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Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism

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Burnham began his career in political activism as a Trotskyite communist and became a very committed anti-communist. Like Buckley, Burnham, in the sixties and seventies particularly, provided intellectual fortification for the conservative movement.

        First published in the early sixties, Suicide of the West is a withering indictment of liberalism. Far from serving as a bulwark against communism, liberalism, Burnham shows, is the ideology of Western suicide, communism in its preliminary stage. Though Soviet communism has collapsed, liberalism remains, and as long as it does, Suicide of the West should be read by conservatives.

I can't give this book the review it deserves. Truth is I read it 11 years ago and would mangle it if i tried to get specific. But it is absolutely a must-read for people who are vaguely certain that there is something wrong with the dominant trends in 20th century western social thought, but can't elucidate their thoughts. I read this book quite by accident the year after i finished college, and the memory of the thrill i felt is still with me. Suicide of the West will challenge and provoke, excite and inspire. It will send you to the library: you'll read 10 more books because of it. Read this book.

The premise of The Suicide of the West is that the West is in decline, and the decline is fueled by the rise of liberalism. Despite the strong title, most of the book is an attempt at an objective definition of liberalism. Only the beginning and end actually discuss why liberalism could potentially lead to the end of Western Civilization. Burnham doesn't believe liberalism is the cause, per se, of the decline of the West, but "that liberalism has come to be the verbal systematization of the process of Western contraction and withdrawal; that liberalism motivates and justifies the contraction and reconciles us to it." To me that sounds like a convoluted way of saying it is the cause, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

What exactly is this dangerous ideology capable of motivating the decline of Western Civilization? "Modern liberalism, which contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being. Ideals that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define "the good society." Liberalism is about optimism. Liberals believe that all men have equal civilizing potential. They hold that freedom of speech should extended to all, no matter how extreme their ideas, and that the vote of the people should always decide who is right. Liberalism believes in the potential of humankind to be raised to a state of world peace and harmony never before seen in history. Terrible and obviously suicidal, right? I didn't think so either.

The question is, do I, or indeed, do liberals really believe this? With enough education, science, technological progress, good government etc. is it possible to take humans with all our foibles and create the perfect society? What about just ending hunger? Poverty? War? Oppression? The belief that any or all of those goals are realistically achievable is actually fairly modern according to Burnham. It became popular within the last 400 or 500 years, starting with Bacon and Descartes. Before them, and others like them, achieving the perfect society wasn't the goal or ideal of government. It simply wasn't considered possible given human nature and human history. People weren't waiting on science to create an earthly paradise, they were waiting on Jesus.

If liberals believe that they should work on the noble goal of forming a perfect society, what do conservatives want? A conservative wants slow change. He prefers either to maintain the status quo or possibly even return to how things were in "the good ole' days." The basic idea is "if things work okay now, why risk the unknown potential negative implications associated with changing them? Instead, let's do everything we can to maintain what we have." Does that sound pessimistic to you? Depressing even? It does to me. Is it realistic though? Is it more rational than the liberal's constant tendency to reform? Maybe.

If a perfect society is possible, why haven't we achieved it yet? A liberal's answer is fairly simple: people are still ignorant and we still have not created the necessary social institutions to remedy the ignorance. For someone like Burnham, this is the perfect chance to lay into the ideology and, at times, succeed in making it look pretty absurd.

He does this by showing how liberalism explains away any crime committed by someone who is poor, a minority or in almost any other social situation, as a failure of society, rather than as a personal failure of the criminal. He shows that often the problems liberals are trying to solve are problems of people who have no desire to have their problems solved and how liberals, motivated by guilt, waste enormous resources trying to bring about worldwide equality.


It's hard to argue that liberalism is ALL bad, and Burnham doesn't. He cautiously concedes that liberalism has led to some societal good. Still, despite the fact that many liberal ideals are laudable, most attempts to implement them are misguided. The human condition can be improved, but you can't always convince terrorists to resort to peaceful methods for achieving their goals by negotiating with them. You can't solve hunger by sending lots of money to Africa and alas, you'll never create a perfect society by having millions of voters with diverse motivations and interests participate in a democracy. To state the root of the problem, "the liberal assumes... that men, given a knowledge of the problem and freedom to choose, will opt for peace, justice and plenty. But the facts do not bear him out either for individuals or for societies. Individuals choose, very often, trouble, pain, injury, for themselves and for others." In other words, the problem of liberalism lies in human nature as defined by history.

Most people desire life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the social conditions necessary to optimize those rights. The question then becomes, what is the best way to achieve these conditions? An ideologist will have a ready answer to almost any problem that arises. In the case of liberalism, the solution is almost always the opposite of "conserving" tradition or the status quo. Instead, a liberal's approach is to value hope over experience and to destroy or drastically reform existing foundations and build again. Occasionally this approach leads to desirable results but, as any software developer will tell you, starting over usually isn't the best way to fix a bug.

The correct approach, Burnham would argue, is to look at each problem individually and without the lens of an ideology, liberal or otherwise. Something much easier said than done. He points out: "As a rule, a man, when his ideological lenses are shattered, is in haste to replace them with another set ground to a new prescription. The unfiltered world is not his dish of tea."

A conservative prefers renewal to reform. He advocates an "equality of legal rights" rather than striving for equality of class or condition. He opts for individual improvement over collective, patriotism over internationalism, family and community over the "bloodless abstraction" of humanity and peace over strength as the "highest social value."


Again, why is liberalism the root of the Suicide of the West? Because it values global equality over strength, global order over national order. It means that the West must stop expanding either through the spread of native ideas and truths that we hold to be inalienable as well as stopping all physical expansion such as colonialism or imperialism. Burnham argues that if we choose not to expand, we are choosing to contract. Liberalism doesn't deny this contraction, in fact it tries to reconcile us to it.

Despite being written over 45 years ago, The Suicide of the West feels fresh and remains relevant. It definitely altered my way of viewing the world and it has really caused me to take a closer look at what I know and believe.

This book was written in 1964 but is as relevant (if not more so) today than it was when first published. Since that time, modern liberalism has moved further leftward and worldwide Communist revolutionary impulses have only marginally declined, notwithstanding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Red China is becoming the new Red menace and Russia is in the midst of potentially dangerous changes.

The very premise of this book has played out on the world scene since its writing. The liberal approach towards Communism (i.e. appeasement) in the 1970s had weakened the Western resolve to contain Communism just as Burnham predicted it would. On the other hand, the 1980s demonstrated the efficacy of the opposite approach, namely mustering the will and resources to rollback Communism. And the 1990s served to remind us all once again how ill-equipped liberalism is in containing Communism as the Red Dragon raised its ugly head and the Bear grew restless.

Burnham spends the first two-thirds of the book describing the liberal worldview in intellectual and moral terms. He begins by first outlining the major tenets of liberalism and shows from whence they arose. He then demonstrates how some of these tenets are intellectually weak due to their internal inconsistency, mutual incompatibility, and failures in application.

Burnham then shifts to the moral/psychological aspect of liberalism, specifically the role of values in liberal ideology; and the priority that liberals give to those values. He also explains the sentiments that drive the commitment to liberalism and explains how, in many cases, those sentiments are inconsistent with the intellectual tenets of liberalism. He also describes the powerful role guilt plays in the liberal impulse towards egalitarianism.

Especially enlightening is Burnham's contrasting of the modern liberal with the classical liberal of the 19th century. He makes the comparison by showing that many of the intellectual tenets of modern liberalism are absent from the 19th century laissez-faire version. He also describes how and why values have been inverted - namely that the modern liberal now esteems peace/security above freedom/liberty.

With the intellectual/psychological analysis of liberalism complete, Burnham then proceeds to evaluate the threat of Communism to Western Civilization. His explanation of Communism's inherent demand to achieve world dominance is superb. There is no mistaking the fact that co-existence with capitalism is simply not an option for the Communist.

But because modern liberalism shares similar egalitarian impulses with Communism, it is intellectually and morally weakened before the Red menace. In short, it is difficult to oppose Communism from the Left. There simply is too much in common to come out in direct opposition to its ideology. This is not to say that liberals support Communist tactics, although they have been among the Kremlin's chief apologists at various times (e.g. 1930s, 1960s).

Because liberals share many egalitarian goals with Communism, they become "useful idiots" for the world revolutionaries, whose interest it is to create instability in non-Communist countries. For example, it is now known (vis-à-vis post-Cold War Archives) that the Soviet Union incited and exploited much of the American civil unrest (1930s, 1960s) that liberal ideologues created in their pursuit of egalitarianism. In essence, because of an overlap in their common goals, the Communists found the modern liberal to be a useful tool for hastening the world revolution of the proletariat.

However, unlike its explicit goals, liberal sentiments are actually quite disjoint from the Communist. In fact, the differences in sentiments are what permit Communists to use liberals to further their revolutionary goals. For example, the liberal's quest for peace is not the same as the Communist's. The Communist sees peace as the calm arising out of a world free of capitalism. It does not mean peace achieved by nation's agreeing to mutual co-existence. But the Communist finds the liberal's pursuit of "peace" useful in order to weaken the security of non-Communist nations.

So willingly or unwittingly, modern liberals, especially from the West, are essentially useless when it comes to halting the Communist quest to dominate and eventually overthrow non-communist systems. Their perspective prevents them from confronting the non-rational ideological menace with the only principle it understands -- force.

Only a hard-line stance (as Ronald Reagan promoted) and proactive measures will put a check on an ideology that has world domination as its ultimate goal. This lesson has been demonstrated once as a result of the Cold War outcome. And one can only hope and pray that the lesson will not be forgotten. Because if it is, the West will indeed commit suicide and be delivered into the hands of International Communism.

The reviews that I read here are right on the mark, so I will not venture to repeat their observations. Perhaps the most salient aspect of James Burnham book is it's astute observations of human nature and its consequences in terms of economics and justice. There is no philosophizing here; Burnham provides a dispassionate description of what modern liberal democracies and there inherent vulnerabilities. Just for its descriptions on human nature and world outlook, it should be required reading if most if not all undergraduates, regardless of what field.

A classic work that is illuminating at least as much for its analysis of modern ideology as for its thesis (which has become relevant again in the face of the rise of militant Islam).

The main flaw in this work is the inadequately explained thirty-nine-point litmus test for liberalism near the end of the second chapter. Too many readers tend to reflexively assume that Burnham is presenting it as a measure of where one falls on a left-right spectrum, and so they misunderstand it. The list is best understood as a set of principles which, while not necessarily exclusive to liberalism, are so central to modern (circa 1965) American liberalism that disagreement with more than a few of them would call into question one's pedigree as a bona fide liberal. A measure of one's conservative (or libertarian) pedigree would require an entirely different list.

I first read this book while in college in 1971. It's concepts and definitions have remained ingrained in my thinking since then. I revisited the book because of a conversation with my brother. I recommended that he read it-although I had forgotten the particulars of why he should read it. Since then I have reread it-especially chapter 5 which describes, point by point, exactly what Liberalism is.

I now realize that Burnham's thinking is an integral part of my own-without my remembering exactly where the thought originated. Jonah Goldberg's book, "Liberal Facism", is a history of Liberal thought through the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is the perfect followup to Burnham.

I love this book!