, he does not have a loud band of apostate disciples ruining his name, as we see with Burke, Kirk and Weaver. The value of Burnham's thought for our time is in his realization that power is more than juridical formal power. Conservatives do not face just electoral opponents but a cultural and economic whirlwind that threatens the entire inheritance of the West. Burnham can tell us how we got here and can point a way out.  He may be a point of discussion between paleo and neo conservatives. He is held in high esteem by such disparate figures as Samuel Francis and and Roger Kimball.

Burnham provided a conceptual framework for understanding the dominant economic, cultural and political trends of his century and single-handedly imported a tradition of political thought absent in the English speaking world. He spent over twenty years as Senior Editor and columnist on foreign affairs for National Review. But despite his accomplishments and the tendency of conservatives to enshrine their heroes in the movement Parthenon, Burnham is hardly discussed. Daniel Kelly’s 2002 biography James Burnham and the Struggle for the World did not portend a revival in Burnham’s thought, and Burnham’s major works have not been reprinted in decades. He is the lost man of the modern right.