The New Elite

This chapter describes how James Burnham embarked on a new intellectual journey in the early 1940s, after he left Marxism. During that period, World War II was raging. Nazism seemed to be the wave of the future in Central and Western Europe. Joseph Stalin, in concert with a bureaucratic clique, controlled the Soviet Union. Fascist Japan occupied important Chinese cities like Beijing and Nanjing. In the liberal-democratic United States, the New Deal had become a permanent feature of American life. Burnham's The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (1941) explains these events by arguing that fascism, communism, and the New Deal were not distinct phenomena; they represented a larger, predictable trend in human history. The book does not completely jettison Marxist, Leninist, and Trotskyite principles; Burnham just denied Marx's contention that the future belonged to the working classes. In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham predicts the decline of capitalism and the rise of what he called a managerial class composed of dreary bureaucrats, corporate managers, and technicians. He describes their quest for power and the limitations they imposed on democracy.