II. Activist, Strategist

Too often, especially in the nuclear age, strategy is conceived in military terms. It was James Burnham’s distinctive contribution to the art of strategic analysis to have understood that the military side is not the only, or necessarily the most important, side of Soviet strategy; and to have been first to have done so in the early years of that cold war which is still with us, despite all revisionist attempts to bury it as past history.

My own conceptual debt to James Burnham began many years before I had the honor and pleasure of meeting him in the flesh. As Samuel T. Francis has also noted (in Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham, University Press of America, 1984), the most important of Burnham’s works is The Machiavellians (1943). It is the key to everything he wrote subsequently: the Burnham equivalent of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode.

BC

About the Author

Brian Crozier

Too often, especially in the nuclear age, strategy is conceived in military terms. It was James Burnham’s distinctive contribution to the art of strategic analysis to have understood that the military side is not the only, or necessarily the most important, side of Soviet strategy; and to have been first to have done so in the early years of that cold war which is still with us, despite all revisionist attempts to bury it as past history.

My own conceptual debt to James Burnham began many years before I had the honor and pleasure of meeting him in the flesh. As Samuel T. Francis has also noted (in Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham, University Press of America, 1984), the most important of Burnham’s works is The Machiavellians (1943). It is the key to everything he wrote subsequently: the Burnham equivalent of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode.