One evening in February 1963, inside Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University, the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism was called to order. Authors under discussion included John Dewey, Karl Marx, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Michael Oakeshott. The instructor was James Burnham, a senior editor of National Review. His topic: “Liberalism as the Ideology of Western Suicide.”
The seminar was not recorded. But Burnham turned the material into Suicide of the West, published the following year and now reissued by Encounter Books in association with the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. Lengthy and sometimes dated, Burnham’s treatise is nonetheless worth revisiting, not only for its cutting analysis, but also because it introduces the reader to the cold and breathtaking precision of its author’s intellect. For the stoic, detached, empirical, hard-boiled, penetrating, realist mind of James Burnham is something to behold, to admire, to emulate.
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