Like many in this century, James Burnham came to the serious study of man and government by way of Communism: he became a true believer, suffered disillusion, and cast about for something new. What he found was profound enough. His
The Managerial Revolution
was one of the most influential books of this age. In one sense it was
too
influential: it's no longer read, because nearly everything in it has become accepted.
His
The Machiavellians
, written in 1943 and revised twenty years later, is also long out of print, which is a great pity: in that work Burnham examines a number of political theorists, summarizes their work, and presents his own view of political science. As he says in its preface: "Having come to know something of the gigantic ideology of Bolshevism, I knew that I was not going to be able to settle for the pygmy ideologies of Liberalism, social democracy, refurbished laissez-faire, or the inverted cut-rate Bolshevism called 'fascism' " Any serious student of politics would do well to locate a copy and read it very carefully; for Burnham was far from being a dry academic. Scholarly enough, he never trotted out scholarship without very good reasons.
Government, Burnham says, is a wonderful thing; so wonderful that our ancestors (who were, we must continue to remind ourselves, every whit as smart as we) hastened to ascribe this wonderful thing to actions of gods and demi-gods. In this short essay Burnham lays bare a dread secret; and tells us why there may yet be empire in mankind's future.
In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of Cities were known to be gods or demigods. Minos, author of the Cretan constitution and of the navy through which Crete ruled the Aegean world, was the son of Zeus and Europa, and husband of the moon goddess, Pasiphae. On his death he was made one of the three judges of the underworld, at the entrance to which—in Dante's description—he sits "horrific, and grins; examines the crimes upon the entrance; judges, and sends" each soul to its due punishment.
The half human, half dragon Cecrops, first king of Athens, who numbered its tribes, established its laws of marriage, property and worship, and taught it writing, was reputed to be the secret husband of Athena, whom he chose as guardian of his City. Minos, doubting whether Theseus, who was later to bring the rest of Attica under Athenian command, was indeed the son of Poseidon, flung a ring into the sea, and was answered when Theseus, plunging into his father's realm, brought back not only the ring but the golden crown of Amphitrite.
It was the pious Aeneas, son of Venus, who led to Italy those Trojans whose descendants were to transform a village into a world empire. The local king, Evander, told him of the old days:
These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs,
Of Nymphs and Fauns, and savage men, who took
Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak
Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care
Of laboring oxen, or the shining share,
Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare.
Their exercise the chase; the running flood
Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food.
Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove,
Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above.
The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought,
And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught,
And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay
From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway.The Aeneid
, Book VIII
The seven hills were linked as one city through the exploits of the child of Mars, Romulus, suckled by a wolf and fed by a woodpecker, metamorphosed after death into the god, Quirinus.
Our own John Adams, in spite of his distaste for such modes of explanation, recognized that "it was the general opinion of ancient nations that the Divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men. . . . The laws of Lacedaemon were communicated by Apollo to Lycurgus; and, lest the meaning of the deity should not have been perfectly comprehended or correctly expressed, they were afterwards confirmed by his oracle at Delphos. Among the Romans Numa was indebted for those laws which procured the prosperity of his country to his conversations with [the fountain nymph] Egeria. . . . Woden and Thor were divinities too; and their posterity ruled a thousand years in the north. . . . Manco Capac was the child of the sun, the visible deity of the Peruvians, and transmitted his divinity, as well as his earthly dignity and authority, through a line of Incas. . . . There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous."
The great principles upon which our own civilization is founded are traced to the commands issued on a mountain top by God Himself to the man who was at once His prophet and His people's chief, to be confirmed and amplified by His Son.
John Adams—though destined to become himself almost a demigod—was inclined to our modern agreement that these old tales are "prejudice," "popular delusion" and "superstitious chimeras." He suggested also one of the favored scientific explanations of their persistent recurrence:
Is it that obedience to the laws can be obtained from mankind in no other manner? Are the jealousy of power and the envy of superiority so strong in all men that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice?
John Adams—
A Defense of the Constitution
Or, rephrased as statement instead of question: A superstitious belief in the superhuman origin of government is foisted by rulers on their subjects as one of the devices by which the subjects are kept in line.
A rival and also widespread scientific account stresses a kind of imaginative play rather than political deceit as source of the superstitions. As example, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in comment on the story of Romulus:
The whole story [of Romulus and Remus] . . . is artificial and shows strong Greek influence. The birth, exposure, rescue, and subsequent adventures of the twins are a Greek tale of familiar type. Mars and his sacred beast, the wolf, are introduced on account of the great importance of this cult. The localities described are ancient sacred places; the Lupercal, near the
ficus ruminalis
, was naturally explained as the she-wolf's den. . . . Another Greek touch is the deification of an eponymous [name-giving] hero. The rape of the Sabine women is clearly aetiological, invented to account for the custom of simulated capture in marriage; these women and also Titus Tatius represent the Sabine element in the Roman population. The name Romulus
(= Romanus)
means simply "Roman."
In short: the story of the founding of the City is a set of poetic variations on the City's name.
There is no need to reject such explanations by modern science, viewed in their own frame, in order to suggest from another perspective that the ancient peoples, who were not notably more foolish than we, were perhaps also communicating truths by their accounts of the origin of Cities, though admittedly they used a rhetorical system quite other than that of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.
The central truth is the insight that there is no adequate rational explanation for the existence and effective working of government, much less for good or fairly good government. (I rule out of the definition of "government" a dominion exercised directly and exclusively by physical strength—a social form which by the nature of the case cannot exist in a group that contains more than three or four human beings.) The universality of this insight is really attested by the scientific writers on society as much as by the ancients. Without exception they too introduce a myth in order to explain the origin of the City. The only difference is that post-Renaissance scientists use a less picturesque language. Instead of Cecrops or Minos or Romulus, they write of a "state of nature" (benign or horrific), an isolated Island with first one and then more than one resident, "primitive communism," the Dialectic, "challenge and response," the Zeitgeist, and a host of other mythic entities that have no substantial reality outside of the scientists' own lively but shamefaced imaginations.
Moreover, apart from a few gross and almost self-evident cases, no one has found a purely rational theory to explain why some governments, though very different from each other, do well, whereas others, though closely similar, do badly. When you drop scientist ideology, it becomes clear that you cannot explain the success of some and the failure of other governments without including a non-rational factor that we call, according to our metaphysical habits, chance, luck, accident, magic, or Providence.
Government is then in part, though only in part, non-rational. Neither the source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms. This is and must be so because the problem of government is, strictly speaking, insoluble; and yet it is solved. The double fact, though real and part of historical life, is a paradox.
Consider the problem of government from the point of view of the reflective individual. I, as an individual, do in fact submit myself (at least within certain limits) to the rule of another—to government. But suppose that I ask myself:
why
should I do so? why should I submit to the rule of another?
what
justifies his rule? To these questions there are no objectively convincing answers in rational terms alone.
Is he physically stronger than I? Granted that his strength might enable him actually to rule me (though I might of course outsmart him), does it give him the
right
to do so? Is he taller, fairer, swifter than I? Is one or the other of these a political credential? He is more intelligent? Very well; but in government may not character or experience or faith be more relevant than brains? And who decides the degree of his possession of any of these fluid qualities? He is rich? But do not riches corrupt? He is poor, then. If so, will he not be tempted the more?
Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machinations, or by confederacy with others. . . . And as to the faculties of the mind. . . . prudence is but experience; which equal time equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one's own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve.
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
Is there a sign that the gods have chosen this man as ruler? Is he the first-born of a certain father? or
named
ruler by the voice of one-half plus one of the adults, or a designated class of the adults, of the City? We begin to reach, it will seem, arguments of more weight. "Arguments?" Axioms or sentiments, rather, which can indeed settle the problem of rule, if by an act of prior faith we share them: one of them, that is, and reject the others, because believing simultaneously in more than one might plunge us into contradiction. These are what Gugliemo Ferrero called "principles of legitimacy," belief in which can "legitimize" rule or government: the theocratic principle, the hereditary principle, and the democratic principle are respectively implicit in the three questions at the start of this paragraph. These principles are the Guardians of the City, which make it possible, when one of them is accepted by the community, for government to be something other than mere brute force.
But why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why should such a principle justify the rule of that man over me? Does it prove him better than I because he had his father instead of my father, his color skin in place of mine, because his arts can win more votes than mine? I accept the principle, well . . . because I do, because that is the way it is and has been. This may be a sufficient and proper argument, but it is certainly not a rational one. Ferrero's countryman, Gaetano Mosca, used the term "political formula" for "principle of legitimacy," and explained in this way:
According to the level of civilization in the peoples among whom they are current, the various political formulas may be based either upon supernatural beliefs or upon concepts which, if they do not correspond to positive realities, at least appear to be rational. We shall not say that they correspond in either case to scientific truths. A conscientious observer would be obliged to confess that, if no one has ever seen the authentic document by which the Lord empowered certain privileged persons or families to rule his people on his behalf, neither can it be maintained that a popular election, however liberal the suffrage may be, is ordinarily the expression of the will of a people, or even of the will of the majority of a people.
And yet that does not mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience. Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. The truth is that they answer a real need in man's social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and real importance.