The Professor as Informer
Coser, Lewis
IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist...
...James Burnham had been a member of that organization once, when it was known as the Workers Party...
...Burnham has since kept moving steadily to the right...
...At the government hearing finally granted to the ISL, there were other exradicals— Daniel Bell, Dwight Macdonald —who also appeared as witnesses...
...The final paragraph of that letter reads: "Believing as I do, I cannot wish success to the Workers Party...
...Those days are gone...
...James Burnham no longer satisfies this description...
...These may seem impossibly high demands, yet the intellectual has always been more than a mere mental technician and whenever he was granted a certain privilege and respect it was, at least in part, be cause he was looked upon as a man devoted to the disinterested pursuit of truth...
...Cross examination brought out that he had started to volunteer information to the FBI about his former comrades since at least 1948...
...the scholar hence must be the most morally superior man of his age: he is called to represent the highest stage of ethical development that it has been possible to reach...
...we teach much more effectively by our example...
...The author of The Prince wrote: "A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interest...
...I understand that James Burnham is not presently teaching at New York University, where he is a member of the philosophy department of which Sidney Hook is chairman...
...DURING THE HEARINGS there developed a remarkable exchange between Burnham and the attorney for the ISL, Joseph Rauh: Q. Did you ever state anywhere that you had to use Communist methods to defeat them...
...He is not only an ex-radical: there is nothing morally shameful about that...
...Somewhat later in the hearing there occurred the following exchange: Q. Why is it all right to lie against a nation which does these thingsbut not all right to lie against an organization which is a threat to do these things...
...In May 1940 he had resigned from the group, in a letter notable for a certain friendliness of tone, as if he were writing to people with whom he disagreed but nonetheless recognized as, in some sense, his intellectual kin...
...but Machiavelli himself was not a ruler, he was an intellectual, and his own life was without blemish...
...What concerns me at the moment is something else, something more fundamental...
...A. You lie as part of your duty to your country...
...FICHTE in his moving definition of the scholar wrote that "We do not only teach by our word...
...His career is one that I find distressing, even repellent, yet I recognize his right, as that of anyone else, to hold whatever opinions he wishes and to change his opinions whenever he feels obliged to...
...today he is an editor of the McCarthyite National Review...
...but I can and do wish its members well...
...He is an ex-intellectual...
...A. On some occasions, yes...
...Will he perhaps presume to call to his aid the name of Machiavelli which he has appropriated without warrant...
...A. I don't know whether I have used that phrase, but I havesaid in effect that some of the methods used by Communists are appropriate to struggles against— Q. And lying is one of them, isn'tit, Mr...
...He came, to avoid putting any undue niceties upon the matter, in the role of government informer...
...But if he were to return to his post, would Sidney Hook, so deeply committed to purging Communists from our faculties on the ground that they cannot be trusted to the pursuit of disinterested truth—would Sidney Hook urge the dismissal of James Burnham, stool pigeon and defender of lying in the name of patriotism...
...Yet the action of James Burnham in lowering himself to the role of an informer, and the moral quality suggested by his testimony concerning the permissibility of employing methods characteristic of Communists, raises an interesting question: Is it possible to be a philosopher and a paid informer at the same time...
...IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist League to have its name removed from the Attorney General's "subversive list...
...They appeared for the defense, testifying that the tiny Marxist but anti-Communist ISL did not advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence...
...What Machiavelli, with whatever irony, preached, Burnham, the intellectual who yearned to be ruler, practised...
...In days gone by American universities used to insist that teachers be "scholars and gentlemen...
...To the extent that each of us, in his own way and arena, preserves the values of truth and freedom, I hope that we shall continue to regard ourselves as comrades, whatever names we use and whatever labels may be tied around our necks...
...Burnham, however, came as a government witness: apparently he no longer hoped "that we shall continue to regard ourselves as comrades...
Vol. 4 • January 1957 • No. 1
