Managerial Revolution

• Book: The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (James Burnham)

URL =

Review

by Charles Haywood

"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."

(https://theworthyhouse.com/2022/05/01/the-managerial-revolution-what-is-happening-in-the-world-james-burnham/)