Books, Arts & Manners

Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham, by Samuel T. Francis University Press of America, 141 pp., $19.50; paper, $8.50 In 1969 a friend shoved his copy of Suicide of the West into my hands. “Read this,” he said. “It explains everything that’s happened in the last five years.”

And everything since. In 1964, when the book appeared, liberalism, as Samuel T. Francis remarks, was enjoying “its most popular, dynamic, and powerful moment.” So much so that the book was passed over in contemptuous silence by the great liberal organs. The title sounded shrill, the thesis seemed unduly gloomy, and liberals could almost be excused for ignoring James Burnham’s masterpiece. After the sensation of his first book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham became less and less fashionable, and more and more profound. By 1964 the political culture had gone one way and he had gone the other.

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Joseph Sobran

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Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham, by Samuel T. Francis University Press of America, 141 pp., $19.50; paper, $8.50 In 1969 a friend shoved his copy of Suicide of the West into my hands. “Read this,” he said. “It explains everything that’s happened in the last five years.”

And everything since. In 1964, when the book appeared, liberalism, as Samuel T. Francis remarks, was enjoying “its most popular, dynamic, and powerful moment.” So much so that the book was passed over in contemptuous silence by the great liberal organs. The title sounded shrill, the thesis seemed unduly gloomy, and liberals could almost be excused for ignoring James Burnham’s masterpiece. After the sensation of his first book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham became less and less fashionable, and more and more profound. By 1964 the political culture had gone one way and he had gone the other.