The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

The managers know that with the technological means at their disposal it would be perfectly easy for them to put everyone to work; but the existing setup prevents them from acting. They naturally tend to identify the welfare of mankind as a whole with their own interests and the salvation of mankind with their assuming control of society. Society can be run, they think, in more or less the same way that they know they, when they are allowed, can run, efficiently and productively, a mass-production factory. It is out of such a vision of life, which is that undoubtedly held by very many managers and would-be managers—above all, managers functioning in the governmental apparatus—that the managerial concepts and managerial ideologies arise. It is not the managers themselves who make the ideologies explicit, draw out their implications, systematize them. That is the task of intellectuals. So long as capitalism is providing the managers with large incomes, so long as the social structure doesn’t seem to be cracking to pieces, the managers may accompany these feelings I have sketched with much of the traditional ideology of capitalism. But capitalist ideology is hollow in their living experience. They readily adapt themselves to the new ideologies because the new ideologies correspond much better to their experience, to their way of looking at the world and themselves. Indeed, the intellectuals, without usually being aware of it, elaborate the new ideologies from the point of vie...