The Committee of Public Safety

Burnham

The Machiavellians by James Burnham (available for download here) may be the greatest work of political “science” you’ve never heard of. Burnham was a former Trotskyite who had a born again experience in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland. His two most important books, The Managerial Revolution and the aforementioned Machiavellians, came during the transition between his previous life as a Communist/Socialist party apparatchik and his later career as a prominent conservative intellectual and one of the original founders of National Review. This produced a curious fusion of the worldview of the Old Left and the nascent vision of the New Right. He was largely free from the orthodoxies of the Left and hadn’t yet been overtaken by the orthodoxies of the Right.

Burham loomed larger as a thinker on the U.S. national stage in 1943 than he did later. I even read somewhere that he would be ranked as one of the great political thinkers of the 20th century by everyone if he’d died in 1944. The Machiavellians even drew comment from George Orwell (Francis Sempa, last seen on this blog contributing a key essay on Halford J. Mackinder and another on Nicholas J. Spykman, has a nice overview of Burnham). Burham’s influence may be wider than recognized. It’s possible that Burham is the father of William Riker’s school of public choice theory. Riker’s student Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has even claimed that Riker was “the greatest political thinker since Machiavelli”. Bueno de Mesquita himself has used an evolved version of Riker’s theory to make predicitions about the outcome of political events:

You weren't like that before the beard

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

It’s interesting that, if public choice theory turns out to have predictive powers, it would validate Burham’s first principle of the “Machiavellian school” (the format I will use will follow Burham’s original scheme of first stating the principle and then following it with the contrary view in parantheses):

1. An objective science of politics, and of society, comparable in its methods to the other empirical sciences, is possible. Such a science will describe and correlate observable social facts, and, on the basis of the facts of the past, will state more or less probably hypotheses of the future. Such a science will be neutral with respect to any practical political goal: that is, like any science, its statements will be tested by facts accessible to any observer, rich or poor, ruler or ruled, and will in no way be dependent upon the acceptance of some particular ethical aim or ideal.

(Contrary views hold that a science of politics is not possible because of the peculiarity of “human nature” or for some similar reason; or that political analysis is always dependent on some practical program for the improvement—or destruction—of society; or that any political science must be a “class science”—true for the “bourgeoise,” but not for the “proletariate,” as, for example, the Marxists claim.)

I’m more of the Nassim Nicholas Taleb school and believe that complex systems within the “fourth quadrant” resist efforts to subject them to conventional rational analysis. Burnham shares some of the thinking which preceded the chaos/complexity revolution of the 1970s. This mode of thought tended to think that complex and chaotic systems would surrender to rationalist/reductionist/mechanical solutions given enough time. Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, written in the 1940s and 1950s, featured weather control machines. This is before Lorenz discovered the butterfly effect which basically ruled out the total weather control that the early Asimov envisioned. I tend to think that politics is too complex to reduce it to the precision achieved by the physical sciences. Burham acknowledges this point but contends that some general principles can be extracted from politics. Bueno de Mesquita’s work, following in the spirit of Burham’s work, may suggest that there is more to be found with Burnham’s first principle than I might suspect.

See more Machiavellian principles.