Bi-Weekly Discussion - PHIL 401: Burnham & Lasch

Details

This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join.

Click on the link below at the scheduled date/time to log in...

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PHIL 401: JAMES BURNHAM & CHRISTOPHER LASCH - WHY ARE THEIR IDEAS SUDDENLY RELEVANT AGAIN?

INTRODUCTION:

This meetup is titled "PHIL 401" like an upper-level college course because I'm tentatively imagining it as the first in a series of discussions where we delve into some lesser known political thinkers that wouldn't typically be covered in an introduction 101-level course on political philosophy. Specifically, we'll look at older thinkers (mostly dead now) whose ideas have recently been revived and try to figure out why some people feel they're relevant to today's concerns. (I guess we could consider this the second meetup of the PHIL 401 series, with the meetup on Nietzsche back in Oct. 2024 being the first.)

This meetup will focus on James Burnham and Christopher Lasch, two 20th-century thinkers whose ideas have been revived since 2017 or so. This is mostly due to the efforts of an emerging political faction I've previously called the "bipartisan populists", a loose coalition of left-wing populists that have been alienated by the way identity politics has sidelined class politics on the left and right-wing populists who welcomed Trump's break from the GOP's free market orthodoxy but now mostly see him as too petty & unfocused.

This renewed interest in Burnham & Lasch is mostly coming from writers at Julius Krein's journal American Affairs and Sohrab Amari's Compass, several "post-left" writers formerly affiliated with the "Dirtbag Left" (e.g. Angela Nagle, Anna Khachiyan, Malcolm Kyeyune), and even some writers at socialist media outlets like Jacobin and Douglas Lain at Zero Books. What unites them appears to be a shared sense that the mainstream political ideologies in America - namely Reagan/Bush conservatism & Clinton/Obama progressivism - have provoked a number of crises due to a mix of bad economics, bad social policies & bad foreign policy but prevented any major reforms. They also tend to think this political stagnation is perpetuated by the self-serving nature of our society's educated elites, and that's what attracts them to James Burnham & Christopher Lasch.
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Although I don't have the time or space for a detailed biographical sketch of the two men in question, it helps to know a little about them...

A BRIEF BIO OF JAMES BURNHAM:

James Burnham was born to an upper-middle class family in Chicago in 1905 and educated at Princeton and Oxford. He began to teach philosophy at New York University in 1929, and in the early 1930s he was highly active in the organizations of various socialist parties and even became a friend of Leon Trotsky. However, he slowly became disillusioned with socialism due to a mix of internal ideological squabbles within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), conflicts he saw between Marx's dialectical materialism and more modern social scientific theories, and the Nazi-Soviet pact during the early days of WW2. The latter led him to believe the USSR was a new form of imperialistic class society and was thus not worthy of support.

During WW2, he took a leave from NYU to work for the OSS - forerunner of the CIA - in the "Political and Psychological Warfare" division. He also wrote his first major work, The Managerial Society, to explain what he saw as a revolution in economic organization - i.e. "managerialism" which involved large-scale coordination between government bureaucrats & their technocratic counterparts among the managers of major industries, which was replacing laissez-faire capitalism where entepreneurs held sway. He explained how he saw this taking place in both Nazi Germany & Stalinist Russia, as well as in America under FDR's New Deal. He quickly followed with another book, The Machiavellians, in 1943 that touted the importance of Machiavelli and the early 20th-century Italian School's "elite theorists" (i.e. Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels), arguing that only a public schooled in political realism could defend democracy from elite aspirants who might try to subvert it. (However, there was an implicit element of power worship in these works that disturbed George Orwell, who critiqued Burnham's ideas in his essay "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" and went on to incorporate them into the totalitarian dystopia he depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

By 1947, Burnham had become an ardent "cold warrior" and wrote The Struggle for the World (1947) to call for a "World Federation" against communism. In 1955, he helped William F. Buckley Jr. found the conservative magazine National Review which from the start adopted a hawkish foreign policy identical to his own. His 1953 book Containment or Liberation? offered a harsh critique of George Kennan's containment policy during the Korean War, and his Bear and Dragon (1960) expressed skepticism about the reality of the Sino-Soviet split.

With his 1964 book Suicide of the West, Burnham sought to explain the contraction of Western powers in the aftermath of WW2, which saw the end of the European colonial empires and the spread of Communism. He attributed this decline to various geopolitical factors, among them the ideology of liberalism which did not initiate the decline but “permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution." He argued that liberalism is rooted in the same sort of utopian thinking as Marxism, and this leads its propnents to expect that every social ill can be cured by then application of reason and causes a feeling of guilt when this proves to be untrue. This phenomenon of liberal guilt sometimes evolves into “a generalized hatred of Western civilization and of his own country as part of the West.”

Despite his strident rhetoric, Burnham's pragmatism led him to often support more moderate Republican candidates; for example, he opposed Barry Goldwater in favor of Nelson Rockefeller during the 1964 GOP primary. His involvement in politics dwindled after he suffered a stroke in 1978, but he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan in 1983 before his death from cancer in 1987.

A BRIEF BIO OF CHRISTOPHER LASCH:

Like Burnham, Christopher Lasch moved from the political left to the right over his lifetime, but unlike Burnham he was never involved in conservative politics. Lasch was born in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska to a secular, highly political family rooted in the left. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and his doctorate from Columbia. He taught history at the University of Iowa and Northwestern in the 1960s and at the time identified as a socialist interested in the Frankfurt School's mix of Marxism and psychoanalysis.

During this time he wrote several books, most notably The New Radicalism in America (1965) which argued that the American socialist movement that had thrived in the early 20th century was gradually become socially untenable as members of "the Left" abandoned their commitments to economic justice to assume professionalized roles and commoditized lifestyles. He offered a different critique in The Agony of the American Left (1969), arguing that the young activists of the New Left had been led astray by fascination with communist revolutions in the Third World which weren't going to happen in the U.S., and that therefore radical change could only come about through reforms popularized by a socialist party supported by public intellectuals who could convince the public that "life under socialism would be preferable to life under corporate capitalism, and thus in the long run... fashion a new political majority."

In 1970, Lasch moved again to teach at the University of Rochester, and his writing began to show further disenchantment with the New Left. He began to formulate what would become his signature style of social critique: a synthesis of Freudian psychology and a strand of socially conservative thinking that remained deeply suspicious of capitalism and its effects on traditional institutions. His most famous work, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), related the hegemony of modern-day capitalism to an encroachment of a "therapeutic" mindset into social and family life. He followed up with The Minimal Self (1984) which argued that widespread fear of the escalating arms race, as well as crime & economic decline, had led people to retreat from social commitments and focus on a personal concerns as a means for psychic survival.

In The True and Only Heaven (1991), Lasch criticized America's faith in progress and touted an alternative path suggested by populists & producerists. And in his last months, as he was dying of cancer, he worked closely with his daughter Elisabeth to complete his final work which excoriated "the new meritocratic class, a group that had achieved success through the upward-mobility of education and career and that increasingly came to be defined by rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, a thin sense of obligation, and diminishing reservoirs of patriotism". He died in 1994 and The Revolt of the Elites was published the following year to critical acclaim.

RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:

Back in February, we discussed various theories of "Elites & Counter-Elites" which have become prominent recently, as pundits have tried to explain the rightward shift of the "new media elite" and "tech counter-elite" around the 2024 election. In the 1st section, we briefly discussed Pareto's "circulation of elites" theory and the distinction he made between "lions" and "foxes" and how this is often simplified & misinterpreted today as conservatives vs progressives. That's relevant to this meetup since Pareto's ideas figure prominently in one of the chapters of Burnham's book "The Machiavellians." I noted in the 2nd section of the "Elites & Counter-Elites" meetup that Burnham's book "The Managerial Revolution" was a major inspiration for many recent right-wing & left-wing critiques of the so-called "professional managerial class" (PMC). These tend to explain "wokeness" (social justice activism) as a self-serving ideology for technocrats.

In May 2022, we had a discussion entitled "Is the Managerial Class Hurting America?" where we discussed how some pundits like Joel Kotkin & Michael Lind had recently revived James Burnham's concept of the "managerial revolution" and Christopher Lasch's "revolt of the elites" and reworked them into a populist critique of the "professional managerial class" (PMC) that runs many of our major corporations, nonprofits & NGOs. We noted there's some overlap with more recent critiques of the self-serving biases of the top 10% of earners in Richard Reeves' book "Dream Hoarders" (2017) and Matthew Stewart's book "The 9.9%" (2021).

Back in Oct. 2023, we had a meetup entitled "(Why) Is Our Civic Virtue Declining?" and in the 3rd section we addressed the debate over whether Millennials & Gen-Z are more selfish & immature than previous generations. We questioned whether there has really been a recent towards selfishness, or whether this is just a common phase in the youth of every modern generation during which their behavior is somewhat self-indulgent because they're not yet tied down by the responsibilities of work & family.

The Skeptics hosted a meetup in Feb. 2023 entitled "Are Generational Theories Bunk?" In the 3rd & 4th sections, we looked at popular conceptions of Millennials as "entitled" and "narcissistic" and how this is similar to how the Baby Boomers were seen by their elders back in the 1960s-70s. This relates to similar concerns Lasch raised almost 50 years ago about the Baby Boomers in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, as well as a few years earlier by Tom Wolfe in his famous 1976 essay "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening".

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of James Burnham & Christopher Lasch's major works and the ideas contained therein. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 60 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I've listed some questions under each section to stimulate discussion. We'll do our best to address most of them, as well as whatever other questions our members raise. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. BURNHAM'S "THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION: WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD" (1941) & "THE MACHIAVELLIANS: DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM" (1943):

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1.) Settler's Lament, "James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution: A Review" (video - 15:04 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq0yKX-PyiA

Michael Lind, "The Importance of James Burnham: What a newly rediscovered thinker got right and wrong
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/burnham-michael-lind
Richard Hanania, "James Burnham Got Almost Everything Wrong: The Managerial Revolution did a terrible job of forecasting the future"
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/james-burnham-got-almost-everything
Zack Beauchamp, "The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tilt: The long shadow of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution."
https://www.vox.com/23505311/elon-musk-twitter-managerial-woke-james-burnham
Malcolm Kyeyune, "Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism: Well-educated progressives wield institutional power to impose a new political and social order"
https://www.city-journal.org/article/wokeness-the-highest-stage-of-managerialism
Charles Haywood, "Book Review: The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (James Burnham)"
https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/08/14/the-machiavellians-defenders-of-freedom-james-burnham/
Andrew Gibson, "James Burnham’s Machiavellians"
https://tocqueville21.com/le-club/james-burnhams-machiavellians/

II. BURNHAM'S "SUICIDE OF THE WEST: AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING & DESTINY OF LIBERALISM" (1964):

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2.) Tom Woods w/ Dan McCarthy, "Suicide of the West: Two Views" (video - 43:42 min, start at 0:29 & listen to 14:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnzRN6UAdZQ&t=29s

Francis Sempa, "If Destruction Be Our Lot: Francis Sempa reassesses James Burnham's 'Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism'."
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/if-destruction-be-our-lot/
Daniel McCarthy, "Suicide of the West: James Burnham vs. Jonah Goldberg"
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/10/suicide-of-the-west-james-burnham-jonah-goldberg-daniel-mccarthy.html
Harley Price, "The Great Conservative Death Wish"
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/the-great-conservative-death-wish/
Daniel J. Mahoney, "The Crisis of the West Revisited: Self-Flagellation and the Great Liberal Death Wish"
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-crisis-of-the-west-revisited-self-flagellation-and-the-great-liberal-death-wish/
Michael Williams & Rita Abrahamsen, "How Donald Trump’s assault on universities echoes earlier American conservative ideas"
https://theconversation.com/how-donald-trumps-assault-on-universities-echoes-earlier-american-conservative-ideas-255470

III. LASCH'S "THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM: AMERICAN LIFE IN AN AGE OF DIMINISHING EXPECTATIONS" (1979) & "THE MINIMAL SELF: PSYCHIC SURVIVAL IN TROUBLED TIMES" (1984):

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3.) Douglas Lain, "Christopher Lasch and the Capitalist Realism of the Progressives" (video - 11:14 min, start at 1:21)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAe9yQLNos&t=1m21s

Jack Trotter, "Our Culture of Narcissism"
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/our-culture-of-narcissism/
Nick Haslam, "In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch excoriated his self-absorbed society – but the book’s legacy is questionable"
https://theconversation.com/in-the-culture-of-narcissism-christopher-lasch-excoriated-his-self-absorbed-society-but-the-books-legacy-is-questionable-216354
Ashley Colby, "The end of the culture of narcissism: The energy wars have exposed a disturbing fantasy"
https://archive.ph/hzf8P
Geoff Shullenberger, "The ghost who haunts the MAGA revolt Christopher Lasch's forgotten book ['The Minimal Self'] foresaw America's malaise"
https://archive.ph/XEzjR

IV. LASCH'S "THE REVOLT OF THE ELITES AND THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY" (1995):

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4.) Charles Haywood, "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy" (video - 19:04 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujs0munzCeI

Rod Dreher, "Democracy Betrayed: Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites at 25"
https://lawliberty.org/forum/democracy-betrayed-laschs-revolt-of-the-elites-at-25/
Nick Burns, "A Narcissism of Small Differences"
https://lawliberty.org/forum/a-narcissism-of-small-differences/
Lee Siegel, "Twilight of the American elite: The revival of liberalism cannot be conducted on Trumpian terms."
https://archive.ph/4cBbh
Alexander Nazaryan, "30 Years Ago, This Book Saw the Coming Backlash Against Elites: Christopher Lasch’s 'The Revolt of the Elites' anticipated the resentments of ordinary Americans that have led inexorably to Trumpism."
https://archive.ph/iserZ

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Bi-Weekly Discussion - PHIL 401: Burnham & Lasch