National Review founding editor James Burnham was a fascinating man. The one-time leading Trotskyist eventually broke with communism, joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS; forerunner of the CIA) to specialize in psychological warfare, and had a successful academic career in philosophy (especially political philosophy) — all before NR’s first issue. In his career for NR, he helped flesh out both the ideological and practical dimensions of the magazine’s anti-communism, among his many other contributions.

In recent years, Burnham has gotten some new fans on parts of the right. But in an excellent, in-depth treatment of Burnham’s work that NR published over the weekend, Nicholas Pompella argues that many of his modern interpreters misunderstand him. Their chief fallacy is to focus on Burnham’s early books, written at a time when he had broken with Marxism but not entirely with some of its habits of mind. There is a particular emphasis on his scientific study of how governments function essentially oligarchically (in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians), which becomes, for these new fans, the primary lens through which to view all of Burnham’s subsequent thought.

This is mistaken, Pompella argues. Burnham was much more complex than that:

This burgeoning New Right claims an intellectual inheritance in Burnham’s early years — his most ruthless and leftist period. But investigating his full political development reveals that Burnham had second thoughts on Machiavelli, and abandoned the leftist attachments the New Right seems to envy so much. Burnham exchanged them for (still practical and grounded) patriotism and conservative morality.

Read the whole thing and let Pompella guide you to a fuller, more honest understanding and appreciation of one of the most profound thinkers ever to work for this publication.