About James Burnham
American political theorist and writer (1905–1987) who moved from Trotskyism to the founding of the post-war American conservative movement. The Machiavellians (1943) popularised the Italian elite theorists — Mosca, Pareto, Michels — arguing that in every society, democratic or not, a minority elite actually rules, and that liberty depends not on popular sovereignty but on a balance among competing elites. A bracing realist challenge to democratic idealism.