Word: burnham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Christian Science Moniter, while agreeing with the broad outlines of what Mr. Wallace says, can only muster the feeble argument that Mr. Wallace is "making it harder" to put over the liberals' protest. With even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (The Naton, April 5) declaring that "one must prefer" James Burnham's clearly faseist program, I, for one, rejoice that the liberal protest is in the hands of one with the sincerity and courage of Mr. Wallace. Durham M. Miller...
Congratulations on an excellent review of Burnham's book by A.S.! Sincerely, P. Sorokin...
...Burnham, the ex-Communist, ex-Trotskyite professor who has recently been canonized by Time-Life, is a shrewder, slicker model of this type (top of his Princeton class, always a sharp dresser); his book is smart, superficially cogent, and therefore the more dangerous. His thesis is that the time is ripe for world empire by one power, and that the inescapable conflict is between Russia and the United States. Borrowing handfuls from historian Arnold Teynbee's arbitrary classification of civilizations (what are the criteria for a civilization?), Burnham sees America as the saviour of Western Civilization from the dynamic surge...
Most of it is appallingly--untrue. Burnham cries that we must first reach out to stop communism everywhere, supporting against it Chiang, France, a strong Germany. We should abandon all attempts to "get along" in the UN, make unilateral decisions and implement them with force. Next, we should take the offensive, drawing first Latin America and then other nations into our new "World Empire," suppressing communism as we go. At home, Burnham would have us illegalize the Communist Party and crush all its "fronts;" his black and white approach leads him to lump the Federation of Atomic Scientists with...
...holes in all this need not be pointed out, Burnham, who numbers an interest in the Machiavellians among his fads, in no mean "realist" himself, flluging "sentimental" and "irrelevant" at all reasoning but his own. On his own terms, then, by passing all the powerful "unrealistic" arguments with his policy, we can find a weakness in his plan that makes his whole book little better than a syllogistic tour de force: he believes the American Empire must build absolutely on monopoly control of atomic weapons by this country. Wishfully, he disregards or brands as communist rumors all statements by scientists...