The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

James Burnham

Political ideals rarely match political reality. This book studies the thinkers who looked past the rhetoric of any given regime to describe how power actually operates — and concludes that freedom survives not through good intentions, but through competing elites checking one another.

An examination of the tradition of political "realist" thinkers — Machiavelli, Mosca, Sorel, Michels, and Pareto — who argued that every society, regardless of its stated ideology, is actually ruled by an organized minority, and that genuine political freedom depends on competing elites checking each other's power.