
The Machiavellians, written by James Burnham in 1943, is the greatest work of political “science” you’ve never heard of.
Burnham was a prominent Trotskyite during the 1930s. However, he had a Road to Damascus moment in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland. It was during during the period between his previous life as an American Communist/Socialist Party apparatchik and his later career as a prominent conservative intellectual (he was one of the original founders of National Review) that Burnham wrote his two most important books, The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. Writing during this transition produced a curious fusion of the worldview of the Old Left and the nascent worldview of the New Right. Burnham writes in a frame of mind that is largely free of the orthodoxy of the Left but hasn’t yet absorbed the orthodoxy of the Right.