Political Truth and Popular Myths

a recent american book called The Machiavellian Defenders of Freedom, ¹ by James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution,¹ has aroused attention as illustrating an important development of contemporary society and economics. The writer maintains that a realistic political theory, if properly understood, is the necessary presupposition and foundation of any attempt to preach or to defend liberty, and that this pure political theory, discovered once and for all by Machiavelli, is to be found repeated by many who, consciously or not, have recently followed his tradition. Burnham does not know, or has overlooked the great and laborious development of Machiavellian thought from the second half of the sixteenth century, through the many acute writers of the baroque period, ending with Vico and Galiani in Italy and Fichte and Hegel in Germany. Not to speak of my own historical researches and theoretical conclusions, we might be surprised that he is ignorant of Meinecke’s History of Politics, though it is only one more proof of the disorganization, weakening or complete breakdown of international cultural relations since the 1914 war. At any rate, Burnham’s book is chiefly or almost wholly devoted to Italy; besides Dante and Machiavelli, the four Machiavellians whose ideas he expounds and approves are the modern Italians, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, the half-Italian Robert Michels, and Sorel who had studied and assimilated Italian political literature.