New York: The John Day Company, 1943. First edition. Octavo. Original blue cloth with yellow titling to spine, lacking dust jacket. Sunning to spine with edgewear and spotting and soiling to boards; small indentations to board panels; some spotting and dusting to page block; pages bright and unmarked. Very good first edition of this rare work by James Burnham. Item #98

James Burnham’s (1905–1987) influential survey of the modern Machiavellians—Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto—who were virtually unknown in the US prior to the publication of this book. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom was first published by The John Day Company in 1943 following the publication of Burnham’s seminal work The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World in 1941, also by The John Day Company. Written in what has been referred to as Burnham’s “Machiavellian years,” The Machiavellians introduced America to the anti-ideological and markedly anti-utopian thought of the Italian elite theorists (Mosca, Michels, and Pareto) and French social theorist Georges Sorel. After breaking with Trotskyism in 1940, Burnham’s political thought took a decidedly realist turn, a turn that was largely influenced by these modern Machiavellians who eschewed idealism and the “politics of wish” in favor of a scientific approach to power and the “politics of reality.” For Burnham, as for each of these Machiavellians, the importance of political power lies not only in its justification but also in how actual actors attain, use, and forfeit power. As Burnham saw it, the modern West was in the throes of a “managerial revolution” wherein power, including the power to manipulate and exploit society’s resources, was becoming concentrated in a managerial class of operators and bureaucrats—a shift in the “locus of sovereignty” away from bourgeois capitalists that Burnham first set forth in The Managerial Revolution. In The Machiavellians, Burnham justified his new revolutionary theory by recourse to the thought of the new Machiavellians, which included the theses that all societies are, as a fact, ruled by an elite minority (Mosca), that there is a constant struggle and circulation among such elites for control of society (Pareto), that rule by elites is inevitable in all organizations and societies (even those most dedicated to a radical egalitarianism), resulting in an “iron law of oligarchy” (Michels), and that myth is important to social and political action (Sorel). A bright and exceedingly scarce first edition of The Machiavellians.

Price: $400.00