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Liberalism is not equipped to meet and overcome the actual challenges confronting Western civilization in our time. Liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society. The guilt that is always part of the liberal syndrome swells painfully when liberals gain power and find that the world's sorrows show no tendency to vanish at their sovereign touch.
Optimally, this total democracy will be world-total. Egalitarianism is key—no qualitative differences can be recognized among people that suggest one person is more fit to govern or direct society than another. Similarly, national differences are pernicious, and patriotism is likewise pernicious, for it undercuts the aspiration to a universal good society, and of course all national, ethnic and racial groups are equal in their ability to reach that good society.
Religion must be a purely private matter; the good society is totally secular, for religion is bound to tradition, irrationality and a jaundiced view of human nature, the opposite of liberal premises. Violence, because it is irrational, is to be avoided on every level.
The author then pivots to the philosophical consequences of this set of beliefs, defining them with precision as an ideology. He gives examples, such as urban renewal projects that merely cause more problems than they fix, but which are nonetheless held up as successes. But of course Burnham was wrong, and he himself was guilty of ideological thinking. As population has exploded in the past fifty years, poor people the world over not only eat better, but have vastly more wealth, due to private enterprise and effort, and the only hungry people are those made hungry by bad politics or bad cultures.
Sure, liberalism had nothing to do with this—it was private enterprise and hard work, and liberal doctrine provided nothing except support for post-colonial tinpot dictators who starved their people while mouthing liberal platitudes. What is there to discuss? His ideology is proof against the shock of any seemingly conflicting facts which you might bring forward.
He will either reinterpret those facts so that they become consistent with his ideology, or deny them. There are no facts that could convince an intransigent John Bircher that there are no communists in the upper echelons of the American government. A debate between Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Buckley, Jr. Next, Burnham detours into reinforcing his analysis, by laying out explicit statements to which liberals as a whole adhere, set alongside possible alternative views.
These statements are mostly a reformulation of the thirty-nine earlier statements Burnham used to flesh out what liberals really believe. Burnham concludes, aiming at what he believes to be the heart of the matter, channeling St.
There is nothing negative in how Burnham frames his analysis, other than his belief that liberals are wrong in all their core premises, and therefore in their beliefs. He is specifically not concerned with refuting the liberal world view, which he anyway regards as a vain project like any argument with an ideologue, explicitly analogous to arguing with a Communist or a segregationist. View 2 comments.
I have read Burnham before, decades ago, but don't recall the circumstances. I recently thought to reread him, and he remains as trenchant as ever. Some of the things that you might think would date the book like the collapse of Soviet communism didn't have that effect at all. If book reviews like this can have spoilers, here it is. Liberalism should be defined as the soothing philosophy that rationalizes and explains our decline as a civilization, seeking to prepare us for the inevitable.
In I have read Burnham before, decades ago, but don't recall the circumstances. In doing so, liberalism becomes a central part of the problem -- a doctor with a death wish and no working definition of health. Mar 08, Thomas Lange rated it really liked it.
This is a clear analysis of modern western political ideology; what we in Europe not so much call Liberalism, as he does, but rather Social Democracy or Progressivism. The word itself is a great example of appropriation of the meaning of a word that originally stood for something much different.
After the first world war this political doctrine began its predominance within political institutions of the western world. This is the point in time Burnham marked when Western Civilization began its d This is a clear analysis of modern western political ideology; what we in Europe not so much call Liberalism, as he does, but rather Social Democracy or Progressivism. This is the point in time Burnham marked when Western Civilization began its decline.
The doctrine developed by altering certain key propositions of classical liberal thought, placing more emphasis on the values of distributive justice and peace, compared to the more self-sufficient, sovereign classical liberal tradition that is placing comparatively more weight on freedom and liberty.
Following Burnham's analysis, it was surprising to me that back in the 60s it was possible to foresee so lucidly many of the problems that Western Civilization is running into right now.
I felt this is a fair and objective book in trying to ascribe valid premises when characterizing the base line of this political ideology. As a libertarian tending person I was missing a more pronounced comparison of Liberalism vs Libertarianism which are inverse in many respects.
Burnham sticks almost always to a conservative counter point when looking for a theoretical opposite of the ideas that are put forward by Liberalism. I was often reminded at Thomas Sowell's - A Conflict of Visions, where Sowell tries to reveal the bloodlines of thought of modern liberalism and conservatism that are a result of so different visions of the human condition. View all 3 comments.
This book came up as a offered no from my ebook library and I was confused by the title. The author has been gone for awhile but was a supporter of Joe McCarthy and with William Buckley, created the right wing National Review magazine. Burnam is concerned about liberalism.
The Liberal party is nonexistent. Burnam blames the left for Joe McCarthy, saying they needed a boogey man and one the fun was over, they cast him aside. While it was written a few decades ago, these beliefs are still common today.
Burnam also talks about the Liberals as having the wrong enemy. It was good for me to read this because it was well written and clear and allowed me to see what the Right really thinks and wants. I knew before but this is very articulate. Jun 26, Tom Stamper rated it it was amazing Shelves: politics.
When reading about William F. Buckley and the early days of National Review James Burnham is usually front and center. His practicality about politics was very unique at the magazine. A common story is his support for Nelson Rockefeller in when his colleagues were behind Barry Goldwater. He agreed with Goldwater on nearly everything, but felt that Rockefeller actually had a chance of winning and the election was too important to fall in love with a pipe dream.
Here Burnham explains why American liberalism has no answers for communism. He takes particular issue with the policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union. He sees it not as a solution, but a way to ignore issues that won't go away. Starting with the foolish agreements at Yalta and subsequent acquiescence at the Suez Canal and Cuba, Burnham wonders why we are so ready to surrender.
More specifically he wonders why we are committing slow suicide rather than confront the world in front of us. The cold war is over but the same inaction is with us. Some in the west hope that our enemies will self-destruct while oters are sympathetic with the anti western criticism and feel that we have it coming.
Together they create a pretty big coalition of stasis. With Iran on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon we are likely heading back into familiar disagreements. In that way Burnham's book is timeless. It was published when I was still in high school; I finally read it this week.
It is unusual for a book written nearly 60 years ago to still be in print; it is still in print, apparently something of a classic. But looking at it this way reverses the proper thinking order. If the former, then we are left without a standard by which to judge whether any given belief is liberal. Burnham gets away with it because nearly everyone agrees that the nineteen beliefs are liberal beliefs.
But liberals do not seem to accuse one another of this type of bias, because their perspective is that they are just engaging with common sense; and that they are therefore not looking at everything through an ideological lens!
In both cases, both then and now, the decline tracks closely with ideas coming out of academia. It does not appear that he saw the connection between that idea and the outcome which it would wreak. He could not have known this was a central element of a theory that would be fully unleashed on us a generation later.
During my own lifetime, I have been witness to both political parties picking up the oars to both row in the same direction, albeit at different speeds.
But the idea that someone would propose going in the other direction has been entirely abandoned. The sight of anyone seriously advocating for freedom in the face of ever-expanding coercive regulation is today but a figment of the imagination.
Surely in the survey of liberal beliefs there would be some acknowledgment of how rights were acknowledged and protected before consensus shifted to denigrate the value which protecting rights had played over the years.
His answer is two fold: Ignorance and Bad Social Institutions. What the culture has lost sight of is the vision to change a rights-violating institution into a non-rights-violating institution. And perhaps his biggest miscalculation of all was to presume that the Right would in any way resist the juggernaut of vicious, ever-expanding nationalism.
I see where James Burnham died in , at which point I had his book in my possession for 15 years, still unread. Nov 05, Otto Lehto rated it liked it. Unlike his excellent The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom , which has stood the time, Suicide of the West is clearly a product of its time and more of a mixed bag. I can see why many critics of contemporary progressive politics "liberalism" in the American sense are enthralled by Burnham's seemingly prophetic diagnosis of establishment liberalism in the 21st century, despite the fact that it contains obvious flaws, starting from the loose definition of liberalism.
I will let that slide, si Unlike his excellent The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom , which has stood the time, Suicide of the West is clearly a product of its time and more of a mixed bag. I will let that slide, since it corresponds to the accepted loose definition of the term in American discourse. Many see in Burnham someone who successfully stepped outside the establishment discourse what some neo-reactionaries today would call "The Cathedral" , observed its growth, and jotted down its peculiar features.
And indeed, Burnham diagnosed several of the key features of liberalism and forecast the increasingly hegemonizing role of liberal discourse in media and the schools. In so doing, however, he committed several fallacies and dubious assumptions that drag the book down. The first problem with the book is the pessimistic tone. Burnham measures the Western civilization's success in purely geographical terms, as the extent of the world map under its control or influence.
This is a very simplistic viewpoint indeed. A commercial society can be culturally and economically vibrant and dominant without significant colonial or military successes. And even in his own terms, since he views the world through the lens of 19th century colonial geopolitics, Burnham vastly underrates the massive geopolitical influence of the West in the post-WW2 era.
In this regard, Burnham, as a pessimistic hawk, overstated the dominance of the Soviet Union. And since the whole book is about the "suicide of the west," the central thesis becomes weak. The second problem is the book's explicit racism. And I don't mean racism in the diluted sense where everything to the right to Hillary Clinton is racist.
I mean racism in the old-fashioned sense of believing in the importance of the differing genetic and cultural abilities of different races. For sure, Burnham is no foaming-at-the-mouth redneck, but he holds some nostalgia for the times of Cecil Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling. Of course, some people on the right are trying to resuscitate this colonial and racist legacy, and for them Burnham provides ample ammunition. And to the extent that uncontrollable immigration flows destabilize Western societies, they have a point that cosmopolitanism has its downside.
But Burnham's analysis, here, overstates the case. The third and related problem is Burnham's steep-leaning ideological bent. It leads to a failure to apply balanced and symmetrical reasoning to the ideological landscape.
In other words, although Burnham accurately describes several of the peculiar details of the progressive liberal establishment and the trans-Atlantic alliance that reflects its values, he fails to identify the corollary details of the distinct countervailing groups who oppose it - e. For him, "non-liberalism" is a catch-all term for all of these groups, and the book fails to analyse or even acknowledge the distinct histories, ideologies, and ethical world views of these groups.
He claims, counterfactually, that only "liberalism" is a distinct all-encompassing world view, whereas viewpoints that oppose it are supposedly either common sensical, realistic, or skeptical towards big ideologies. This is patently false, as many people hold strong moral and political views with long historical pedigrees, whether stemming from the Bible or other cultural traditions.
The choice, therefore, is often between one totalizing Weltanschauung and another. Liberalism, in this sense, is hardly the Unicorn that he paints it to be. It is simply the dominant ideology of the West. Relatedly, in his skepticism towards the liberal principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press he veers too far towards authoritarianism, which defeats the very purpose of his charge "stifling" liberal discourse, and undermines the credibility of his broader political challenge to liberalism.
However, let me end on an uplifting note. Burnham's analysis, despite the aforementioned problems, can be very illuminating for somebody who is steep in Western establishment liberal discourse. Indeed, the capacity to step outside of the parameters of acceptable opinion is an endangered species in today's society.
A free society requires a healthy mix of different contending ideological dispositions, and to the extent that "liberalism" in the vague American sense, not in the principled philosophical sense leads to a hegemonic discourse of vapid platitudes, it should be questioned, challenged, and - if need be - resisted with the power of ideological critique.
Although Burnham's book lacks the logical rigour or philosophical depth of a true classic, and although it is blind to its own biases and flaws, it is a worthy participant in the ongoing Kulturkampf whose permanent ramifications - political orders conjured - will outlive its temporary quakes. Nov 09, Daniel Vaughan rated it it was ok. Burnham makes good points, but this book suffers from spending its entire time talking about how to define liberalism, who believes in liberalism, and why.
To understand his argument on why liberalism leads to suicide, read the first and last chapters. You can hear pieces of his argument in what Fukuyama would eventually argue in full. Mar 28, Joseph Hirsch rated it really liked it. I'd heard James Burnham referenced quite a bit in conservative circles, but had, for one reason or another mostly time constraints had to defer getting to him. The title was obviously an influence on later polemics.
And while there's some ideological overlap with Pat Buchanan and James Burnham, there are some la I'd heard James Burnham referenced quite a bit in conservative circles, but had, for one reason or another mostly time constraints had to defer getting to him. And while there's some ideological overlap with Pat Buchanan and James Burnham, there are some large distinctions, i. Burnham had been gone from National Review for nearly two decades when Jonah Goldberg became a contributing editor at the magazine in and thereafter the editor of its fledgling website, National Review Online.
Goldberg personifies the liberal conservatism, with a dash or more of neoconservatism, that prevailed at National Review and AEI over the past two decades. He is easily the most popular spokesman for this point of view—no ready rival comes to mind. John Locke is a larger presence than Edmund Burke in Mr. Even a liberal, or a conservative more liberal than Burke—who was hardly a reactionary himself—must appreciate this. Democracy is unnatural.
Human rights are unnatural. Goldberg writes. Throughout Suicide , Mr. Goldberg also draws upon the thought, and citations, of Deirdre McCloskey, author of a trilogy of studies on commercial civilization and its underpinnings: The Bourgeois Virtues , Bourgeois Dignity , and Bourgeois Equality. Largely absent from Mr.
The significance of this misunderstanding is that it leads Mr. Goldberg to be more optimistic than is warranted. For Burnham, modern, progressive liberalism was an excuse for Western weakness, a pretext for declaring that defeats were really victories, as bourgeois capitalist civilization lost ground to managerial organization the Communist bloc, for example and self-liquidated when challenged by more confident non-European cultures.
Burnham was against fatalism, too, but he understood that liberalism was perhaps the most virulent form of fatalism. In The Managerial Revolution , Burnham pointed to the New Deal, fascism, and Communism as early forms of the new managerial control that was replacing capitalism. The much cheerier thinking behind Mr. To preserve the unnatural freedom and prosperity that are our patrimony, it is necessary, Mr. Failure to do so is a choice, and so the life or death of the modern West is a matter of choice: its decline, natural in one sense, is ultimately the result of our own decisions, and thus a suicide.
If Christianity has at times succeeded in squaring that circle, it is because Christianity is simultaneously both worldly and otherworldly, capable of affirming universalism and tribalism at the same time. The family and political community, for example, have their particular rights alongside the universal spiritual justice of God.
Liberalism, by contrast, is a purely worldly thing; its justice is not a matter of the eternal soul but of earthly outcomes. Both works by Burnham owe an acknowledged debt to Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and social philosopher whose masterwork is translated into English as The Mind and Society. What Mr. Under a misleading guise of consistency and logic, they serve to justify and explain—to the individual himself, as well as to others—feelings and actions that arise from the residues.
Chamber of Commerce. Also noteworthy is that in listing various nonliberals in academia, Burnham includes classical liberals such as Milton Friedman and F. Suicide of the West includes some discussion of how liberalism has changed over time, though Burnham leaves open the question of just how closely classical liberalism may be related to its modern variety. Burnham places great emphasis on liberal attitudes toward racial equality and the injustice of colonialism, for example. He is surely correct to highlight the importance of these beliefs for liberals.
But he creates the impression, only partly dispelled by modest disclaimers, that anyone who would not defend Southern racial segregation was likely a liberal. Burnham could claim not to be making value judgments and not to be implying that whatever is not liberal such as segregation is therefore good. But the presentation of race and related questions in Suicide of the West is blundering, to say the least. They prompt the reader to consider how they could be corrected.
Intractable political problems may occasionally have psychological remedies—that is, remedies in good character and a balanced outlook on life. What drives the West to suicide, for Burnham, is not liberalism or its putative logic but rather the way in which our civilization has come to value certain types of mind over others—foxes over lions—in a proportion that leaves the West excessively reliant on cleverness or fraud and incapable of effectively wielding force or the threat thereof.
In a passage that perfectly anticipates the way much of U. It is not that liberals, when they enter the governing class.. But because of their ideology they are not reconciled intellectually and morally to force.
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