READ biography,” advised Disraeli, “for that is life without theory.” What are we to make, then, of the life of a theorist? For as the title of this biography hints, the life of James Burnham is significant principally because he devised a series of influential theories about the struggle between Western liberty and its enemies foreign and domestic. Those theories influenced great historical figures like de Gaulle and Trotsky and affected the course of U.S. and Western policy, but the man who framed them lived a relatively quiet life outside the limelight. If he had not turned his remarkably lucid and ruthless mind to devising them, he would probably have passed an agreeably uneventful life as a philosopher specializing in aesthetics. Instead, as perhaps the single most important political analyst of the 20th century, he helped to change the world.
What emerges from Daniel Kelly’s meticulous research is that Burnham’s thought was driven almost entirely by public events. It was remarkably detached both from his class status as a comfortable bourgeois and from the events of his contented private life. In his days as a Trotskyist activist, for instance, Burnham would be called away from a black-tie dinner party to correct the proofs of a revolutionary newspaper without apparently feeling the slightest incongruity. Some of the comrades (notably Irving Howe) detested his WASPish social assurance, but he seems to have been entirely oblivious to their resentment. His self-contained personality, reserved and at times even chilly, depended little on the approval of others and enabled him to strike out repeatedly in bold new intellectual directions on the basis of his own judgment.
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