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The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World
Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called 'managerialism' - rule by managers.
Written in 1941, this is the book that theorised how the world was moving into the hands of the 'managers'. Burnham explains how Capitalism had virtually lost its control, and would be displaced not by labour, nor by socialism, but by the rule of administrators in business and in government.
This revolution, he posited, is as broad as the world and as comprehensive as human society, asking 'Why is "totalitarianism" not the issue?' 'Can civilization be destroyed?' And 'Why is the New Deal something bigger than Roosevelt can handle?'
In a volume extraordinary for its dispassionate handling of those and other fundamental questions, James Burnham explores fully the implications of the managerial revolution.
Praise for James Burnham:
'Burnham has real intellectual courage, and writes about real issues.' - George Orwell
'The stoic, detached, empirical, hard-boiled, penetrating, realist mind of James Burnham is something to behold, to admire, to emulate.' - National Review
'James Burnham was an astonishing writer. Subtle, passionate, and irritatingly well-read.' - New Criterion
'The immense significance of Burnham’s approach is potential. We can ignore it only at the risk of being disarmed by the future course of events.' - Irving Kristol
Written in 1941, this is the book that theorised how the world was moving into the hands of the 'managers'. Burnham explains how Capitalism had virtually lost its control, and would be displaced not by labour, nor by socialism, but by the rule of administrators in business and in government.
This revolution, he posited, is as broad as the world and as comprehensive as human society, asking 'Why is "totalitarianism" not the issue?' 'Can civilization be destroyed?' And 'Why is the New Deal something bigger than Roosevelt can handle?'
In a volume extraordinary for its dispassionate handling of those and other fundamental questions, James Burnham explores fully the implications of the managerial revolution.
Praise for James Burnham:
'Burnham has real intellectual courage, and writes about real issues.' - George Orwell
'The stoic, detached, empirical, hard-boiled, penetrating, realist mind of James Burnham is something to behold, to admire, to emulate.' - National Review
'James Burnham was an astonishing writer. Subtle, passionate, and irritatingly well-read.' - New Criterion
'The immense significance of Burnham’s approach is potential. We can ignore it only at the risk of being disarmed by the future course of events.' - Irving Kristol
285 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1941
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3,871 people want to read
About the author
James Burnham
42 books180 followersJames Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years, as his thinking developed, he left Marxism and produced his seminal work The Managerial Revolution. He later turned to conservatism and served as a public intellectual of the conservative movement. He also wrote regularly for the conservative publication National Review on a variety of topics.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
February 6, 2021
James Burnham is not one of the great prognosticators of the 20th century, and nearly everything he writes in this book is wrong, but he's wrong in that grand tradition of bloviating conservative intellectuals where they really swing for the fences and it's all very engaging and thought-provoking even as it's fundamentally misdirected. Burnham's wit is sharp, his prose is tight, and you can tell he's aiming at some very interesting ideas even as he misses most of them. It's the kind of writing that really gets your brain cranking in response, which I may enjoy even more than reading very well-written and well-considered pieces with which I totally agree. Watching people say foolish things with panache is the reason I read the National Review (which Burnham, appropriately enough, helped found).
The intellectual half-life of this book has been long and fascinating, and could probably occupy its own book or at least an article. The "managerial revolution" as a concept has lodged itself in the cultural consciousness, yet with a meaning nearly the opposite of what Burnham intended. And though George Orwell wrote a scathing review of it on its release (both his review and Paul Sweezy's are very much worth reading in their own right), The Managerial Revolution provided a significant source of inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the geopolitics of which are all lifted directly from this book.
Time (and especially the 1970s) may not have been kind to Burnham's specific predictions, but overall this still packs the same wallop it did in 1942. Get your hands on a first edition if you can, because he says completely insane things about the Nazis and who knows whether that may have been removed later. Definitely recommended.
The intellectual half-life of this book has been long and fascinating, and could probably occupy its own book or at least an article. The "managerial revolution" as a concept has lodged itself in the cultural consciousness, yet with a meaning nearly the opposite of what Burnham intended. And though George Orwell wrote a scathing review of it on its release (both his review and Paul Sweezy's are very much worth reading in their own right), The Managerial Revolution provided a significant source of inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the geopolitics of which are all lifted directly from this book.
Time (and especially the 1970s) may not have been kind to Burnham's specific predictions, but overall this still packs the same wallop it did in 1942. Get your hands on a first edition if you can, because he says completely insane things about the Nazis and who knows whether that may have been removed later. Definitely recommended.
December 10, 2019
8/10. A minor modern classic.
Not entirely accurate in its prognostications, but not as wrong as it seems on the surface. Burnham had a problem with being too bound to the zeitgeist to understand historical developments in perspective - likewise in 'Suicide of the West' - but he presents here fragmented components of a framework helpful for understanding the world as it developed (which in fact took on many criteria of the managerial society, but with capitalism more tenacious than predicted) and for a historically-important and contemporary vision of when the rule of law gave way to administrative rulemaking (see Hamburger, 'Is Administrative Law Lawful?') and when the meanings of 'liberal' and 'progressive' began their continuing Marxist turn, as the Left routed us on the semantic field (pun intended).
Think of how and why Burnham's predictions didn't come to pass - and think of how they may have come to pass in a mutated form - and this book will provide great (though not endless) food for thought and insight in to the Gramscian long march through the institutions, and technocrats more generally.
Later works build upon Burnham, such as Sam Francis, 'Leviathan and its Enemies', which I look forward to reading.
Not entirely accurate in its prognostications, but not as wrong as it seems on the surface. Burnham had a problem with being too bound to the zeitgeist to understand historical developments in perspective - likewise in 'Suicide of the West' - but he presents here fragmented components of a framework helpful for understanding the world as it developed (which in fact took on many criteria of the managerial society, but with capitalism more tenacious than predicted) and for a historically-important and contemporary vision of when the rule of law gave way to administrative rulemaking (see Hamburger, 'Is Administrative Law Lawful?') and when the meanings of 'liberal' and 'progressive' began their continuing Marxist turn, as the Left routed us on the semantic field (pun intended).
Think of how and why Burnham's predictions didn't come to pass - and think of how they may have come to pass in a mutated form - and this book will provide great (though not endless) food for thought and insight in to the Gramscian long march through the institutions, and technocrats more generally.
Later works build upon Burnham, such as Sam Francis, 'Leviathan and its Enemies', which I look forward to reading.
October 23, 2017
horribly outdated and utterly wrong in all its predictions
May 1, 2022
Who rules? That’s what we all want to know. The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham’s still-influential 1941 book (the subject, for example, of recent pieces by Aaron Renn and Julius Krein), gave that eternal question a fresh answer. Broadly speaking his was, we can see eighty years later, indisputably the correct analysis. Burnham agreed that capitalism, private enterprise as the engine of the ruling class, was dying, the usual opinion in that tumultuous time, but made the entirely new claim that what would replace it was not, as most assumed, socialism, but a new thing. Namely, the ascent of managers, a new ruling class, who would hugely expand government and use it to mold society into new forms for their own benefit.
The Managerial Revolution is a cousin to Burnham’s 1942 The Machiavellians, in which Burnham more completely laid out his theory of the ruling class, through a Gnostic examination of history. In The Managerial Revolution, he treats as axiomatic that every society must have a ruling class, but this book looks not backward, rather forward, to what our specific new ruling class will be, and how it will rule. Both books suffer somewhat from a belief that human social and political relations can be reduced to an objective science; in 1941, unlike today, an author could still believe the precision of his predictions was only limited because of the “relatively undeveloped stage at which sociological science today rests.” Burnham always aspired to be a pure rationalist, but that made him unable to appreciate that human beings are not machines, and therefore their actions cannot be reduced to the same analysis as physical processes (to be fair, a common error also made by some on today’s postliberal Right). Hence, his claims about the future were wrong in many details, but that does not really detract much from the value of his book.
The Managerial Revolution has to be viewed through the lens of its precise time and place—after all, its subtitle is “What Is Happening in the World.” A key element of men’s thoughts eighty years ago was that the world was in flux, a flux that would lead to entirely new meanings and new ways of existing. The common belief was that anything could happen—unlike today, the gray world of Nietzsche’s Last Man was not on the horizon, though certainly not all possible futures were seen as good. Whatever we may think after decades of propaganda, the then-ongoing war was not the crucial element in this flux; for Burnham, certainly, the war was mostly incidental, merely the present most dramatic manifestation of a broader global turmoil. What mattered was the social systems which were being tested in the refiner’s fire.
Burnham’s basic thesis is that all social systems are converging, in a “social revolution,” into what he calls managerialism. He is perfectly well aware that social change is always constantly occurring in every time and place, and of itself is not hugely noteworthy. It is the rate of change that makes a revolution; if change is fast enough, which it is normally not, the resulting tremors, as it were, create a fracture, and a wholesale change in “the most important economic and political institutions, widespread cultural institutions and beliefs, and ruling groups or classes.” Such revolutions are not common. The most recent one was the replacement, at the end of the Middle Ages, of feudalism by bourgeois capitalism. In the West, that is; Burnham explains his focus on the West by correctly noting that only what the West does matters, or at least has mattered for a very long time. “The modern world has been the world of [the great powers of 1941], not of Afghanistan or Nicaragua or Mongolia.”
What’s a manager? When we think “manager,” we usually think of private enterprise. We may think of a fast-food chain store manager; or of a middle-manager scrabbling to rise in the professional-managerial elite; or of a powerful executive who is seen as managing a corporation. But that’s not what Burnham meant by “manager.” He meant enlightened, intelligent men, only incidentally, and usually not at all, tied to private enterprise, who would use the ever-growing power of the state to ultra-competently arrange all economic matters for the benefit of society—and, not incidentally, also for their own benefit. The McDonald’s manager, in Burnham’s analysis, is a mere wage slave; the executive is irrelevant and subordinate to the real managers, at least once the social revolution is complete.
Managers did originate in private enterprise, as a direct result of the increasing complexity of industrial economies beginning in the nineteenth century. Most individual tasks of workers in 1941 almost always require less skill than in the past, the result of rationalizations of various types (Burnham does not mention Taylorism, but that is the sort of thing he means). The crucial exception is the task of management, which is necessarily becoming vastly more complex, as enterprises become larger and farther-flung (again, Burnham does not mention it, but in short this is because of economies of scale). The fundamental task of “direction and co-ordination” Burnham calls managing, and those who do it managers—in short, those who manage the actual processes of production.
Managers are thus children of capitalism, though they, like the children of Cronos, are overthrowing their father. Under capitalism there is no central, conscious regulation of the economy as a whole. The result was two broad classes of people in society: those with an ownership stake in instruments of production, the bourgeois or capitalists, who are the ruling class, and the proletariat. Nation states fed by global trade are characteristic of capitalism, with those states being (at least theoretically) limited in their powers over economic life, and those states were politically dominated by the bourgeoisie. The belief pattern, or ideology, that underpins capitalism celebrates individualism, and thus private initiative, as well as supposed natural rights, and maintains a firm belief in progress as both necessary and inevitable. (“Democracy” in this analysis is an irrelevant distraction, and Burnham also rejects any form of parliamentarianism, in an analysis not dissimilar to that of Carl Schmitt, who derided the “endless conversation” of modern parliaments.)
What determines the ruling class, in all times and places, is who controls the instruments of production—control of access and preferential treatment in distribution. The latter usually follows the former, but not always. Capitalism as thus outlined seems “natural” to us; nothing can be further from the truth. Capitalism is dying. Not only is it far from permanent, or the final stage of history, or dictated by human nature, it has only existed “for a minute fragment of total human history.” Its imminent death can be seen by the mass unemployment that bedevils capitalism, excessive private and public debt which “cannot be managed much longer,” “permanent agricultural depression” resulting in inadequate food supply; failure to properly adopt technology; and most of all, the impotence of bourgeois ideology in the face of new, powerful ideologies. Collectively, these lead to a fatal loss of self-confidence in the ruling class. “[T]he capitalist organization of society has entered its final years.” One might respond that obviously Burnham was wrong—but he would say that we no longer live under capitalism, whatever the Marxists say, and the problems he lists were solved by the completed transition to managerialism. As we will discuss, the truth is somewhere in-between.
Under managerialism, central, conscious regulation of the economy as a whole is the crucial element. This is required to solve the fatal debilities of capitalism and cannot be accomplished without largely or totally eliminating private enterprise in favor of government central planning. (Friedrich Hayek probably had a stroke, if he ever read this book.) Merely having managers coordinate private enterprise within private enterprise is wholly inadequate. “The basis of the economic structure of managerial society is governmental (state) ownership and control of the major instruments of production. On a world scale, the transition to this economic structure is well advanced. . . . Those who control the state, those whose interests are primarily served by the state, are the ruling class under the structure of state-owned economy.” This is the new ruling class—the managers, who control both access to the means of production and receive preferential distribution of the fruits—though not necessarily in cash, like the capitalists, but more often in-kind, as the result of stratified access to services, privileges, and other fruits of power.
Socialism, what most were predicting would replace capitalism, a society that is classless, fully democratic, and international, has never existed anywhere, and never will. Burnham offers much theoretical discussion on this topic (he was a repentant Trotskyist, only having emerged from its spell in 1939), but it all boils down to that it’s never worked, and is never going to. With the vigor of a recovered cult member, Burnham sneers at those who repeat that “socialism has never had a chance.” Whether it is moral, or more moral than capitalism, is irrelevant. It is not coming.
We are now living through a new revolution, the managerial revolution, which will result in the total replacement, in the time period 1915 to1965, of capitalism by managerialism. In 1941, what Burnham saw was an ongoing struggle for power, for who will be the ruling class, not dissimilar to that around the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but foreshortened and the outcome certain. This revolution is and will be world-wide. “The economic framework in which this social dominance of the managers will be assured is based upon the state ownership of the major instruments of production. Within this framework there will be no direct property rights in the major instruments of production vested in individuals as individuals.” Managers will not, as individuals, control the means of production; they will control the state, which will control the means of production, and they will modify the institutions of the state in order to further ensure this. They must; without governmental expansion and control by managers thereof; the position of managers will always be precarious. Managers are thus the new ruling class.
As with the rise of capitalism, ideology will buttress this seizure of power; the relevant ideologies “have not yet been fully worked out” but are approximated by Leninism-Stalinism, National Socialism, “and, at a more primitive level, by New Dealism and such less influential American ideologies as ‘technocracy.’ ” (We can debate if the currently ascendant ideology of late-stage leftism is the current such master ideology, but that’s a topic for another day.) The term “socialism,” as used by these ideologies, has nothing to do with actual socialism; the term “is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favorable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.” Intellectuals will again work out these ideologies, serving, again without meaning to, the new ruling class. This is not mere prediction; it is “an interpretation of what already has happened and is now happening.”
So far, so coherent. On the other hand, Burnham failed to see that, unlike past social systems, managerialism contains within itself no mechanism to either enforce competency or to limit parasitism, which led him to grossly overestimate the competence of managerialism, especially its long-term competence. Under feudalism, rigid social expectations and limited overall wealth meant that the ruling class had to maintain a basic level of competency and could not engage in stupidity, nor in elite overproduction (hence the medieval focus on what to do with second and third sons). Under capitalism, social expectations were less rigid, but still strong, and the need to turn a profit disciplined the ruling class and limited its membership. No profit, not a bourgeois for long. But under today’s managerialism, and modern giant economies (even if much of those economies is fake), for reasons perhaps unrelated to managerialism, or perhaps indeed related, there are no longer any social expectations, except to burn incense at the altar of globohomo, and there is no discipline of the market, thus allowing managerialism to become, in effect, the largest tapeworm in the Universe. Certainly, today’s managers offer no semblance of the rule of law, something Burnham correctly identifies in The Machiavellians as a key component of ruling class legitimacy.
For a brief moment in the 1940s, when for ideological reasons dedicated (to one ideology or another), smart young men around the world were pouring into managerial positions, it seemed logical that this was the future, and competence would abound. But, as George Orwell says in a highly critical review/essay reprinted at the front of this book, from 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” which discusses both The Machiavellians and The Managerial Revolution, this is just another example of Burnham’s besetting sin of always “predicting the continuation of the thing that is happening.” (I quote this phrase constantly, applying it far more broadly than to Burnham, especially to the passivist Right.) Expanding on this, Orwell notes that “Power worship [of which Orwell accused Burnham] blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.” Burnham fell over and over into this trap, which makes him an outstanding analyst and a very flawed prophet.
Seeing, and making explicit reference to, the supposed success of Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany, Burnham concludes that government expansion is inevitable because government is inherently and always superior to private enterprise. He approves of “centralized state direction, managed currency, state foreign-trade monopoly, compulsory labor, and prices and wages controlled independently of any free market competition,” because thereby “the whole economy can be directed toward aims other than profit.” The government will be the only major employer, and this will not be slavery, but efficiency. The crises that afflict capitalist economies will disappear. The long-term production curve will go up, instead of down, as it is under capitalism. Private enterprise simply is unable to ever produce the amount of goods necessary for the modern world (leaving aside what goods those are). The masses will be far better off under managerialism than under capitalism (though no doubt the ruling class will fight among itself, and try to extend its privileges relative to the masses, just as does any ruling class). Five-year plans and ten-year plans created by centralized planners, the new sovereigns, are wonderful and are the future. Russia and Germany are showing the way—whether we like it or not. As always, Burnham violently rejects any moral overlay or any moral judgments.
Crucially, Burnham sees America as behind in this important process—behind Russia, behind Germany, even behind Italy. As government expands ever more into the economy, the capitalist sphere necessarily shrinks, and that of managers expands. Some of this is actual government enterprise; even in America, “half or more of the population is dependent wholly, or in determining part, upon government for the means of living.” Even more of it is government regulation, which also necessarily reduces capitalist sway. Regulation is wonderful; it is only inefficient when the capitalists dare to interfere with it. America, under Roosevelt, is working toward managerialism, but needs to accelerate the process.
With the benefit of decades under our belt, we can see that Burnham was right about managers being the new ruling class, but very wrong that this would be a more efficient system. Those who suffered through the “management” of our response to the Wuhan Plague with open eyes, for example, can no longer have any faith whatsoever in managers. But that’s only one of millions of examples, and really, he should have known better, because history shows that rule by bureaucrats may have a brief efflorescence, usually during what John Glubb called the Age of Pioneers of a civilization, but always quickly becomes sclerotic and corrupt, from Cleopatra to the Ottomans. Burnham places a great deal of emphasis on the Germans and their success in management, and maybe that’s a counter-example, but I’m increasingly convinced that using Germans as historical examples of anything is a mistake, because they are, or they were, you know, Germans.
It’s just about now that we’re seeing that we’re going to have to pay the piper for eighty years of managerialism, but better late than never, I suppose, to get the inevitable over with. Facile and simple minds might object that capitalism is still very much with us; what about the Lords of Tech, with their massive profits? But they are not capitalists at all, of course; almost all of today’s “capitalists” are managers in disguise, who manipulate the government to achieve profits, using various forms of rent extraction to line their pockets. The name for this is corporatism, and in corporatism, it is the government that calls the tune. And even when there is no such direct cooperative manipulation today, there is still no free enterprise, because the managers, that is, the government, minutely dictate in all instances what free enterprise is permitted to do, and what, if any, profits may be kept. That’s not even mentioning the enormous amount of simple stupidity that is the fruit of managerialism, because smart people are few and far between, and hard-working smart ones even rarer. We have, whatever Burnham hoped, in fact declined into the worst possible kind of governance—a “technocracy” of dumb people who spend all their time stealing.
Still, all of what Burnham says is interesting . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
The Managerial Revolution is a cousin to Burnham’s 1942 The Machiavellians, in which Burnham more completely laid out his theory of the ruling class, through a Gnostic examination of history. In The Managerial Revolution, he treats as axiomatic that every society must have a ruling class, but this book looks not backward, rather forward, to what our specific new ruling class will be, and how it will rule. Both books suffer somewhat from a belief that human social and political relations can be reduced to an objective science; in 1941, unlike today, an author could still believe the precision of his predictions was only limited because of the “relatively undeveloped stage at which sociological science today rests.” Burnham always aspired to be a pure rationalist, but that made him unable to appreciate that human beings are not machines, and therefore their actions cannot be reduced to the same analysis as physical processes (to be fair, a common error also made by some on today’s postliberal Right). Hence, his claims about the future were wrong in many details, but that does not really detract much from the value of his book.
The Managerial Revolution has to be viewed through the lens of its precise time and place—after all, its subtitle is “What Is Happening in the World.” A key element of men’s thoughts eighty years ago was that the world was in flux, a flux that would lead to entirely new meanings and new ways of existing. The common belief was that anything could happen—unlike today, the gray world of Nietzsche’s Last Man was not on the horizon, though certainly not all possible futures were seen as good. Whatever we may think after decades of propaganda, the then-ongoing war was not the crucial element in this flux; for Burnham, certainly, the war was mostly incidental, merely the present most dramatic manifestation of a broader global turmoil. What mattered was the social systems which were being tested in the refiner’s fire.
Burnham’s basic thesis is that all social systems are converging, in a “social revolution,” into what he calls managerialism. He is perfectly well aware that social change is always constantly occurring in every time and place, and of itself is not hugely noteworthy. It is the rate of change that makes a revolution; if change is fast enough, which it is normally not, the resulting tremors, as it were, create a fracture, and a wholesale change in “the most important economic and political institutions, widespread cultural institutions and beliefs, and ruling groups or classes.” Such revolutions are not common. The most recent one was the replacement, at the end of the Middle Ages, of feudalism by bourgeois capitalism. In the West, that is; Burnham explains his focus on the West by correctly noting that only what the West does matters, or at least has mattered for a very long time. “The modern world has been the world of [the great powers of 1941], not of Afghanistan or Nicaragua or Mongolia.”
What’s a manager? When we think “manager,” we usually think of private enterprise. We may think of a fast-food chain store manager; or of a middle-manager scrabbling to rise in the professional-managerial elite; or of a powerful executive who is seen as managing a corporation. But that’s not what Burnham meant by “manager.” He meant enlightened, intelligent men, only incidentally, and usually not at all, tied to private enterprise, who would use the ever-growing power of the state to ultra-competently arrange all economic matters for the benefit of society—and, not incidentally, also for their own benefit. The McDonald’s manager, in Burnham’s analysis, is a mere wage slave; the executive is irrelevant and subordinate to the real managers, at least once the social revolution is complete.
Managers did originate in private enterprise, as a direct result of the increasing complexity of industrial economies beginning in the nineteenth century. Most individual tasks of workers in 1941 almost always require less skill than in the past, the result of rationalizations of various types (Burnham does not mention Taylorism, but that is the sort of thing he means). The crucial exception is the task of management, which is necessarily becoming vastly more complex, as enterprises become larger and farther-flung (again, Burnham does not mention it, but in short this is because of economies of scale). The fundamental task of “direction and co-ordination” Burnham calls managing, and those who do it managers—in short, those who manage the actual processes of production.
Managers are thus children of capitalism, though they, like the children of Cronos, are overthrowing their father. Under capitalism there is no central, conscious regulation of the economy as a whole. The result was two broad classes of people in society: those with an ownership stake in instruments of production, the bourgeois or capitalists, who are the ruling class, and the proletariat. Nation states fed by global trade are characteristic of capitalism, with those states being (at least theoretically) limited in their powers over economic life, and those states were politically dominated by the bourgeoisie. The belief pattern, or ideology, that underpins capitalism celebrates individualism, and thus private initiative, as well as supposed natural rights, and maintains a firm belief in progress as both necessary and inevitable. (“Democracy” in this analysis is an irrelevant distraction, and Burnham also rejects any form of parliamentarianism, in an analysis not dissimilar to that of Carl Schmitt, who derided the “endless conversation” of modern parliaments.)
What determines the ruling class, in all times and places, is who controls the instruments of production—control of access and preferential treatment in distribution. The latter usually follows the former, but not always. Capitalism as thus outlined seems “natural” to us; nothing can be further from the truth. Capitalism is dying. Not only is it far from permanent, or the final stage of history, or dictated by human nature, it has only existed “for a minute fragment of total human history.” Its imminent death can be seen by the mass unemployment that bedevils capitalism, excessive private and public debt which “cannot be managed much longer,” “permanent agricultural depression” resulting in inadequate food supply; failure to properly adopt technology; and most of all, the impotence of bourgeois ideology in the face of new, powerful ideologies. Collectively, these lead to a fatal loss of self-confidence in the ruling class. “[T]he capitalist organization of society has entered its final years.” One might respond that obviously Burnham was wrong—but he would say that we no longer live under capitalism, whatever the Marxists say, and the problems he lists were solved by the completed transition to managerialism. As we will discuss, the truth is somewhere in-between.
Under managerialism, central, conscious regulation of the economy as a whole is the crucial element. This is required to solve the fatal debilities of capitalism and cannot be accomplished without largely or totally eliminating private enterprise in favor of government central planning. (Friedrich Hayek probably had a stroke, if he ever read this book.) Merely having managers coordinate private enterprise within private enterprise is wholly inadequate. “The basis of the economic structure of managerial society is governmental (state) ownership and control of the major instruments of production. On a world scale, the transition to this economic structure is well advanced. . . . Those who control the state, those whose interests are primarily served by the state, are the ruling class under the structure of state-owned economy.” This is the new ruling class—the managers, who control both access to the means of production and receive preferential distribution of the fruits—though not necessarily in cash, like the capitalists, but more often in-kind, as the result of stratified access to services, privileges, and other fruits of power.
Socialism, what most were predicting would replace capitalism, a society that is classless, fully democratic, and international, has never existed anywhere, and never will. Burnham offers much theoretical discussion on this topic (he was a repentant Trotskyist, only having emerged from its spell in 1939), but it all boils down to that it’s never worked, and is never going to. With the vigor of a recovered cult member, Burnham sneers at those who repeat that “socialism has never had a chance.” Whether it is moral, or more moral than capitalism, is irrelevant. It is not coming.
We are now living through a new revolution, the managerial revolution, which will result in the total replacement, in the time period 1915 to1965, of capitalism by managerialism. In 1941, what Burnham saw was an ongoing struggle for power, for who will be the ruling class, not dissimilar to that around the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but foreshortened and the outcome certain. This revolution is and will be world-wide. “The economic framework in which this social dominance of the managers will be assured is based upon the state ownership of the major instruments of production. Within this framework there will be no direct property rights in the major instruments of production vested in individuals as individuals.” Managers will not, as individuals, control the means of production; they will control the state, which will control the means of production, and they will modify the institutions of the state in order to further ensure this. They must; without governmental expansion and control by managers thereof; the position of managers will always be precarious. Managers are thus the new ruling class.
As with the rise of capitalism, ideology will buttress this seizure of power; the relevant ideologies “have not yet been fully worked out” but are approximated by Leninism-Stalinism, National Socialism, “and, at a more primitive level, by New Dealism and such less influential American ideologies as ‘technocracy.’ ” (We can debate if the currently ascendant ideology of late-stage leftism is the current such master ideology, but that’s a topic for another day.) The term “socialism,” as used by these ideologies, has nothing to do with actual socialism; the term “is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favorable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.” Intellectuals will again work out these ideologies, serving, again without meaning to, the new ruling class. This is not mere prediction; it is “an interpretation of what already has happened and is now happening.”
So far, so coherent. On the other hand, Burnham failed to see that, unlike past social systems, managerialism contains within itself no mechanism to either enforce competency or to limit parasitism, which led him to grossly overestimate the competence of managerialism, especially its long-term competence. Under feudalism, rigid social expectations and limited overall wealth meant that the ruling class had to maintain a basic level of competency and could not engage in stupidity, nor in elite overproduction (hence the medieval focus on what to do with second and third sons). Under capitalism, social expectations were less rigid, but still strong, and the need to turn a profit disciplined the ruling class and limited its membership. No profit, not a bourgeois for long. But under today’s managerialism, and modern giant economies (even if much of those economies is fake), for reasons perhaps unrelated to managerialism, or perhaps indeed related, there are no longer any social expectations, except to burn incense at the altar of globohomo, and there is no discipline of the market, thus allowing managerialism to become, in effect, the largest tapeworm in the Universe. Certainly, today’s managers offer no semblance of the rule of law, something Burnham correctly identifies in The Machiavellians as a key component of ruling class legitimacy.
For a brief moment in the 1940s, when for ideological reasons dedicated (to one ideology or another), smart young men around the world were pouring into managerial positions, it seemed logical that this was the future, and competence would abound. But, as George Orwell says in a highly critical review/essay reprinted at the front of this book, from 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” which discusses both The Machiavellians and The Managerial Revolution, this is just another example of Burnham’s besetting sin of always “predicting the continuation of the thing that is happening.” (I quote this phrase constantly, applying it far more broadly than to Burnham, especially to the passivist Right.) Expanding on this, Orwell notes that “Power worship [of which Orwell accused Burnham] blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.” Burnham fell over and over into this trap, which makes him an outstanding analyst and a very flawed prophet.
Seeing, and making explicit reference to, the supposed success of Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany, Burnham concludes that government expansion is inevitable because government is inherently and always superior to private enterprise. He approves of “centralized state direction, managed currency, state foreign-trade monopoly, compulsory labor, and prices and wages controlled independently of any free market competition,” because thereby “the whole economy can be directed toward aims other than profit.” The government will be the only major employer, and this will not be slavery, but efficiency. The crises that afflict capitalist economies will disappear. The long-term production curve will go up, instead of down, as it is under capitalism. Private enterprise simply is unable to ever produce the amount of goods necessary for the modern world (leaving aside what goods those are). The masses will be far better off under managerialism than under capitalism (though no doubt the ruling class will fight among itself, and try to extend its privileges relative to the masses, just as does any ruling class). Five-year plans and ten-year plans created by centralized planners, the new sovereigns, are wonderful and are the future. Russia and Germany are showing the way—whether we like it or not. As always, Burnham violently rejects any moral overlay or any moral judgments.
Crucially, Burnham sees America as behind in this important process—behind Russia, behind Germany, even behind Italy. As government expands ever more into the economy, the capitalist sphere necessarily shrinks, and that of managers expands. Some of this is actual government enterprise; even in America, “half or more of the population is dependent wholly, or in determining part, upon government for the means of living.” Even more of it is government regulation, which also necessarily reduces capitalist sway. Regulation is wonderful; it is only inefficient when the capitalists dare to interfere with it. America, under Roosevelt, is working toward managerialism, but needs to accelerate the process.
With the benefit of decades under our belt, we can see that Burnham was right about managers being the new ruling class, but very wrong that this would be a more efficient system. Those who suffered through the “management” of our response to the Wuhan Plague with open eyes, for example, can no longer have any faith whatsoever in managers. But that’s only one of millions of examples, and really, he should have known better, because history shows that rule by bureaucrats may have a brief efflorescence, usually during what John Glubb called the Age of Pioneers of a civilization, but always quickly becomes sclerotic and corrupt, from Cleopatra to the Ottomans. Burnham places a great deal of emphasis on the Germans and their success in management, and maybe that’s a counter-example, but I’m increasingly convinced that using Germans as historical examples of anything is a mistake, because they are, or they were, you know, Germans.
It’s just about now that we’re seeing that we’re going to have to pay the piper for eighty years of managerialism, but better late than never, I suppose, to get the inevitable over with. Facile and simple minds might object that capitalism is still very much with us; what about the Lords of Tech, with their massive profits? But they are not capitalists at all, of course; almost all of today’s “capitalists” are managers in disguise, who manipulate the government to achieve profits, using various forms of rent extraction to line their pockets. The name for this is corporatism, and in corporatism, it is the government that calls the tune. And even when there is no such direct cooperative manipulation today, there is still no free enterprise, because the managers, that is, the government, minutely dictate in all instances what free enterprise is permitted to do, and what, if any, profits may be kept. That’s not even mentioning the enormous amount of simple stupidity that is the fruit of managerialism, because smart people are few and far between, and hard-working smart ones even rarer. We have, whatever Burnham hoped, in fact declined into the worst possible kind of governance—a “technocracy” of dumb people who spend all their time stealing.
Still, all of what Burnham says is interesting . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
October 8, 2024
The obituary of liberal capitalism and the last good work of speculative dialectical historicism, tempered by a clearheaded and chilling political Realism.
Burnham's analytical approach towards economics and politics is ridiculously powerful and, though, I have to admit, his writing style here was not quite yet on the same level as his later works, this was undeniably one of the most important works of political economy written in the 20th century.
Over a century into managerial dominion, and 80 years after the publication of this book, there's hardly any fault we can find with Burnham's analysis, and wherever we do find points to object to, those are almost always the very specific details of his predictions, which he tended to be rather conservative with. And the deviation of practice from theory stems from the empirical results of the completion of the managerial revolution being vastly more severe and elaborate than his expectations and only prove that Burnham was right, even more so than he himself might have imagined. And so, I'd try to justify and defend his seemingly wrong predictions.
The point of contention would be some of his incorrect, or rather, not entirely accurate, geopolitical predictions. And though Burnham may have gotten the specifics wrong, as far as the theory of the managerial revolution is concerned, the realities of the political economy are pretty much just as Burnham predicted them. Those are inaccuracies which we can explain with the rather obvious observations that: Firstly, this book was written in the heat of WW2 and.. Second, that the technological acceleration of the 60s through the 80s was unpredictable, insane, but also strangely elusive and subversively disrupting polities and economies at large.
It's no surprise that Burnham, like many of his contemporaries, believed in German victory in the war (shocker, I know), and though the war progressed differently, it had to do precisely with the rapid evolution of managerialism throughout the Allied nations. But of course, due to (not-unjustified) historical prejudice, the impotence of the British empire (and the most passive surrender of France) clouded the judgement of many and instilled an unquestionable belief in total German dominance and victory.
Sure, Germany is no longer on the map, or at least not as a sovereign entity. It's now just another province of the Global American Empire, like the rest of Europe. Also, there is no European managerial superstate as he envisioned. And while, yeah, there's the EU, it is simply just the means for consolidating the American dominion over the continent, rather than a separate sovereign institution. Moreover, in a very similar fashion, Japan is an absolutely irrelevant American satellite as well, once again proving Burnham wrong...
However, there is China, and there is the Russian Federation, both mapped 1:1 with his predictions for managerial supernational states in Europe and Asia. And there are also a handful of other nations which have some sort of a somewhat autonomous and semi-sovereign status, like Iran and India for example. This is all perfectly in line with his central thesis, even if he may have incorrectly believed that it would be different managerial polities to contend with the GAE.
And of course, there is the US.. whereas the New Deal was the managerial initiation, the system extended further, much further, at much slower but much steadier pace than Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and unlike the other powers, the managerial development wasn't marked by a turbulent, all-encompassing social destruction. It did take awhile but the new managerial doctrine of the US was completed with the CRA movement, with its own version of terrorism and pogroms. The cold war being, obviously, the struggle for power of the managerial superstates (or just an early one in a series of many), as envisioned by Burnham, and which affirmed and exacerbated Roosevelt's revolution developing it into the most sophisticated, complex and complete managerial project in the world..
Even so, while the domination of the GAE's technocracy is admirable - and frightening -, with its hodgepodge aesthetics of socialism, liberalism and puritan conservatism, the vast and complex network of NGOs dedicated to their 'public-private partnerships' throughout the globe, its cultural decay and atrophy are obvious and undeniable in the 2020s, though not as extreme and apocalyptic as many political fanatics (of any fraction) are trying to make them out to be. And it will be interesting to see how this social organism will evolve in the near future.
And while, in retrospect, bureaucracy really is a more fitting term to describe the social structure, Burnham's 'Managerial revolution' is like a potion of clarity, which is very much needed for updating our understanding (and language) of political economy.
It is painfully obvious, to those who have been paying attention, that the modern economic debate is mind-numbingly useless, tedious, and antiquated. It can be described as, on the one hand, a gang of braindead imbeciles who are ecstatically waiting for the collapse™ of capitalism and the ushering in of the Glorious new socialist age, and on the other hand, the dimwitted dupes who are vigorously defending(lmao) a fake "ideal" that vaguely represents the corpse of something that's been dead for over a century now. And it's really simple to understand this. Those who still cling on to the terminology of capitalism and socialism in an attempt to describe anything within our reality well into the 21st century can easily be ignored as manipulative ideologues, or the morons subjugated to them, and with Burnham's works we can develop anti-bodies resistant to their nonsense.
Burnham's analytical approach towards economics and politics is ridiculously powerful and, though, I have to admit, his writing style here was not quite yet on the same level as his later works, this was undeniably one of the most important works of political economy written in the 20th century.
Over a century into managerial dominion, and 80 years after the publication of this book, there's hardly any fault we can find with Burnham's analysis, and wherever we do find points to object to, those are almost always the very specific details of his predictions, which he tended to be rather conservative with. And the deviation of practice from theory stems from the empirical results of the completion of the managerial revolution being vastly more severe and elaborate than his expectations and only prove that Burnham was right, even more so than he himself might have imagined. And so, I'd try to justify and defend his seemingly wrong predictions.
The point of contention would be some of his incorrect, or rather, not entirely accurate, geopolitical predictions. And though Burnham may have gotten the specifics wrong, as far as the theory of the managerial revolution is concerned, the realities of the political economy are pretty much just as Burnham predicted them. Those are inaccuracies which we can explain with the rather obvious observations that: Firstly, this book was written in the heat of WW2 and.. Second, that the technological acceleration of the 60s through the 80s was unpredictable, insane, but also strangely elusive and subversively disrupting polities and economies at large.
It's no surprise that Burnham, like many of his contemporaries, believed in German victory in the war (shocker, I know), and though the war progressed differently, it had to do precisely with the rapid evolution of managerialism throughout the Allied nations. But of course, due to (not-unjustified) historical prejudice, the impotence of the British empire (and the most passive surrender of France) clouded the judgement of many and instilled an unquestionable belief in total German dominance and victory.
Sure, Germany is no longer on the map, or at least not as a sovereign entity. It's now just another province of the Global American Empire, like the rest of Europe. Also, there is no European managerial superstate as he envisioned. And while, yeah, there's the EU, it is simply just the means for consolidating the American dominion over the continent, rather than a separate sovereign institution. Moreover, in a very similar fashion, Japan is an absolutely irrelevant American satellite as well, once again proving Burnham wrong...
However, there is China, and there is the Russian Federation, both mapped 1:1 with his predictions for managerial supernational states in Europe and Asia. And there are also a handful of other nations which have some sort of a somewhat autonomous and semi-sovereign status, like Iran and India for example. This is all perfectly in line with his central thesis, even if he may have incorrectly believed that it would be different managerial polities to contend with the GAE.
And of course, there is the US.. whereas the New Deal was the managerial initiation, the system extended further, much further, at much slower but much steadier pace than Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, and unlike the other powers, the managerial development wasn't marked by a turbulent, all-encompassing social destruction. It did take awhile but the new managerial doctrine of the US was completed with the CRA movement, with its own version of terrorism and pogroms. The cold war being, obviously, the struggle for power of the managerial superstates (or just an early one in a series of many), as envisioned by Burnham, and which affirmed and exacerbated Roosevelt's revolution developing it into the most sophisticated, complex and complete managerial project in the world..
Even so, while the domination of the GAE's technocracy is admirable - and frightening -, with its hodgepodge aesthetics of socialism, liberalism and puritan conservatism, the vast and complex network of NGOs dedicated to their 'public-private partnerships' throughout the globe, its cultural decay and atrophy are obvious and undeniable in the 2020s, though not as extreme and apocalyptic as many political fanatics (of any fraction) are trying to make them out to be. And it will be interesting to see how this social organism will evolve in the near future.
And while, in retrospect, bureaucracy really is a more fitting term to describe the social structure, Burnham's 'Managerial revolution' is like a potion of clarity, which is very much needed for updating our understanding (and language) of political economy.
It is painfully obvious, to those who have been paying attention, that the modern economic debate is mind-numbingly useless, tedious, and antiquated. It can be described as, on the one hand, a gang of braindead imbeciles who are ecstatically waiting for the collapse™ of capitalism and the ushering in of the Glorious new socialist age, and on the other hand, the dimwitted dupes who are vigorously defending(lmao) a fake "ideal" that vaguely represents the corpse of something that's been dead for over a century now. And it's really simple to understand this. Those who still cling on to the terminology of capitalism and socialism in an attempt to describe anything within our reality well into the 21st century can easily be ignored as manipulative ideologues, or the morons subjugated to them, and with Burnham's works we can develop anti-bodies resistant to their nonsense.
December 22, 2022
In this work, Author James Burnham describes the transformation of capitalist society to what he calls "managerial society". Capitalism is dead, socialism won't replace it, instead rule by manager and bureacrats will come about.
The analyses Burnham provides is incorrect about half of the time, and his predictions about the future are quite a bit worse than that.
Why did Burnham believe in the correctness of his theory? First because he's quite clearly a product of his time, this book was written in 1940, at the end of the period we call the great depression. Burnham has clearly overlearned the lesson of this period, and has taken the same erroneous conclusion many communist of the time took. That capitalism as an econmic system is no longer capable of dealing with the problems of the modern world.
He did however rather correctly interpreted the events of the Russian revolution. Which failed to achieve socialism (at least any sort of socialism which Marx or any marxist pre 1917 would've recognised as socialism), but did not however return to capitalism. Instead an economy run by bureacrats came about.
Burnham also correctly notes that as the economy becomes more complex, the amount of, and importance of bureaucrats and technical specialists increases. Governments face a similar phenomenon.
Eventually he claims, these bureaucrats gain so much control over economy and goverment that they as a class gain control of it, and thus become the new ruling class of society.
The problem with his theory as a whole is that it seeks to explain everything that happens in society due to this newfound importance of the managers.
He interprets everything through an economic lens, a grave mistake by itself, which is then made worse by the fact that Burnham's understanding of economics and capitalism is, to put it lightly, less than perfect.
However there is an idea to be salvaged from this otherwised rather flawed work.
The existence of the managers as a class is a reality. Bureaucrats have a very significant amount of control over the world's governments. And managers, directors etc determine the behaviour of corporations to a very large extent, despite not technically owning the corporations they manage.
This is true in 2022 even more so than it was in 1940.
The analyses Burnham provides is incorrect about half of the time, and his predictions about the future are quite a bit worse than that.
Why did Burnham believe in the correctness of his theory? First because he's quite clearly a product of his time, this book was written in 1940, at the end of the period we call the great depression. Burnham has clearly overlearned the lesson of this period, and has taken the same erroneous conclusion many communist of the time took. That capitalism as an econmic system is no longer capable of dealing with the problems of the modern world.
He did however rather correctly interpreted the events of the Russian revolution. Which failed to achieve socialism (at least any sort of socialism which Marx or any marxist pre 1917 would've recognised as socialism), but did not however return to capitalism. Instead an economy run by bureacrats came about.
Burnham also correctly notes that as the economy becomes more complex, the amount of, and importance of bureaucrats and technical specialists increases. Governments face a similar phenomenon.
Eventually he claims, these bureaucrats gain so much control over economy and goverment that they as a class gain control of it, and thus become the new ruling class of society.
The problem with his theory as a whole is that it seeks to explain everything that happens in society due to this newfound importance of the managers.
He interprets everything through an economic lens, a grave mistake by itself, which is then made worse by the fact that Burnham's understanding of economics and capitalism is, to put it lightly, less than perfect.
However there is an idea to be salvaged from this otherwised rather flawed work.
The existence of the managers as a class is a reality. Bureaucrats have a very significant amount of control over the world's governments. And managers, directors etc determine the behaviour of corporations to a very large extent, despite not technically owning the corporations they manage.
This is true in 2022 even more so than it was in 1940.
August 14, 2023
Burnham argued that capitalism was a temporary form of organization currently being transformed into some non-socialist future form of society.
Burnham argued correctly that capitalism could not be regarded as an immutable and permanent form. In Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished."
The worldwide mass unemployment of the depression era was, for Burnham, indicative that capitalism was itself "not going to continue much longer."
He was wrong that capitalism was finished, underrated its capacity to remake itself...but he was absolutely correct that historic capitalism could not continue down the same road, and it has certainly mutated....into something we now call neo-liberal capitalism.
Burnham looked around the world for indications of the new form of society which was emerging to replace historic capitalism and saw certain commonalities between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "New Deal." Authoritarianism in all its forms as anarchists would say. Of course Burnham was not anarchist, far from it.
Burnham argued that over a comparatively short period, which he dated from the first world war, a new society had emerged in which a "social group or class" which Burnham called "managers" had engaged in a "drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class." As Michael Albert (ie. Parecon) would say 'the coordinator class' (from a completely opposite political direction).
Burnham was arguing that whether ownership was corporate and private or statist and governmental, the essential demarcation between the ruling elite (executives and managers on the one hand, bureaucrats and functionaries on the other) and the mass of society was not ownership so much as it was control of the means of production.
Burnham's arguments stemmed partly from the idea of bureaucratic collectivism first introduced to Trotskyism by Yvan Craipeau, but in Burnham's case from a conservative Machiavellian rather than a Marxist viewpoint.
Burnham argued correctly that capitalism could not be regarded as an immutable and permanent form. In Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished."
The worldwide mass unemployment of the depression era was, for Burnham, indicative that capitalism was itself "not going to continue much longer."
He was wrong that capitalism was finished, underrated its capacity to remake itself...but he was absolutely correct that historic capitalism could not continue down the same road, and it has certainly mutated....into something we now call neo-liberal capitalism.
Burnham looked around the world for indications of the new form of society which was emerging to replace historic capitalism and saw certain commonalities between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "New Deal." Authoritarianism in all its forms as anarchists would say. Of course Burnham was not anarchist, far from it.
Burnham argued that over a comparatively short period, which he dated from the first world war, a new society had emerged in which a "social group or class" which Burnham called "managers" had engaged in a "drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class." As Michael Albert (ie. Parecon) would say 'the coordinator class' (from a completely opposite political direction).
Burnham was arguing that whether ownership was corporate and private or statist and governmental, the essential demarcation between the ruling elite (executives and managers on the one hand, bureaucrats and functionaries on the other) and the mass of society was not ownership so much as it was control of the means of production.
Burnham's arguments stemmed partly from the idea of bureaucratic collectivism first introduced to Trotskyism by Yvan Craipeau, but in Burnham's case from a conservative Machiavellian rather than a Marxist viewpoint.
June 24, 2018
The Managerial Revolution was written in 1940 and published in the spring of 1941, before the United States entered World War Two as a combatant and Hitler betrayed Stalin with Operation Barbarossa. The memory of the Great Depression was still sharp in James Burnham's mind. He predicts that the days of capitalism are numbered, and he believes that socialism, in the sense of a classless, democratic society, is impossible. In the book he puts forth the hypothesis that capitalist society is in the process of being replaced by "managerial society," the rule of a managerial class.
As you probably know, this didn't happen in the First World. Whereas it's true that the government now controls much more of society than it formerly has, capitalism is still with us to a large extent. Furthermore, Burnham makes a lot of other predictions in this book that also didn't come true.
Why, then, should one bother to read it? Well, Burnham wasn't an idiot. He had an orderly, logical, well informed mind. In this book he gives rational reasons for the predictions he makes. If the reader asks himself while he reads why Burnham's predictions failed, he will no doubt find the experience enlightening.
As you probably know, this didn't happen in the First World. Whereas it's true that the government now controls much more of society than it formerly has, capitalism is still with us to a large extent. Furthermore, Burnham makes a lot of other predictions in this book that also didn't come true.
Why, then, should one bother to read it? Well, Burnham wasn't an idiot. He had an orderly, logical, well informed mind. In this book he gives rational reasons for the predictions he makes. If the reader asks himself while he reads why Burnham's predictions failed, he will no doubt find the experience enlightening.
May 19, 2023
Audible. 3.5 stars. Really interesting thesis, probably should've stopped after the first 3 chapters.
June 16, 2023
Книга написана в 1933 году и обосновывает концепт Менеджериализма - власти менеджеров, идущей на смену каритализму и невозможному коммунизму-социализму. Интересная идея, не такая уж и заведомо ошибочная, как может поквзаться с первого прочтения. Стоит поглядеть на Китай и Южную Корею с Сингапуром
July 1, 2022
A notable book in the history of conservative political thought. Burnham argued the future of politics would be managerial (i.e., rule by bureaucratic types in industry and government), rather than capitalist or socialist. Burnham goes on to look at how managerialism has been implemented in three societies, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and New Deal America. The book holds up well for a non-fiction title from a different era (Burnham writes in clear, concise prose) and, despite some faulty predictions, has in many ways been vindicated by subsequent developments.
October 5, 2020
https://beingbeliefbehavior.blogspot....
the lukewarm review is because I believe the set of people that will find this book useful is quite small -- but if you have a fairly strong desire to get a bit deeper into the "path" or "random walk" of history, you will find it at least interesting.
the lukewarm review is because I believe the set of people that will find this book useful is quite small -- but if you have a fairly strong desire to get a bit deeper into the "path" or "random walk" of history, you will find it at least interesting.
February 14, 2021
I think it’s safe to say that Karl Marx would not have recognized the mystical lands behind the iron curtain. I think it’s also fair to say that Adam Smith would not have recognized 1950s America. I do however believe that James Burnham would recognize our current world order.
We are trained to think of only two mechanisms of social organization. Capitalism and Marxism. Capitalism, which started in the late middle ages (circa 1300s?) and ended in 1914 in a tremendous explosion of violence; and Marxism which was never more than a utopian idea. There’s a reason for this, capitalism provided a more natural division of power, wresting from one group of oligarchs and giving to another in a process of power-destruction which led to a greater period of freedom and the accompanying prosperity. Marxism was too easily coopted by the powerful and didn’t last the first few bursts of collective farms or worker-managed factories before it was centralized into communism, the first baby-managerial ideology (which itself only lasted about 70 years).
Which is all moot, at any rate, because both of those methods for social organization are now over. We are in a new mechanism, what James Burnham called a “Managerial Society”. That is what his book “Managerial Revolution” is about. And we are now firmly in Burnham’s “Managerial Society”. Now, I don’t really like the moniker – as you don’t. But this book is careful to remind us that what we call things is less important than the mechanisms by which our current society is organized. Capitalism, that method of social organization which dethroned feudalism and created a world of such tremendous prosperity and newly discovered liberty that it destroyed itself out of excess stuff, is now over. It could not survive the consolidation of economic power that was the end result of the incredible revolution of productivity (the industrial revolution) in which the division of labor engendered a powerless class manning the assembly lines and a group of – wait for it – managers, who controlled the mechanisms of production responding to the extraordinary economies of scale.
It is, however, more the philosophical child of Plato than Aristotle. Incidentally this is why modern managerialism fits better in the Democratic party than the Republican – Democrats are the more natural inheritors of collectivist political projects (‘New Deal’ and eugenics and Planned Parenthood and minimum wage and other attempts at social class-creation), they fit more neatly and are more comfortable with the herd (and know best how to manage it); whereas republicans – the offspring of Aristotle – have a more libertarian “leave me the hell alone” strain to them. But it should be mentioned that neither the .1% nor the 9.9% are necessarily party-affiliated. It is about class, not party and certainly not about ideology. Ideology is only deployed as a useful weapon by individuals vying against their competitors to join the 9.9% (or to hold their perch, at all costs there).
A few years ago I wrote a piece called “What is going on?” In this piece, I identified much of the current political project of the ‘managers’ as they seek to build permanent power for their class. However, I erred in that I also used the knee-jerk vocabulary which we are accustomed to hurling at each other: “socialism” and “communism” and “fascism” and other isms which are of course meaningless. And in that, I argued from one side of the ideological food-fight (the one I am most sympathetic to) – in doing so I lost the ability to more fully articulate not what I feel about what is going on, but what is actually going on. I am fully willing to remedy that, but probably not here. It would require some additional work. The point is, the “Managerial Society” is now a fait accompli.
So what is the “Managerial Society”? It is, to put it simply, the New Aristocracy so eloquently outlined by Matthew Stewart. Specifically (and this is where Burnham, writing almost 100 years ago, gets some things wrong), the current “Managerial Society” is a plutarchy controlled by – as Stewart says – the .1%. They control the means of production and the vast portions of planetary wealth. They have realized that to preserve their exalted positions they must control the state; coercive weaponry of power is what all monarchs of the world know they must possess, and the plutocracy is no different. In this, Burnham is also wrong – he identified the state takeover of the means of production as the beginning of managerialism. But that is his own Marxist underpinnings (he was a Trotskyist in the 30s before abandoning it to join William Buckley, like so many did in the heady days of ideology); the reality is that the Plutocracy and their massive productive machinery took over the state. But, now that they have it, they have no interest whatsoever in managing their sprawling empires. They are too busy at their private islands or in congress with each other – and you’ve probably never heard of them. They are not politicians, or actors, or sports figures. Those figures come from the “Managerial Society”, either as direct managers or the jesters meant to pave the way for the aristocracy’s permanent power by mining the debate by pulling at the heart-strings of their foot-soldiers on their Gramscian “march through the institutions”.
The “New Aristocracy”, the “Managerial Elite” are those 9.9% who control the productive capacity of the world; a marriage of the state and its mechanized managerial agenda and the ‘private sector’ which is no longer private but at the command of the “Managerial Aristocrats” through regulation and the revolving door exchange of public/private position. They have been called the “deep state” — too soon?
So who is everybody else? They are, of course, the underclass. The losers. BLM or MAGA – not to put too fine a point on it. Those foot soldiers who the “aristocrats” battling each other for control of the state and its privileges and power send to fight (and sometimes die) on the back streets of downtown Seattle or to seize our most hallowed halls in rage and impotence. “Nor will the bulk of those who have done, and will do, the fighting in the struggle be recruited from the ranks of the managers themselves; most of the fighters will be workers and youths who will doubtless, many of them, believe that they are fighting for ends of their own.” If they are on the MAGA side they are fighting globalism and if they are on the BLM side they are fighting for diversity; words they have been given by the managers which in no way represent what they will achieve should they ‘win’; for the “New Aristocracy” has been working hard to “raise the ladders as they ascend” – as economist Angus Deaton has said. Staying true to James Burnham’s instructions, none of this is a value statement. Capitalism opened the door (through the allure of permanent economic growth) to tremendous inequality and also the ability of the powerful to live well beyond their means, creating environmental degradation that we will be living with for generations. Marxism was never workable, and was discarded almost immediately by those who saw a path to permanent power and became the proto-managerial society until it too fell; for totalitarian managerialism does not have the feedback loops which allowed it to morph and adjust to the winds of popular discontent, natural disaster or scarcity and thereby save itself from destruction. The same is true for Nazi German “Managerialism”, which was of the same shade as the Soviet variety and perished for the same reasons. American “New Deal” managerialism has been longer lasting, because there have been – at least so far- feedback loops which allow citizens to express discontent, to vie for (increasingly complicated) access to the 9.9% and to punish the egregious Aristocrats (and even occasionally a Plutocrat or two), thereby preserving a sense of power where none exists in actual fact. Managerialism is here to stay, it is the way our society is controlled. The incentive structure, the economic structure, the class structure have imposed themselves – and advancement will increasingly follow proscripted methods, outlined perhaps by Dominic Green in his enlightening article “Oligarchy in America”. For those who want to win, they will follow the recipes. In America’s “Managerial Society”, there will be no other way to succeed.
We are trained to think of only two mechanisms of social organization. Capitalism and Marxism. Capitalism, which started in the late middle ages (circa 1300s?) and ended in 1914 in a tremendous explosion of violence; and Marxism which was never more than a utopian idea. There’s a reason for this, capitalism provided a more natural division of power, wresting from one group of oligarchs and giving to another in a process of power-destruction which led to a greater period of freedom and the accompanying prosperity. Marxism was too easily coopted by the powerful and didn’t last the first few bursts of collective farms or worker-managed factories before it was centralized into communism, the first baby-managerial ideology (which itself only lasted about 70 years).
Which is all moot, at any rate, because both of those methods for social organization are now over. We are in a new mechanism, what James Burnham called a “Managerial Society”. That is what his book “Managerial Revolution” is about. And we are now firmly in Burnham’s “Managerial Society”. Now, I don’t really like the moniker – as you don’t. But this book is careful to remind us that what we call things is less important than the mechanisms by which our current society is organized. Capitalism, that method of social organization which dethroned feudalism and created a world of such tremendous prosperity and newly discovered liberty that it destroyed itself out of excess stuff, is now over. It could not survive the consolidation of economic power that was the end result of the incredible revolution of productivity (the industrial revolution) in which the division of labor engendered a powerless class manning the assembly lines and a group of – wait for it – managers, who controlled the mechanisms of production responding to the extraordinary economies of scale.
It is, however, more the philosophical child of Plato than Aristotle. Incidentally this is why modern managerialism fits better in the Democratic party than the Republican – Democrats are the more natural inheritors of collectivist political projects (‘New Deal’ and eugenics and Planned Parenthood and minimum wage and other attempts at social class-creation), they fit more neatly and are more comfortable with the herd (and know best how to manage it); whereas republicans – the offspring of Aristotle – have a more libertarian “leave me the hell alone” strain to them. But it should be mentioned that neither the .1% nor the 9.9% are necessarily party-affiliated. It is about class, not party and certainly not about ideology. Ideology is only deployed as a useful weapon by individuals vying against their competitors to join the 9.9% (or to hold their perch, at all costs there).
A few years ago I wrote a piece called “What is going on?” In this piece, I identified much of the current political project of the ‘managers’ as they seek to build permanent power for their class. However, I erred in that I also used the knee-jerk vocabulary which we are accustomed to hurling at each other: “socialism” and “communism” and “fascism” and other isms which are of course meaningless. And in that, I argued from one side of the ideological food-fight (the one I am most sympathetic to) – in doing so I lost the ability to more fully articulate not what I feel about what is going on, but what is actually going on. I am fully willing to remedy that, but probably not here. It would require some additional work. The point is, the “Managerial Society” is now a fait accompli.
So what is the “Managerial Society”? It is, to put it simply, the New Aristocracy so eloquently outlined by Matthew Stewart. Specifically (and this is where Burnham, writing almost 100 years ago, gets some things wrong), the current “Managerial Society” is a plutarchy controlled by – as Stewart says – the .1%. They control the means of production and the vast portions of planetary wealth. They have realized that to preserve their exalted positions they must control the state; coercive weaponry of power is what all monarchs of the world know they must possess, and the plutocracy is no different. In this, Burnham is also wrong – he identified the state takeover of the means of production as the beginning of managerialism. But that is his own Marxist underpinnings (he was a Trotskyist in the 30s before abandoning it to join William Buckley, like so many did in the heady days of ideology); the reality is that the Plutocracy and their massive productive machinery took over the state. But, now that they have it, they have no interest whatsoever in managing their sprawling empires. They are too busy at their private islands or in congress with each other – and you’ve probably never heard of them. They are not politicians, or actors, or sports figures. Those figures come from the “Managerial Society”, either as direct managers or the jesters meant to pave the way for the aristocracy’s permanent power by mining the debate by pulling at the heart-strings of their foot-soldiers on their Gramscian “march through the institutions”.
The “New Aristocracy”, the “Managerial Elite” are those 9.9% who control the productive capacity of the world; a marriage of the state and its mechanized managerial agenda and the ‘private sector’ which is no longer private but at the command of the “Managerial Aristocrats” through regulation and the revolving door exchange of public/private position. They have been called the “deep state” — too soon?
So who is everybody else? They are, of course, the underclass. The losers. BLM or MAGA – not to put too fine a point on it. Those foot soldiers who the “aristocrats” battling each other for control of the state and its privileges and power send to fight (and sometimes die) on the back streets of downtown Seattle or to seize our most hallowed halls in rage and impotence. “Nor will the bulk of those who have done, and will do, the fighting in the struggle be recruited from the ranks of the managers themselves; most of the fighters will be workers and youths who will doubtless, many of them, believe that they are fighting for ends of their own.” If they are on the MAGA side they are fighting globalism and if they are on the BLM side they are fighting for diversity; words they have been given by the managers which in no way represent what they will achieve should they ‘win’; for the “New Aristocracy” has been working hard to “raise the ladders as they ascend” – as economist Angus Deaton has said. Staying true to James Burnham’s instructions, none of this is a value statement. Capitalism opened the door (through the allure of permanent economic growth) to tremendous inequality and also the ability of the powerful to live well beyond their means, creating environmental degradation that we will be living with for generations. Marxism was never workable, and was discarded almost immediately by those who saw a path to permanent power and became the proto-managerial society until it too fell; for totalitarian managerialism does not have the feedback loops which allowed it to morph and adjust to the winds of popular discontent, natural disaster or scarcity and thereby save itself from destruction. The same is true for Nazi German “Managerialism”, which was of the same shade as the Soviet variety and perished for the same reasons. American “New Deal” managerialism has been longer lasting, because there have been – at least so far- feedback loops which allow citizens to express discontent, to vie for (increasingly complicated) access to the 9.9% and to punish the egregious Aristocrats (and even occasionally a Plutocrat or two), thereby preserving a sense of power where none exists in actual fact. Managerialism is here to stay, it is the way our society is controlled. The incentive structure, the economic structure, the class structure have imposed themselves – and advancement will increasingly follow proscripted methods, outlined perhaps by Dominic Green in his enlightening article “Oligarchy in America”. For those who want to win, they will follow the recipes. In America’s “Managerial Society”, there will be no other way to succeed.
April 17, 2025
Burnam was an interesting figure. He started out as a Trotskyite who at the end of his life was a buddy with William F. Buckley. The book was published in 1941, it would have benefitted from being delayed as a result of the war.
In the early part of the 20th Century there was a lot of optimism about the power of a new class of educated managers. Woodrow Wilson, in two books espoused the idea that we would surmount all the errors of the Founders by putting more "experts" into government. Paul Appleby, an FDR apologist, argued that government is different and that once a person became a public official they would check their self interest at the door.
Burnam's premise was simple - we started with society being organized by feudal norms, which evolved into Capitalism which evolved into Socialism which would evolve into the Managerial State which would be run the people who control production. He made several absurd assertions - let me list just a few -
1) He argues that the Russian Revolution was the first managerial revolution. In spite of the fact that Russia never operated under capitalist rules. He also lauds the Nazis for their restoration of a working system after WWI for Germany. Oddly he points out that in Russia in that time the top 10% controlled 50% of all income and wealth in society (take that Thomas Piketty!)
2) He seems quite comfortable with violent and repressive regimes if they are moving to the managerial revolution - who cares if a bunch of Kulaks or Capitalists or anyone else is murdered getting to the goal.
3) He argues the world is evolving into three spheres. - European - with at the Russian system in control; Asia with Japan in control and possibly a Western Hemisphere with the US in control (he thinks FDRs "innovations" were a "primitive" version of the managerial revolution.
4) He argues that after the ascendency of the MR that it would not make any difference whether something was done in the public or private sector and indeed seems to conclude that governmental solutions are often better.
5) he describes his work as not "historical" but "scientific"
6) He supposes that the US transition could well be a violent revolution - and he is ok with that.
7) Finally he argues that a "bureaucratic" (Appleby's model) and the "managerial revolution" are virtually the same.
There are more gems - but those a seven "highlights"
Why I suggest that it would have been better to wait is that in 1945 Frederich Hayek published a seminal paper in AER which laid out a case later expanded in two books (the Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty) to suggest that centralized knowledge and planning were inherently flawed because of something he called "the Knowledge of Time and Place". The crude process of individual experiences could never be properly accounted for from the center.
I came upon this because one of my friends argued that this was a brilliant book. Unfortunately I cannot remember the source of that recommendation. But I can assure you that if I could I would love to have a discussion with that person to see if I missed anything in the book.
In 1945 Frederich Hayek
In the early part of the 20th Century there was a lot of optimism about the power of a new class of educated managers. Woodrow Wilson, in two books espoused the idea that we would surmount all the errors of the Founders by putting more "experts" into government. Paul Appleby, an FDR apologist, argued that government is different and that once a person became a public official they would check their self interest at the door.
Burnam's premise was simple - we started with society being organized by feudal norms, which evolved into Capitalism which evolved into Socialism which would evolve into the Managerial State which would be run the people who control production. He made several absurd assertions - let me list just a few -
1) He argues that the Russian Revolution was the first managerial revolution. In spite of the fact that Russia never operated under capitalist rules. He also lauds the Nazis for their restoration of a working system after WWI for Germany. Oddly he points out that in Russia in that time the top 10% controlled 50% of all income and wealth in society (take that Thomas Piketty!)
2) He seems quite comfortable with violent and repressive regimes if they are moving to the managerial revolution - who cares if a bunch of Kulaks or Capitalists or anyone else is murdered getting to the goal.
3) He argues the world is evolving into three spheres. - European - with at the Russian system in control; Asia with Japan in control and possibly a Western Hemisphere with the US in control (he thinks FDRs "innovations" were a "primitive" version of the managerial revolution.
4) He argues that after the ascendency of the MR that it would not make any difference whether something was done in the public or private sector and indeed seems to conclude that governmental solutions are often better.
5) he describes his work as not "historical" but "scientific"
6) He supposes that the US transition could well be a violent revolution - and he is ok with that.
7) Finally he argues that a "bureaucratic" (Appleby's model) and the "managerial revolution" are virtually the same.
There are more gems - but those a seven "highlights"
Why I suggest that it would have been better to wait is that in 1945 Frederich Hayek published a seminal paper in AER which laid out a case later expanded in two books (the Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty) to suggest that centralized knowledge and planning were inherently flawed because of something he called "the Knowledge of Time and Place". The crude process of individual experiences could never be properly accounted for from the center.
I came upon this because one of my friends argued that this was a brilliant book. Unfortunately I cannot remember the source of that recommendation. But I can assure you that if I could I would love to have a discussion with that person to see if I missed anything in the book.
In 1945 Frederich Hayek
September 17, 2023
Most of the book's predictions are incorrect, the analysis of capitalism and the causes of the Great Depression are incredibly misleading, and the historical determinism are just some of the reasons why this book is not a good guide for trying to understand the postwar world. However, I do think the author makes some interesting points, especially with regard to the erosion of parliamentary sovereignty, the increased role of the administrative state, and the need to articulate post-revolutionary alternatives to socialism.
February 3, 2024
This book puts forward a interesting viewpoint. I don't personally fully agree with all of Burnham's conclusions but I do find them useful to broaden my viewpoint. This isn't a exciting read or one of the most important books of the 20th century but it does provide a unique set of ideas which have been influential in modern political theory. So based on that I'd say worth the read.
December 5, 2022
A bit tedious and often hilariously wrong in its predictions- the core thesis is compelling though.
Want to read
September 2, 2024---------------------
- Toby Lütke
- Toby Lütke
May 9, 2022
This is Burnham’s masterpiece in which he tales a long cold look at the type of society that existed in 1941 and how it was likely to develop. The central question is that given the anticipated global breakdown of capitalism was it certain that it would be replaced by socialism, and if not, by what?
Burnham reviews the state of capitalism in 1941 and argues that it cannot continue. He reviews socialism and concludes that it is not a viable global alternative and is certainly not an inevitable development. He then puts forward a managerial theory in which power in the forthcoming post capitalist world is concentrated in the hands of what he calls managers, that is those who are directly responsible for running but not directly owning state enterprises.
The book explores the predicted general features of such a society before examining in depth three contemporary examples Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and New Deal America. He argues that in each case power over the production and distribution of national wealth is shifting away from capitalist owners but to managers and not the masses of ordinary people. The totalitarian nature of the first two examples is said to be a transition stage more brought about by the pace of change than the underlying dynamics.
I think this book is remarkable for its clarity and its attempt at dispassionate analysis of these issues. Burnham is at pains to define the terms he uses and indeed on occasion the explanations and examples are excessively laboured. The arguments are cleverly built up from principles to predictions and examples taken from the world as it was then known.
Of course from the perspective of 2022 much of what Burnham wrote 81 years ago seems simplistic and naive and of course it has an old fashioned feel to it. It is easy to dismiss most of the predictions as having been falsified not long afterwards. He certainly underestimated the durability and adaptability of capitalism and was badly wrong in his assumption that Germany would win the Second World War. His relatively positive assessment of Hitler now offends greatly but gives insight into views at the time.
These shortcomings are perhaps not that surprising when one considers the analysis is of the world as seen from the point of view of an American in 1941. Despite all the incorrect predictions it would appear that Burnham’s suggestions have proved accurate in some general senses - the world has tended to split into large competing power blocks, there has been almost constant proxy war of one form or another, ideologies based on individualism have been challenged by those based on collectivism, socialism has not been the inevitable replacement for capitalism, capitalists have tended to become more remote from the actual business of production and wealth creation ceding degrees power to other groups, whatever the system in place countries have rarely become truly classless but have remained dominated by powerful elites.
One very striking feature of this book is that it provides the detailed background used by George Orwell in describing the geopolitical situation in 1984. Moreover it describes the type of state presided over by Big Brother - even down to the constant implication that Big Brother is merely a figurehead with real power lying with the managerial class or party members which would include O’Brien, Winston’s torturer. Orwell acknowledged his debt to Burnham and wrote a fabulous essay on Burnham and his books.
The managerial revolution was not, as Burnham predicted, complete by 1990 but one could argue that many of the features he identified were more embedded as part of the system. Maybe seen on a long timescale, much longer than he thought, he will turn out to have been more right (in several senses) than many have assumed. After all the replacement of European feudal society with capitalism took several hundred years.
Three other points - 1. Women are hardly mentioned in the book and appear to have no influence whatsoever - seems odd even for 1941. 2. There is much description of the elites and how they behave but I feel much less On the motivation and behaviour of the masses or proletariat - again a bit odd. 3. It all focuses on Europe, North America, and Russia (in both Europe and Asia) the rest of the world seems to be regarded as either a set of colonies or minor countries, quite different from a modern view of dynamic economies in all parts of the world. 4. I enjoyed the section on ideologies, how Nazi and Leninist ideologies share many features , how managerial ideologies differ and the use of ideologies for setting the “psychic environment” for social revolutions.
I enjoyed this book. Out of date and misguided? Probably. Instructive about contemporary 1941 attitudes and perspectives? Certainly. A wonderful insight into Orwell’s thinking when writing 1984? Definitely,
Burnham reviews the state of capitalism in 1941 and argues that it cannot continue. He reviews socialism and concludes that it is not a viable global alternative and is certainly not an inevitable development. He then puts forward a managerial theory in which power in the forthcoming post capitalist world is concentrated in the hands of what he calls managers, that is those who are directly responsible for running but not directly owning state enterprises.
The book explores the predicted general features of such a society before examining in depth three contemporary examples Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and New Deal America. He argues that in each case power over the production and distribution of national wealth is shifting away from capitalist owners but to managers and not the masses of ordinary people. The totalitarian nature of the first two examples is said to be a transition stage more brought about by the pace of change than the underlying dynamics.
I think this book is remarkable for its clarity and its attempt at dispassionate analysis of these issues. Burnham is at pains to define the terms he uses and indeed on occasion the explanations and examples are excessively laboured. The arguments are cleverly built up from principles to predictions and examples taken from the world as it was then known.
Of course from the perspective of 2022 much of what Burnham wrote 81 years ago seems simplistic and naive and of course it has an old fashioned feel to it. It is easy to dismiss most of the predictions as having been falsified not long afterwards. He certainly underestimated the durability and adaptability of capitalism and was badly wrong in his assumption that Germany would win the Second World War. His relatively positive assessment of Hitler now offends greatly but gives insight into views at the time.
These shortcomings are perhaps not that surprising when one considers the analysis is of the world as seen from the point of view of an American in 1941. Despite all the incorrect predictions it would appear that Burnham’s suggestions have proved accurate in some general senses - the world has tended to split into large competing power blocks, there has been almost constant proxy war of one form or another, ideologies based on individualism have been challenged by those based on collectivism, socialism has not been the inevitable replacement for capitalism, capitalists have tended to become more remote from the actual business of production and wealth creation ceding degrees power to other groups, whatever the system in place countries have rarely become truly classless but have remained dominated by powerful elites.
One very striking feature of this book is that it provides the detailed background used by George Orwell in describing the geopolitical situation in 1984. Moreover it describes the type of state presided over by Big Brother - even down to the constant implication that Big Brother is merely a figurehead with real power lying with the managerial class or party members which would include O’Brien, Winston’s torturer. Orwell acknowledged his debt to Burnham and wrote a fabulous essay on Burnham and his books.
The managerial revolution was not, as Burnham predicted, complete by 1990 but one could argue that many of the features he identified were more embedded as part of the system. Maybe seen on a long timescale, much longer than he thought, he will turn out to have been more right (in several senses) than many have assumed. After all the replacement of European feudal society with capitalism took several hundred years.
Three other points - 1. Women are hardly mentioned in the book and appear to have no influence whatsoever - seems odd even for 1941. 2. There is much description of the elites and how they behave but I feel much less On the motivation and behaviour of the masses or proletariat - again a bit odd. 3. It all focuses on Europe, North America, and Russia (in both Europe and Asia) the rest of the world seems to be regarded as either a set of colonies or minor countries, quite different from a modern view of dynamic economies in all parts of the world. 4. I enjoyed the section on ideologies, how Nazi and Leninist ideologies share many features , how managerial ideologies differ and the use of ideologies for setting the “psychic environment” for social revolutions.
I enjoyed this book. Out of date and misguided? Probably. Instructive about contemporary 1941 attitudes and perspectives? Certainly. A wonderful insight into Orwell’s thinking when writing 1984? Definitely,
January 29, 2016
ex-trot turned rightwinger lifts some trot ideas, such as 'bureaucratic collectivism,' gives them a far right twerk, and publishes as original research. yawn. basic thesis is that the world is a-headin' for the end of cappyism OH NOS--toward something that looks like NSDAP/USSR/FDR (see what he did there?). dullness for dullards.
thing is, everyone has management. it's not inconsistent with socialist principles at all to be a manager, as management of property is a different thing than ownership or possession of property. management is a job, after all, and it can be perfectly proletarian. dude thinks that the managers have taken over and are the new ruling class. whatever. as if the manager making $200,000 per annum while working 90-hour weeks has anything on the owner of the company who 'earns' $4M on no work per week. FFS.
thing is, everyone has management. it's not inconsistent with socialist principles at all to be a manager, as management of property is a different thing than ownership or possession of property. management is a job, after all, and it can be perfectly proletarian. dude thinks that the managers have taken over and are the new ruling class. whatever. as if the manager making $200,000 per annum while working 90-hour weeks has anything on the owner of the company who 'earns' $4M on no work per week. FFS.
August 14, 2010
The author begins by outlining what is special about this book (Page viii): ". . .'The Managerial Revolution' was the first generalized attempt tat trhe statement of a theory of the modern epoch that cut through the alternative of either capitalism or socialism"
In other words, Burnham is positing yet a third approach. He sees capitalism as compromised and socialism as not likely to represent the future. The Managerial Society is what he sees as looming. Tha managers of organizations will, in his view, become the dominant "class."
I wasn't really convinced when I first read this--and remain unconvinced today. But it is an interesting thesis.
In other words, Burnham is positing yet a third approach. He sees capitalism as compromised and socialism as not likely to represent the future. The Managerial Society is what he sees as looming. Tha managers of organizations will, in his view, become the dominant "class."
I wasn't really convinced when I first read this--and remain unconvinced today. But it is an interesting thesis.
September 22, 2021
Indispensable in understanding the future
It’s baffling how this book and the social theory it contains have not become mainstream. The Managerial Revolution is what we’re living though. Begun through super-organisms like the European Union and United Nation, and expedited as of 2020 through the Covid pandemic. It’s important to remember that the author admits his personal opposition to this future, yet, as a true scientist which is also proclaims himself to be, he cannot but state what appears to be most in accordance with the current (1940s) facts, and the most probable theory against all others.
It’s baffling how this book and the social theory it contains have not become mainstream. The Managerial Revolution is what we’re living though. Begun through super-organisms like the European Union and United Nation, and expedited as of 2020 through the Covid pandemic. It’s important to remember that the author admits his personal opposition to this future, yet, as a true scientist which is also proclaims himself to be, he cannot but state what appears to be most in accordance with the current (1940s) facts, and the most probable theory against all others.
May 16, 2020
Managerialism is the soul-destroying 'ism' which haunts our daily lives. One can see why Orwell was so fascinated with Burnham's work and thinking.
June 5, 2022
James Burnham's 1941 "The Managerial Revolution" is the original attempt at defining the massive change in society that was occurring in the first half of the 20th century--and was still in an inchoate state as of publication. Burnham knew his book would cause a firestorm, and although it became a bestseller initially, it was quickly disparaged and buried. His last chapter is titled "Objections" and begins:
To clarify what he means by such terms as 'capitalist' and 'owner' Burnham defines both:
Burnham gave capitalism fifty years from WWI to be replaced by managerialism, which gives a date of death in the 1960's. His explanation for why capitalism is dying is curious, and unfortunately he does not give a good explanation for it, especially why unemployment takes priority over other social issues.
Critics of "The Managerial Revolution" usually mention a couple of specific prognostications that we now know were wrong, at least in detail. Firstly, he assumes that the world will coalesce into three super-states: the United States, Germany, and Japan. In 1941, most people assumed the axis powers would win WWII, but as Burnham says, it doesn't matter for his thesis if Germany wins or loses, because the point is that Europe will be forced into a German-dominated European Union either way. He is vague on Asia; maybe Japan will form the core of the Asian bloc, or maybe some other East Asian country--such as China.
He also misfires on one comment about capitalist entrepreneurs, although it must have seemed reasonable at the time. Nowadays, we would point to the mammoth tech companies, such as Google and Amazon as proof that wealth is still being aggregated in individual hands. Although how long that will last, who knows?
"I am well aware that the conclusions reached in this book will be displeasing to most of those who read it. . . But truth is a function, not of belief, but of evidence."Burnham hotly disputes the generally held belief that there are fundamentally only two ways of running a modern state: socialism and capitalism. If you throw out one, you inevitably get the other. He spotted a mongrel sneaking in, what he called managerialism, that neither held 'profit' as dogma, nor advertised itself as producing a 'free, classless society'. In particular, when capitalism, which he saw having begun its demise during WWI, does become extinct, he gives lengthy proofs of why it absolutely will not be replaced by socialism.
To clarify what he means by such terms as 'capitalist' and 'owner' Burnham defines both:
"A capitalist is one who, as an individual, has ownership interest in the instruments of production; who, as an individual, employs workers, pays them wages, and is entitled to the products of their labor.”His example is mildly amusing. If you can't control who enters your house, then in no meaningful sense are you the owner of that house. Burnham's point is that capitalists who have lost control of their businesses to professional managers, in no meaningful way can be said to own the business. Effectively, the managers do.
“Ownership means control; if there is no control, then there is no ownership.”
Burnham gave capitalism fifty years from WWI to be replaced by managerialism, which gives a date of death in the 1960's. His explanation for why capitalism is dying is curious, and unfortunately he does not give a good explanation for it, especially why unemployment takes priority over other social issues.
"[M]ass unemployment is the most intolerable of all the difficulties that any economy can face, sufficient, by itself, to guarantee the collapse of an economic system. . . Experience has shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment."Throughout the book Burnham is humble about his aims. He is only trying to produce a tentative theory to explain current events; he is not making judgements about what is good or bad. He also doesn't try to give a full account of what the effects of managerialism will be either on individuals or the economy. All he points out is that, unlike capitalism, managers, especially state managers, have no need to generate a profit, so can make decisions that would bankrupt a private company. This must have implications, but Burnham is quiet on exactly what they will be.
Critics of "The Managerial Revolution" usually mention a couple of specific prognostications that we now know were wrong, at least in detail. Firstly, he assumes that the world will coalesce into three super-states: the United States, Germany, and Japan. In 1941, most people assumed the axis powers would win WWII, but as Burnham says, it doesn't matter for his thesis if Germany wins or loses, because the point is that Europe will be forced into a German-dominated European Union either way. He is vague on Asia; maybe Japan will form the core of the Asian bloc, or maybe some other East Asian country--such as China.
He also misfires on one comment about capitalist entrepreneurs, although it must have seemed reasonable at the time. Nowadays, we would point to the mammoth tech companies, such as Google and Amazon as proof that wealth is still being aggregated in individual hands. Although how long that will last, who knows?
“The chance to build up vast aggregates of wealth of the kind held by the big bourgeois families no longer exists under the conditions of contemporary capitalism."As I read the book, I kept forgetting that it was written over eighty years ago in a very different era. Given that, it is a remarkable work, well worth the time to read because of what it says about our current situation.
February 25, 2025
Never have so many incisive structural analyses of current political systems been combined with such wrong predictions about the immediate future.
What Burnham gets wrong:
* Burnham assumed that the Managerial structure was inevitable in private business, so he must have assumed that the principal agent problem was insurmountable. With bonuses, a legal responsibility of the manager, and a reasonably responsible board of directors, much of this asymmetry can be resolved.
* Burnham failed to anticipate how property rights would continue to be enforced on behalf of capitalists, thereby enabling them to excise non-cooperative managers.
* Burnham believed that the capitalists would continue to become less involved in the management of the companies (and, therefore, control over the instruments of production). Burnham failed to anticipate just how quickly technology would transform the economy through the present. This causes many of the current most influential capitalists to still be managers of their respective businesses (e.g. Meta, Tesla, Stripe, Google, etc.).
* Burnham identifies the regulatory capture mechanism, but fails to recognize how impactful that would be in helpful entrenched capitalists retain power.
* Burham's makes terrible predictions about the impending inevitability of Managerial society. Much of the terribleness of this prediction has to do with his underlying assumption of the efficiency of Managerial society (though this at least somewhat forgivable given the propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union at the time). Ultimately, what doomed this prediction was the inefficiencies of Managerial societies that would cause them to collapse.
* Burnham makes a terrible prediction regarding the impending emergence of 3 power centers of America, Europe, and Asia. In reality, the following 50 years would be highlighted by the war between the (mostly) capitalist structure and the managerial structure. Perhaps this forecast is understandable given the trend of WWII at the time of his writing, the seemingly unlikely destruction of the western Europe's capital stock, and the black swan that was the atomic bomb.
Despite all these wrong assumption and bad predictions, I still believe this book gets the following ideas so right that it is worth a read:
* Burham was accurate about the loss of capitalist power in as far as the book predicted the increasing power of the Mangerial state in economic affairs. Given the continuance of the New Deal policies (e.g Social Security), the expanding of the welfare state by the Great Society, and the increasing role of government in trade controls even now. However, Burnham was off in the magnitude of this dynamic.
* Burnham was incredibly prescient in pointing out that the Managerial Revolution necessary meant a decrease in the power of the legislature and an increase in the executive. In the US, with presidents continuing to declare war without Congressional approval, executing US citizens without a trial, and creating increasing regulation, it's hard to argue that power of the executive--and therefore, the Managerial apparatus that actually creates the regulations--hasn't increase drastically at the expense of Congress.
* Burnham classification of the ruling class being the control over the instruments of production and, consequently, preferential access to the distribution of goods make from those instruments is a fantastically succinct mental model.
* Burnham's comparison between the Managerial similarities between the USSR and Nazi Germany highlights the truth of Horseshoe Theory.
Overall, I highly recommend reading this book if you can stomach how wrong many of his predictions ended up being.
Overall, I highly recommend
What Burnham gets wrong:
* Burnham assumed that the Managerial structure was inevitable in private business, so he must have assumed that the principal agent problem was insurmountable. With bonuses, a legal responsibility of the manager, and a reasonably responsible board of directors, much of this asymmetry can be resolved.
* Burnham failed to anticipate how property rights would continue to be enforced on behalf of capitalists, thereby enabling them to excise non-cooperative managers.
* Burnham believed that the capitalists would continue to become less involved in the management of the companies (and, therefore, control over the instruments of production). Burnham failed to anticipate just how quickly technology would transform the economy through the present. This causes many of the current most influential capitalists to still be managers of their respective businesses (e.g. Meta, Tesla, Stripe, Google, etc.).
* Burnham identifies the regulatory capture mechanism, but fails to recognize how impactful that would be in helpful entrenched capitalists retain power.
* Burham's makes terrible predictions about the impending inevitability of Managerial society. Much of the terribleness of this prediction has to do with his underlying assumption of the efficiency of Managerial society (though this at least somewhat forgivable given the propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union at the time). Ultimately, what doomed this prediction was the inefficiencies of Managerial societies that would cause them to collapse.
* Burnham makes a terrible prediction regarding the impending emergence of 3 power centers of America, Europe, and Asia. In reality, the following 50 years would be highlighted by the war between the (mostly) capitalist structure and the managerial structure. Perhaps this forecast is understandable given the trend of WWII at the time of his writing, the seemingly unlikely destruction of the western Europe's capital stock, and the black swan that was the atomic bomb.
Despite all these wrong assumption and bad predictions, I still believe this book gets the following ideas so right that it is worth a read:
* Burham was accurate about the loss of capitalist power in as far as the book predicted the increasing power of the Mangerial state in economic affairs. Given the continuance of the New Deal policies (e.g Social Security), the expanding of the welfare state by the Great Society, and the increasing role of government in trade controls even now. However, Burnham was off in the magnitude of this dynamic.
* Burnham was incredibly prescient in pointing out that the Managerial Revolution necessary meant a decrease in the power of the legislature and an increase in the executive. In the US, with presidents continuing to declare war without Congressional approval, executing US citizens without a trial, and creating increasing regulation, it's hard to argue that power of the executive--and therefore, the Managerial apparatus that actually creates the regulations--hasn't increase drastically at the expense of Congress.
* Burnham classification of the ruling class being the control over the instruments of production and, consequently, preferential access to the distribution of goods make from those instruments is a fantastically succinct mental model.
* Burnham's comparison between the Managerial similarities between the USSR and Nazi Germany highlights the truth of Horseshoe Theory.
Overall, I highly recommend reading this book if you can stomach how wrong many of his predictions ended up being.
Overall, I highly recommend
September 2, 2024
In this book, James Burnham argues that the political order of the West is not evolving from capitalism to socialism, but from capitalism to managerialism. Managerialism is a political system through which managers, rather than capitalists, control the means of production. Written in 1941, Burnham cites the Soviet Union and Germany as the earliest adopters of managerialism, with the United States close behind through its implementation of the New Deal.
Many of his observations are insightful. For example, he noticed that in the United States, among other places, senior managers of a business have effective control of that business, rather than the shareholders themselves. They're able to deploy capital and determine what to sell and how to sell them, with the presumed owners having very little say in the matter.
While his observations and theories are intriguing, I finished the book with doubts about his thesis remaining. I'll just list two for now.
First, I wonder if his theories rested too much on definitions that are incomplete or insufficient. For example, his definitions of capitalism, socialism, and managerialism rested on the class (or group of people) that controlled the means of production. In other words, Burnham defined who controlled economic processes in a political manner, which raises questions of whether a category error has taken place. Also, among the questions socialists vehemently argue about is what does the word socialism mean. I wonder if Burnham rests too much on Marx's analysis of what capitalism and socialism are when there are may be different and perhaps more complete understanding of what these words actually mean. In fact, Ludwig von Mises viewed what happened in the Soviet Union and Germany during WWII not as managerialism, but rather different ways to practice socialism.
Second, even if managerialism has arisen from capitalism by the turn of the 20th century, the time span of this new system is much shorter than previous epochs, which was capitalism and feudalism. These latter systems lasted for hundreds of years, whereas managerialism, at least when Burnham was writing about it, had just begun and had been around for decades. It is difficult to compare decades-long phenomena with those that lasted for centuries and believe that managerialism was a replacement of any previous system.
Notwithstanding these objections, I found Burnham's arguments and historical examples to be very helpful in helping readers a context for how politics in the West may be evolving. It is certainly the case that government bureaucracies, which exist within any empire, have flourished since the New Deal. In fact, the American Deep State may fit quite well into Burnham's theoretical structure.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how Western political structures may have evolved over time.
There are a number of problems with this approach.
Many of his observations are insightful. For example, he noticed that in the United States, among other places, senior managers of a business have effective control of that business, rather than the shareholders themselves. They're able to deploy capital and determine what to sell and how to sell them, with the presumed owners having very little say in the matter.
While his observations and theories are intriguing, I finished the book with doubts about his thesis remaining. I'll just list two for now.
First, I wonder if his theories rested too much on definitions that are incomplete or insufficient. For example, his definitions of capitalism, socialism, and managerialism rested on the class (or group of people) that controlled the means of production. In other words, Burnham defined who controlled economic processes in a political manner, which raises questions of whether a category error has taken place. Also, among the questions socialists vehemently argue about is what does the word socialism mean. I wonder if Burnham rests too much on Marx's analysis of what capitalism and socialism are when there are may be different and perhaps more complete understanding of what these words actually mean. In fact, Ludwig von Mises viewed what happened in the Soviet Union and Germany during WWII not as managerialism, but rather different ways to practice socialism.
Second, even if managerialism has arisen from capitalism by the turn of the 20th century, the time span of this new system is much shorter than previous epochs, which was capitalism and feudalism. These latter systems lasted for hundreds of years, whereas managerialism, at least when Burnham was writing about it, had just begun and had been around for decades. It is difficult to compare decades-long phenomena with those that lasted for centuries and believe that managerialism was a replacement of any previous system.
Notwithstanding these objections, I found Burnham's arguments and historical examples to be very helpful in helping readers a context for how politics in the West may be evolving. It is certainly the case that government bureaucracies, which exist within any empire, have flourished since the New Deal. In fact, the American Deep State may fit quite well into Burnham's theoretical structure.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how Western political structures may have evolved over time.
There are a number of problems with this approach.
December 19, 2020
The Managerial Revolution is a helpful book in several respects.
1. It aids in the understanding of Burnham's subsequent work. He wrote it during his personal break with Trotskyist Communism when he concluded dialectical materialism was an insufficient theoretical lens to explain world social and economic developments. Some appear to read this as a conservative diatribe, but Burnham maintains a sort of materialism and pretension toward science from his recent Marxist past. One he sheds some in his subsequent writing.
On that point, his later books and essays were comparatively devoid of interest in economic theory. I suspect this is because he considered the Managerial Revolution inevitable and thought it best to strike Leviathan at where its leaders were most deficient and vulnerable- virtue and culture (and thereby return to a defense of Classical Liberalism from another, helpful direction). I would not have come to this conclusion without reading this book.
2. In the process of the scales being lifted from his eyes, Burnham left the world with an enduring observation that has been refined some by other thinkers since its publication. As another reviewer put it, the theory of Managerial Revolution is far from perfect in its explanatory power, but the general track of things is correct. He offers a trilemma of sorts in the final chapter that really gets to the nub of things- which of the following seems more likely and (now) historically verifiable: (1) A sustained capitalism? (2) The replacement of capitalism with socialism? (3) The replacement of capitalism with a managerial apparatus?
Considering this is a profitable thought exercise.
3. It was a highly influential book upon its publication and so helps one understand the spirit of the times. George Orwell was a great admirer of Burnham's and that influence will be made very clear to anybody who has read both The Managerial Revolution and 1984.
My personal recommendation is to read Burnham's major books in reverse. Start with Suicide of the West and work your way back. It's his most essential read and refinement of his best insights are found throughout.
1. It aids in the understanding of Burnham's subsequent work. He wrote it during his personal break with Trotskyist Communism when he concluded dialectical materialism was an insufficient theoretical lens to explain world social and economic developments. Some appear to read this as a conservative diatribe, but Burnham maintains a sort of materialism and pretension toward science from his recent Marxist past. One he sheds some in his subsequent writing.
On that point, his later books and essays were comparatively devoid of interest in economic theory. I suspect this is because he considered the Managerial Revolution inevitable and thought it best to strike Leviathan at where its leaders were most deficient and vulnerable- virtue and culture (and thereby return to a defense of Classical Liberalism from another, helpful direction). I would not have come to this conclusion without reading this book.
2. In the process of the scales being lifted from his eyes, Burnham left the world with an enduring observation that has been refined some by other thinkers since its publication. As another reviewer put it, the theory of Managerial Revolution is far from perfect in its explanatory power, but the general track of things is correct. He offers a trilemma of sorts in the final chapter that really gets to the nub of things- which of the following seems more likely and (now) historically verifiable: (1) A sustained capitalism? (2) The replacement of capitalism with socialism? (3) The replacement of capitalism with a managerial apparatus?
Considering this is a profitable thought exercise.
3. It was a highly influential book upon its publication and so helps one understand the spirit of the times. George Orwell was a great admirer of Burnham's and that influence will be made very clear to anybody who has read both The Managerial Revolution and 1984.
My personal recommendation is to read Burnham's major books in reverse. Start with Suicide of the West and work your way back. It's his most essential read and refinement of his best insights are found throughout.
March 10, 2025
James Burnham is without question one of the most original political thinkers of the past century. A founder of the American Workers Party, and a close ally of Trotsky, Burnham became the chairman of the philosophy department at NYU at age 24. Following the Nazi- Soviet Pact, Burnham moved to the right.
During World War II, Burnham took a leave of absence from NYU to work for “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the behest of George F. Kennan, Burnham led the "Political and Psychological Warfare" division of the Office of Policy Coordination, where he produced a number of studies which sought to discern the topography of the post- war world.
Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” was his first important work; it is both original and prophetic. George Orwell, although not a Burnham acolyte, employed Burnham’s template of three ‘superstates’ in his “1984.”
“The Managerial Revolution,” written in 1941, was intended as a warning to a world convulsed by war and revolution. Unlike most of his contemporaries, the author described a world in which economic and social arrangements no longer reflect the ideal types of capitalism or socialism. Instead, Burnham argued that economic and political power was shifting from both the owners of capital and the workers to a managerial class.
Burnham expanded the concept of the managerial class, arguing that whether ownership was corporate and private or statist, the demarcation between the ruling elite and the mass of society was not ownership, but effective control of the means of production. Capitalist society relied evermore on bureaucratic structures as did socialist society with the advent of its nomenklatura. Thus, Burnham foretold the evolution of power throughout the world; a world where an increasing number of economic and political decisions are delegated to bureaucrats who are not necessarily accountable in the traditional sense of the term.
Throughout the study, Burnham attempts to maintain the posture of an apolitical scientist. His language is technical and objective; however, his conclusions belie his dispassionate stance.
During World War II, Burnham took a leave of absence from NYU to work for “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the behest of George F. Kennan, Burnham led the "Political and Psychological Warfare" division of the Office of Policy Coordination, where he produced a number of studies which sought to discern the topography of the post- war world.
Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” was his first important work; it is both original and prophetic. George Orwell, although not a Burnham acolyte, employed Burnham’s template of three ‘superstates’ in his “1984.”
“The Managerial Revolution,” written in 1941, was intended as a warning to a world convulsed by war and revolution. Unlike most of his contemporaries, the author described a world in which economic and social arrangements no longer reflect the ideal types of capitalism or socialism. Instead, Burnham argued that economic and political power was shifting from both the owners of capital and the workers to a managerial class.
Burnham expanded the concept of the managerial class, arguing that whether ownership was corporate and private or statist, the demarcation between the ruling elite and the mass of society was not ownership, but effective control of the means of production. Capitalist society relied evermore on bureaucratic structures as did socialist society with the advent of its nomenklatura. Thus, Burnham foretold the evolution of power throughout the world; a world where an increasing number of economic and political decisions are delegated to bureaucrats who are not necessarily accountable in the traditional sense of the term.
Throughout the study, Burnham attempts to maintain the posture of an apolitical scientist. His language is technical and objective; however, his conclusions belie his dispassionate stance.
April 1, 2022
The Managerial Revolution is a curious book. Intriguing theory, well-written, replete with interesting history, seemingly coherent predictions are all undermined by the failure of Burnham to correctly predict the future. He's also half right about a lot of things which further complicates matters.
Burnham hypothesises that a social revolution is taking place comparable to the transition of Feudalism to Capitalism. The death of Capitalism is attributed to unemployment, lazy capitalists, decadent nations, unpersuaded citizens and disgruntled, powerful managers. This is the managerial revolution and Burnham believed it was well underway in 1940.
During the book on Burnham shows that Socialism has failed to blossom in the Soviet Union. He Quotes Trotsky's statistics showing that greater inequality exists in the Soviet Union than the 'bourgeois' US. Burnham also asserts that the 'workers' lack the skills required to run society as over the years their jobs have been simplified whilst a few specialists are integral to the maintenance of the economy. The leaders of any society are those who control the means of production so workers are incapable. Therefore Burnham sees engineering and plant manager types as the coming elite not the proletariat.
Burnham believed that immensely wealthy capitalists were no longer possible. To me it seemed he believed Germany was on it's way to victory. History has proved him wrong on these counts. Also he thought that the world would be swiftly divided into 3 major superstates. Once again incorrect but the rise of the EU, UN and other supranational bodies is definitely a phenomenon that makes Burnham appear half-right at worst. He was certainly correct about the rise of government bureaucracy and agencies, the dumbing down of jobs and the totalitarian control of modern life. However capitalism has persisted longer than Burnham thought this fact alone means a 3/5 is the maximum I can give the Managerial Revolution. Who knows though Covid maybe the fine nail in the coffin for individualism.
Burnham hypothesises that a social revolution is taking place comparable to the transition of Feudalism to Capitalism. The death of Capitalism is attributed to unemployment, lazy capitalists, decadent nations, unpersuaded citizens and disgruntled, powerful managers. This is the managerial revolution and Burnham believed it was well underway in 1940.
During the book on Burnham shows that Socialism has failed to blossom in the Soviet Union. He Quotes Trotsky's statistics showing that greater inequality exists in the Soviet Union than the 'bourgeois' US. Burnham also asserts that the 'workers' lack the skills required to run society as over the years their jobs have been simplified whilst a few specialists are integral to the maintenance of the economy. The leaders of any society are those who control the means of production so workers are incapable. Therefore Burnham sees engineering and plant manager types as the coming elite not the proletariat.
Burnham believed that immensely wealthy capitalists were no longer possible. To me it seemed he believed Germany was on it's way to victory. History has proved him wrong on these counts. Also he thought that the world would be swiftly divided into 3 major superstates. Once again incorrect but the rise of the EU, UN and other supranational bodies is definitely a phenomenon that makes Burnham appear half-right at worst. He was certainly correct about the rise of government bureaucracy and agencies, the dumbing down of jobs and the totalitarian control of modern life. However capitalism has persisted longer than Burnham thought this fact alone means a 3/5 is the maximum I can give the Managerial Revolution. Who knows though Covid maybe the fine nail in the coffin for individualism.
September 22, 2022
wiki
British writer George Orwell was inspired by Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and his explanation of power, which informed Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell noted in 1945, "For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires... "
The superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in the novel are partly influenced by Burnham's assessment of Roosevelt's America, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as being managerial states.
In 1946 Orwell, summarized Burnham's managerial revolution and outlined the geopolitical landscape of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of 'managers'. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new 'managerial' societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom."
While Orwell partly agreed with Burnham's analysis, he never fully accepted Burnham's attitude towards Machiavellian managerial power. This unresolved thought helped to inspire the character of O'Brien, who talks about power and regimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
British writer George Orwell was inspired by Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and his explanation of power, which informed Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell noted in 1945, "For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires... "
The superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in the novel are partly influenced by Burnham's assessment of Roosevelt's America, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as being managerial states.
In 1946 Orwell, summarized Burnham's managerial revolution and outlined the geopolitical landscape of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of 'managers'. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new 'managerial' societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom."
While Orwell partly agreed with Burnham's analysis, he never fully accepted Burnham's attitude towards Machiavellian managerial power. This unresolved thought helped to inspire the character of O'Brien, who talks about power and regimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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