The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom
James Burnham published *The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom* in 1943 as both a study of political realism and an act of intellectual self-education after seven years inside the Trotskyist movement. The book traces a tradition of political thinkers who treated power as the central subject of political science, beginning with Niccolò Machiavelli and extending through Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham argues that these thinkers share a method: they analyze what people do in political life rather than accepting what people say they are doing. He calls them "Machiavellians" because they descend, in approach and in spirit, from Machiavelli's insistence that the facts of power govern political outcomes.
Burnham opens with Dante Alighieri's *De Monarchia*, a treatise on politics he uses to demonstrate the dominant method of political discourse across centuries. Dante argues for a unified world-state under the Holy Roman Emperor, invoking theology, miracles, and scholastic metaphysics. Burnham strips the argument down and finds nothing that advances our knowledge of how people actually behave. What Dante calls the "formal meaning" — eternal salvation, universal peace, unity — dissolves on contact with historical context. When Burnham reconstructs the real meaning, he finds a propaganda document for the exiled Ghibelline faction of Florence, written by a man who had failed in politics and turned to a foreign emperor to restore his fortunes by force. The formal argument, lofty as it reads, serves to disguise and render intellectually irresponsible a set of specific and vengeful practical aims.
Dante as a Case Study in Political Language
Burnham identifies five features of Dante's method that recur, he argues, in the vast majority of political writing. The formal aims are transcendental or utopian, meaningless in terms of real-world action. The arguments, whether logically valid or fallacious, remain irrelevant to concrete political problems because they address the metaphysical goals, which themselves have no operational content. The formal meaning simultaneously expresses and disguises the real meaning — who benefits, who loses, who controls which institutions. And because the real meaning stays hidden behind abstraction, it escapes direct intellectual challenge. Burnham calls this irresponsibility: the practical aims of any given political position receive no evidence-based scrutiny because all the logical energy goes into defending mythical premises. He cites the 1932 Democratic Party platform, which promised balanced budgets and sound currency while preparing to do the opposite, as a modern instance of identical structure.
Machiavelli and the Science of Power
Machiavelli breaks with this tradition by stating his aims openly and grounding them in historical evidence. His central goal is the national unification of Italy, an objective specific enough to accept or reject and probable enough to take seriously, given the examples of France, England, and Spain. Burnham notes that Machiavelli concluded Italy could unify only through a Prince — an assessment he considers correct, since feudal lords, the Church, and the inarticulate masses lacked the capacity or the interest to build a national state. The one great social group that required national unification — the rising class of burghers and merchants — was too young and untested to rule alone. The monarchy provided the organizing center.
Burnham identifies Machiavelli's method as scientific in character: Machiavelli uses language in a cognitive manner whose meaning can be tested against the real world; he defines politics as the study of struggles for power; he assembles facts from historical records, diplomatic experience, and personal observation; and he attempts to correlate these facts into generalizations. Machiavelli's famous treatment of mercenaries, fortresses, and short terms of office for officials flows from this method. He finds, for instance, that a republic preserves its liberty only when officials serve for short, fixed terms with no extensions — and that the twilight of the Roman Republic began when Romans prolonged those terms.
Mosca and the Ruling Class
Gaetano Mosca occupies the most structurally important position in Burnham's account. Mosca's central thesis holds that in every organized society, a minority rules and a majority is ruled. This minority — Mosca's "ruling class" — varies in composition, character, and method, but the division itself is a constant. How does someone gain admission? Mosca finds that deep wisdom and altruism usually hinder rather than help. A capacity for hard work, ambition, a certain callousness, and luck in birth and circumstances — these qualities serve in any ruling class at any time. Additional qualities vary by society: the skilled warrior matters in a military culture, the expert priest in a deeply religious one, the shrewd financier in a commercial economy.
Mosca introduces the concept of the "political formula" — the myth or ideology through which a ruling class rationalizes its power. This formula may invoke racial superiority, divine right, or the will of the people, depending on the historical period and the prevailing sentiment. Burnham stresses Mosca's observation that the integrity of the political formula is essential for a society's survival: when widespread skepticism corrodes the formula, the social order destabilizes. Rome, Venice, and Japan sustained themselves for centuries, in part, through a conservative attachment to their formulas, harsh toward rationalists who debunked them. Athens put Socrates to death for this reason, and Mosca suggests that, from the standpoint of survival, Athens was probably right.
Where does freedom enter? Mosca defines it as "juridical defense"—government by law and due process that imposes impersonal restrictions on those who hold power. He considers free speech the most important right and the strongest foundation for juridical defense. His most profound conclusion, which Burnham traces back to Machiavelli, holds that only power can control power. Juridical defense survives only where multiple and opposing social forces check and restrain one another. When any single tendency or force absorbs the rest, tyranny follows.
Sorel on Myth and Violence
Georges Sorel spoke for the revolutionary syndicalist wing of the French labor movement and advocated the "general strike" as a unifying political myth. Burnham focuses on Sorel's theory of myth rather than on the specific program. A myth, Sorel argues, differs from both a scientific hypothesis and a utopia. A hypothesis can be tested against facts; a utopia describes an imaginary ideal that can be patched onto existing systems. A myth functions as an expression of a group's determination to act. It cannot be refuted because it operates through sentiment rather than through logic. The early Christians expected Christ's imminent return — the catastrophe failed to materialize, yet the movement profited immensely from the apocalyptic myth. Luther and Calvin saw none of the religious exaltation they predicted, yet the Reformation transformed European civilization.
Sorel also defends violence, though Burnham carefully specifies the argument. Sorel distinguishes violence linked to a myth — sacrifice, heroism, disciplined action — from mere brutality. Humanitarian and pacifist ideologies, Sorel observes, serve to obscure the force that operates automatically through capitalist production and state power. The moral denunciation of violence helps keep workers quiet. Meanwhile, fraud and corruption replace overt force as paths to success, and the ruling class decays. The frank acceptance of violence, when linked to a great myth, paradoxically reduces the total amount of brutality in practice, because the myth's absolute quality lends heightened significance to limited acts and guards against endless repetition.
Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy
Robert Michels asks a deceptively simple question: how do the tendencies inherent in social organization affect the realization of democracy? He examines hundreds of organizations, with special attention to the German Social Democratic Party and the larger German trade unions. Why these? Because they represent the organizations most explicitly committed, in doctrine and internal constitution, to democracy and equality. If oligarchy appears here, it appears universally.
Michels finds oligarchy appearing universally. The technical requirements of administration, the incompetence of the masses in organizational matters, and the psychological gratifications of leadership all drive organizations toward rule by a small group, regardless of the organization's stated ideals. Leaders develop interests that diverge from the membership, acquire expertise that makes them difficult to replace, control internal communication, and accumulate the material perquisites of office. Michels formulates this finding as the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" — whoever says organization says oligarchy.
Pareto, Residues, and the Circulation of Elites
Vilfredo Pareto provides the most general theoretical framework in Burnham's account. Pareto divides human conduct into logical and non-logical categories, then demonstrates, through a massive body of evidence spanning cultures and centuries, that the socially decisive actions of human beings are predominantly non-logical. People profess goals and then act in contradiction to them. Groups that share identical goals take conflicting actions; groups with conflicting goals take identical actions. Christians who hold the commandment against killing fight wars without perceiving any contradiction. Pacifists support the wars their nations wage. Marxists who cite the same texts cut one another's throats.
Pareto analyzes these phenomena through his distinction between "residues" and "derivations." Residues are the relatively constant elements in human social action — stable sentiments that persist across cultures and centuries. Derivations are the shifting verbal explanations, doctrines, and theories that people construct to make their conduct appear rational. Of the six classes of residues Pareto identifies, the two most important for political analysis are Class I (Instinct for Combinations) and Class II (Group-Persistences). Class I individuals — Machiavelli's "Foxes" — live by cunning, speculative manipulation, and innovation. Class II individuals — the "Lions" — rely on force, loyalty, tradition, and conservative attachment to family, nation, and faith.
The "circulation of the elites" refers to how the relative distribution of Foxes and Lions within the ruling class and the broader population shifts over time, driving social change. When the ruling class closes its ranks, degeneracy follows: weak individuals accumulate within the elite while capable individuals accumulate outside it. The society then faces either internal revolution or external destruction. Pareto cites Sparta, whose rigidly closed citizen elite declined in both numbers and quality until the Thebans shattered it at Leuctra in the fourth century B.C.
Freedom, Science, and the Fate of Civilization
Burnham draws the political conclusions of the Machiavellian tradition in his final chapters. Democracy, defined as literal self-government by the masses, is impossible. Defined instead as a system in which citizens can openly oppose and criticize the ruling elite — what Mosca calls juridical defense — it becomes possible, and Burnham considers it the most desirable achievable condition.
Can politics become scientific? Burnham distinguishes three forms of the question. A science of politics is possible and already exists in rough form: the Machiavellian tradition itself constitutes a body of first-approximation generalizations about political behavior. The masses cannot act scientifically in political affairs because their numbers, ignorance of administrative technique, and preoccupation with material survival prevent deliberate scientific action. Sections of the elite, however, can act with some degree of scientific rationality, at least temporarily, and historical examples include periods in Rome, the Catholic Church, the Venetian Republic, and England.
Burnham closes with a dilemma. A scientific ruling elite would recognize that myths hold society together — and would therefore have to profess myths it knew to be false. The tendency is for deceivers to become self-deceived, at which point scientific conduct ceases. Sincerity costs truth. The possibility of scientific governance depends on favorable and temporary circumstances, and Burnham judges that the circumstances of his own time have produced ruling elites that are anti-scientific on major social questions while expert at narrow techniques of mass manipulation. He ends on a conditional hope: civilization will probably survive, but only if a new generation of leaders replaces the old, keeps the social structure from freezing, and accepts the tragic limitations that Machiavellian science discloses about the nature of political life.
