Student Of Subversion

As a self-acknowledged disciple of James Burnham, Brian Crozier seeks political and strategic truth .through a search for the “real” as distinct from the “formal” meaning of political utterances. Thus, before we can examine Crozier’s immense contribution to modern strategic thought, we must begin as he would, with his debt to Burnham. Crozier himself explained that debt most thoroughly in a 1976 article in the Lugano Review, later condensed and updated for NR (April 15, 1983).

In this tribute to Burnham and his works, Crozier singles out The Machiavellians (1943) as Burnham’s most fundamental contribution to political thought (far more so than the much better known Managerial Revolution). It was in this book that Burnham made his famous distinction between real and formal meaning. In a bold comparison across six centuries, he drew a parallel between Dante Alighieri’s political treatise, De Monarchia, and the Democratic Party platform of 1932. When Dante called for a unified world state and universal peace, the real issue was whether the Florentine Republic was to be governed by its own citizens or taken over by a reactionary foreign monarch. When the Democrats in 1932 promised a balanced budget, what they really meant was that they saw themselves as the ones who were best fitted to control the federal money supply.

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As a self-acknowledged disciple of James Burnham, Brian Crozier seeks political and strategic truth .through a search for the “real” as distinct from the “formal” meaning of political utterances. Thus, before we can examine Crozier’s immense contribution to modern strategic thought, we must begin as he would, with his debt to Burnham. Crozier himself explained that debt most thoroughly in a 1976 article in the Lugano Review, later condensed and updated for NR (April 15, 1983).

In this tribute to Burnham and his works, Crozier singles out The Machiavellians (1943) as Burnham’s most fundamental contribution to political thought (far more so than the much better known Managerial Revolution). It was in this book that Burnham made his famous distinction between real and formal meaning. In a bold comparison across six centuries, he drew a parallel between Dante Alighieri’s political treatise, De Monarchia, and the Democratic Party platform of 1932. When Dante called for a unified world state and universal peace, the real issue was whether the Florentine Republic was to be governed by its own citizens or taken over by a reactionary foreign monarch. When the Democrats in 1932 promised a balanced budget, what they really meant was that they saw themselves as the ones who were best fitted to control the federal money supply.