It's Time to Undo James Burnham's Propaganda about Niccolo Machiavelli

for altermix, commenter and student of Machiavelli

Almost everyone who has some knowledge about Niccolo Machiavelli’s writings have never read his infamous book “The Prince” let alone “The Discourses”, the History of the Republic of Florence, The Art of War, or his many plays, poems, songs, and poetic sermons (yes, sermons).  Instead, they have mainly read the distorted and abominated versions of his writings called “Machiavellianism” through scads of American novels and self-help books of pop culture (such as Machiavellians (Gangsters of New York) by Bella di Corte – 3,542 Amazon book reviews and Patrick Boucheron, What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness, 150 reviews).  The main sources of reading about Machiavelli’s writings by the intellectual class are from war hawk Leo Strauss and his propaganda book “Thoughts on Machiavelli” (see my Amazon review), and James Burnham’s interpretation of the book reviewed here, “The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom” (1943), 581 Amazon reviews).

Burnham was a leader in the Communist Party USA prior to his defection and re-employment as editor of the conservative National Review magazine. He previously worked for the forerunner agency of the CIA.  Burnham’s deviousness and work for the CIA epitomizes the term “Machiavellian” – scheming and unscrupulous in politics.

Firstly, Burhnam asserted Machiavelli never “divorced politics from ethics”. What Machiavelli wrote was that “the ends can justify the means” but ONLY in the event of an emergency threatening the existence of the Republic of the city-state of Florence, such as a non-contrived war, insurrection, corruption, or weaponized invasion of migrants such as the Barbarians and the Vandals.  Put differently, a very few ends excuse some horrific means in emergency situations only. In all other non-existential emergencies, Machiavelli asserted that Christian morality be relied on as the default position (but not pietism, pacifism or Calvinist predestination-ism). But almost no one ever reads that part of what Machiavelli wrote.  

If Burnham was a clever propagandist, he would first mislead others by contending Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, then readers would tune out and feel they did not have to read further about him.  That would reflect Communist Trotskyite like tricksterism.  And that is what Burnham did, whether he was a propagandist or not.

Most are attracted like a moth to a flame to the vicious rumors of Machiavelli as a teacher of evil, but not to his emergency situation-ethics (not to be confused with relativism, nihilism or individual social-contractualism). To the contrary, Machiavelli’s approach to political thinking might be called “virtue-ism”, where virtue is not piety, pacifism, moral absolutism, or politically correct “virtue signaling”, but the willingness to lose one’s soul for their homeland.  To Machiavelli, one can suspend morality but only if one must defend their homeland from enemies or from internal subversion.  For an understanding true to the letter and spirit of Machiavelli, read Raymond Belliotti, “Machiavelli’s Secret: The Soul of a Statesman”, 2015). 

Mimicking what is happening in the United States today in 2024, the city of Florence was taken over by the Medici banker oligarchs when Machiavelli wrote his book The Prince in 1513.  In fact, the Medici’s imprisoned Machiavelli and tortured him until he was rescued by an influential patron. His books were banned and “cancelled” by the Pope upon his death.

Machiavelli held religious leaders (Moses, St. Augustine) and founders (Romulus) of ancient Rome in the highest esteem, military leaders next (Julius Caesar, Agathocles, Xenophon), exemplary and uncorrupted writers and artists (Michelangelo, Botticelli) and those who have demonstrated achievements in their professions or occupations in that order.  Nowhere did he exalt bankers or intellectuals. He was critical of popes (Pope Leo X) and the papacy. And he blamed the weak “unarmed prophet” Catholic priest-leader of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola, for Florence being sacked, raped and plundered by the French.  Machiavelli was proud of his being a military tactician and strategist more than a playwright or poet. He enjoyed field training citizen soldiers, not mercenaries, in the arts of war.

Secondly, to Burnham Machiavelli was foremost a political “scientist”.  But Machiavelli never considered his writings to form a science. Yes, he thought there were certain natural laws, tendencies, or consequences of war or pacifism, of military formations and tactics, and of republics or oligarchies, but not a science per se.  Burnham’s obsession with casting Machiavelli’s writings as “science” likely stems from his former Trotskyite (permanent revolution) Marxism which held scientists, sociologists, and social engineers in the highest regard and religious leaders in negative regard, inverting Machiavelli’s hierarchy of leadership. Today we can see the corruption that the science of social engineering coupled with Fascist Oligarchism has wrought in America. Machiavelli was opposed to any notion that only a class of “scientists” and intellectuals should control politics. John McCormick’s book “Machiavellian Democracy” describes how Machiavelli promoted the notion that only the Plebian class could control the predations of elites. 

Nonetheless, Burnham had an accurate interpretation of Machiavelli’s cyclical conception of history:

“Virtue begets peace,

peace begets idleness,

idleness mutiny,

and mutiny, destruction.

And vice versa:

Ruin begets laws,

law begets virtue, and

virtue begets honor and goodness”
– History of Florence, Book V.   

Burnham acknowledges Machiavelli’s value of religion as essential to the health of the state. But Burnham saw no need or use for religion in his own life or in the state, unlike Machiavelli.

 Machiavelli wrote four morality “sermons”: “On Ambition” (on how an armed citizenry can only secure the Republic against the ambitions of the oligarchs), “On Ingratitude or Envy” (of the Citizens and Mercenary armies fighting proxy wars), “On Fortune” (of how a city’s fortune was ruined by fraud and the circumvention of usury laws by the Medici’s), and “On Penitence” (delivered to the religious Company of Piety and Pope Clement VII in 1532, on how a prince needs to do religious penance for deeds necessary to save his nation).

Machiavelli closed all his personal letters with the frequent salutation “may Christ keep you”.   Machiavelli was a realist Christian, not a teacher of evil as portrayed by Leo Strauss, Hollywood movies, American fiction writers, and many others. Evil sells, religious realism hardly at all. Sure, Burnham was a prophet, warning about government “managerialism” (the deep state) in 1943, but attempted no antidote as did Machiavelli. The notion of the “deep state” is now used as a bogeyman cop-out for why presidents have no control over the federal government.  But when even a senile president can issue executive orders allowing hundreds of millions of weaponized migrants to overrun the U.S., the president suddenly and magically has powers to control the administrative state.  The important thing to understand from Machiavelli is that historically presidents rarely have “agency” to unilaterally make policy decisions, and merely cow tow to hidden cabals of oligarchs and bankers and donors.

But Burnham accurately describes why Machiavelli’s reputation has so often been vilified by those in power.  The powerful want to obscure what Machiavelli wrote and sacrificed himself for (No, Machiavelli’s book The Prince was not Hitler’s bible, rather it was Roman historian Tacitus’s book “Germania”).  As Mark Twain wrote: “In the beginning a patriot is a scarce man and hated and scorned”. See Michael Jackson and Damian Grace’s book “Machiavelliana: The Living Machiavelli in Modern Mythologies”, 2018.  

To be fair, twenty years after writing The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Burnham wrote Suicide of the West, which prophesized the current day sabotage of America.  But he never corrected his distortions about Machiavelli.  Paraphrasing the Christian New Testament, “man does not live by power alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.” 

In a famous moment in American political history in 1988, Republican vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle (under former CIA director George H.W. Bush) debated democrat senator Lloyd Bentsen who intimately worked with former president Jack Kennedy.  When Republican Quayle claimed he was a follower of the policies of Democrat Jack Kennedy, Bentsen famously replied , “I knew Jack Kennedy and you’re no Jack Kennedy”. 

Neither was James Burnham, and the other intellectuals he cites, “defenders of freedom” (Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Roberto Michaels, excepting Vilfredo Pareto). They were pretentious intellectuals with no military acumen or experience, not men of action, and not grounded in anything beyond raw power politics itself.  Burnham and his intelligentsia of “defenders of freedom” are no Machiavellians.

Most Americans don’t read Machiavelli but when they do, they just cherry pick some isolated sentence, not the whole understanding of what Machiavelli wrote. Rather, American intellectuals have been dependent mainly on two interpreters of what Machiavelli wrote and who lived and worked very hard to misinterpret Machiavelli to the masses: war hawk Leo Strauss who called Machiavelli a “teacher of evil”, and James Burnham, an ex-communist and CIA operative, who made Machiavelli’s writings into an oxymoronic “Machiavellianism”.  Together they successfully kept the masses from clearly understanding Machiavelli for the past 80 years.

We now live in an era like Machiavelli’s where oligarchs have taken over the government. It is a propitious time that requires getting one’s hands dirty to restore the country.  As Machiavelli put it: “one may have to learn how to do bad, to go good” but must be remorseful and not do gratuitous evil.  Echoing Machiavelli, former US Senator from Arizona Barry Goldwater put it this way: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”.

I am assigning a rating of 1 to Burnham’s book.