Eighty years have passed since James Burnham wrote the 20th century’s most important, insightful, and
ignored work of political science,
. Burnham, a former Trotskyite-turned-conservative political philosopher, argued that capitalism as a social organizing structure had been on its deathbed since the beginning of the First World War and would soon pass into insignificance. And, just as capitalism had struggled against and replaced feudalism, so too a new socio-economic principle—what I like to think of as “managerism”—was supplanting it.
Under this new socio-economic order,
managers, not capitalists, control the instruments of production, and acquire more real power in society every passing year. According to Burnham, the state, laws, and culture would gradually transform politics and society to favor managerial rule and managerist thinking: a world in which all economic, social, and foreign relations problems can be solved on the national level by expert dominance, planning, and manipulation.