The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

The new, or re-newed, élite (as we have seen, the old élite is never wholly wiped out) must include men who are able to control contemporary mass industry, the massed labor force, and a supra-national form of political organization. This means, in place of private owners skilled in the manipulation of financial profits or losses on the market, and of the old sort of parliamentary politician, those whom I call “managers”—the production executives and organizers of the industrial process, officials trained in the manipulation of the great labor organizations, and the administrators, bureau chiefs and commissars developed in the executive branch of the unlimited modern state machines. And, that the managers may function, the economic and political structure must be modified, as it is now being modified, so as to rest no longer on private ownership and small-scale nationalist sovereignty, but primarily upon state control of the economy, and continental or vast regional world political organization.