James Burnham: The Partisan Review Years

When James Burnham formally left the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 (intellectually, he had left it the year before), he did not immediately embrace the conservatism of his American Mercury, The Freeman, and National Review years. Burnham instead became a liberal anti-communist and joined the writers at Partisan Review, which at the time was one of the world’s highbrow intellectual journals. Partisan Review featured writers such as Philip Rahv and William Phillips (its two founding editors), Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, T. S. Eliot, Clement Greenberg, Dwight McDonald, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, and many others.