The Managers vs. the Managed

It is James Burnham we might turn to for guidance. Born in 1905 to a wealthy Chicago family, the now largely forgotten social theorist attended Princeton and Oxford, taught philosophy at New York University, contributed to the New York intellectual journal Partisan Review, served in the CIA, and was, in the words of William F. Buckley Jr., the “dominant intellectual influence” at National Review from 1955 to his retirement as senior editor in 1978.

“Burnham,” wrote Gertrude Himmelfarb in 1950, “restored to conservatism some of the hard-headedness it had lost in an effete age of liberal democracy.” In books and essays and columns, Burnham wrote prolifically and controversially on foreign policy, the Cold War, Communist subversion, the separation of powers, congressional supremacy, and the ideology and consequences of liberalism. “He devoted,” Buckley said of Burnham in 1980, “over a period of 23 years, more time and thought to more problems, major and minor, than would seem possible for an editor resident in Kent, Connecticut, who came to New York only two days every week.”

What makes Burnham worth studying now are two books he wrote during the Second World War. These controversial, long-out-of-print texts were the result of the intellectual tumult Burnham experienced as he abandoned the radical Trotskyism of his 30s for the idiosyncratic conservatism of his maturity. The Managerial Revolution (1941) is a commentary on the state of the world at the time of writing. The Machiavellians (1943) is a study of the Italian sociological school of elite theory. Together, they promise to explain nothing less than, as the subtitle of Revolution puts it, “What is happening in the world.”

“Burnham has probably been more right than wrong about the present and the immediate past,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, despite his criticisms of Burnham’s conclusions and vision of the future. And there was plenty to criticize. Burnham’s style is detached, technical, cold, empirical, dense, somber, and often boring. His attitudes on race, too, would today exile him from polite company.

In his attempts to approach politics as scientifically as a physicist approaches physics, Burnham is sometimes guilty of reductionism, determinism, historicism, materialism, and pessimism. Many of his predictions were incorrect. He is often read not as a serious thinker whose ideas remain vivid and enthralling, but as an exemplar of those Communists who abandoned the faith for militant opposition to all political religions—a prototypical neocon. Burnham is neglected, or treated as a fossil.

He shouldn’t be. The war writings of James Burnham not only are a powerful antidote to wishful thinking about politics and society. They also propose a method for the study of cultural, economic, social, diplomatic, and political phenomena. By drawing attention to the actions and beliefs of elites, by describing a transformation in the nature of American democracy, Burnham helps illuminate the world of the caliph, El Chapo, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Caitlyn Jenner.

Burnham’s first book may have described what he called the managerial revolution. But students of his teaching are likely to conclude that the world is currently experiencing a kind of managerial devolution—a widespread degeneration of the capacities of elites, from Beijing to Brussels to Washington, even as they attempt to exert more control over global and domestic affairs, over individual freedom and thought.

This combination of institutional hubris and decay has occasioned a populist reaction. Nationalist parties and grassroots movements critical of the establishment have arisen in Europe and the United States. Outsider politicians generate enthusiasm in both the Republican and Democratic parties. And making things more complicated are changes in the composition of the managerial elite itself, as it broadens to include new ethnicities and sexual identities while deepening its ideological commitment to equality and diversity.

It is this struggle for dominance that has generated all sorts of social turbulence, as the silent majority reappears to oppose a cultural transformation over which it feels it has no control. In today’s world, it is the managers versus the managed. And ultimately, Burnham predicts, the managers will win.

A NEW SCIENCE OF POLITICS

Burnham did not consider himself an advocate but a diagnostician. “I do not accept any theory of class, national, ethnic, partisan, or sectarian truth,” he wrote in a 1978 column. “If conclusions I reach are true, they are just as true for Russians as for Americans, for pagans as for Christians, and for blacks as for whites.” Both The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians are filled with warnings that the author does not ethically or politically endorse the situation he describes. Burnham asks us to view politics as a morally neutral science that obeys certain laws of human nature, power, and history. “The aim of propaganda is to persuade people to accept certain ideas or feelings or attitudes,” he wrote. “The aim of science is to discover the truth about the world.”

To discover this truth, Burnham states a problem, proposes a theory, offers evidence that supports it, and attempts to disprove the alternatives. “I am not concerned,” he writes in The Managerial Revolution, “with whether the facts indicated by this theory are ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ just or unjust, desirable or undesirable—but simply with whether the theory is true or false on the basis of the evidence now at our disposal.”

Though he may have repudiated Marxist doctrine, Marx nonetheless remains a spectral presence in Burnham’s thought. He references the “historical law, with no apparent exceptions so far known, that all social and economic groups of any size strive to improve their relative position with respect to power and privilege in society.” He places great importance on economics. He frequently uses Marxist terminology. “The instruments of economic production,” he writes, “are, simply, the means whereby men live. In any society, the group of persons controlling these means is by that very fact socially dominant.”

History to Burnham is a record of unending conflict. “The general field of the science of politics is the struggle for social power among organized groups of men.” From this struggle, in all societies, in every epoch, one group wins control of what Lenin called the “commanding heights” of economics and politics. This group is the “ruling class.” And it is not difficult to identify: “The easiest way to discover what the ruling group is in any society is usually to see what group gets the biggest incomes.”

There is more than one way to determine who holds power, however. Whom the media hold in esteem, whom they greet with fanfare, celebrate, defer to, apologize for—these are the members of the elite, of the ruling class. And it is this class, Burnham says in The Machiavellians, that determines the winners and losers of a given society, that reaps wealth and power, bestows offices and honors, propagates the values, ideas, beliefs, myths, and taboos consumed by the public:

The members of the ruling class, and elites more generally, are of two types. There are those whom Machiavelli called foxes:

And there are those whom Machiavelli called lions:

Rulers govern through force, through control of political and juridical institutions, above all through public philosophies or ideologies or myths that capture the imaginations of men and inspire or compel them to action. Much of Burnham’s political science was devoted, therefore, to unmasking these ideologies, of seeing through them to the power relations they obscured.

This demolition of the superstructure above the social base was also, of course, a preoccupation of the Marxists. What made Burnham different, however, was that he applied this method of analysis to Marxism itself—showing it to be a ruling-class ideology like any other.

Ideology, the “verbal cement” sustaining “the fabric of any given type of society,” was Burnham’s true target. The value of ideologies for him was not in their empirical validity, but in their social utility.

“The theory of evolution or of relativity or of the electronic composition of matter are scientific theories,” Burnham wrote—theories of the sort he attempted to formulate about society. But “the doctrines of the preambles to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, the Nazi racial doctrines, Marxian dialectical materialism, St. Anselm’s doctrine of the meaning of world history”—these were merely “the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals.” A political scientist in the tradition of Machiavelli burrows through an ideology to find the truth about a social order. This was Burnham’s task as he studied global events at the beginning of World War II.

CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, AND TECHNOCRACY

‘The problem,” wrote Burnham in The Managerial Revolution, “is to discover, if possible, what type (if indeed it is to be a different type) of social organization is on the immediate historical horizon.” That a different type of society was indeed coming into being was a key assumption of his theory.

It was also a safe assumption. The decades following the First World War had seen a Bolshevist state emerge from the ruins of an impoverished empire, an explosion in mass production, a global boom and bust, widespread unemployment, the rise of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, a change in the relation of the individual to his government in the United States, a surprising and horrifying alliance between the Nazis and their Soviet enemies, and, finally, the return of war.

It was Burnham’s contention that the West had entered a third great era in its history, the “managerial revolution” of his title. First had come feudalism, then capitalism. Each social order, and the elite it privileged, arose, flourished, and was eventually replaced. “To the social dominance of feudal lords, with their vassals and fiefs, succeeds the social dominance of industrialists and bankers, with their monetary wealth, their factories and wage-workers.” The capitalists would be succeeded as well.

“What were the chief characteristics of the ‘modern world,’ ” Burnham asked, “the type of society usually referred to as ‘capitalist’ or ‘bourgeois,’ which was dominant from the end of the Middle Ages until, let us say in order to fix a date, 1914, the beginning of the First World War?”

In his fashion, Burnham itemized the salient features of this bourgeois or capitalist world, separating them into four groups:

Economic: commodity production; the importance and universality of money used not only as a medium of exchange but also as the mechanism of capital investment and personal and business credit; an emphasis on profit; periodic crises known as panics or depressions or recessions; extended and unregulated markets. “The market decides, independently of the wills of human beings.”

Social: class division between, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists who own the means of production—“factories, mines, land, railroads, machines, whatever they may be”—and, on the other hand, the proletariat or workers.

Political: the existence of nation-states participating in a global system of commerce; parliamentary governments with limited powers; and the idea 

of citizenship.

Ideological: individualism; natural rights; belief in the idea of progress; “the stress placed by capitalist society on the notion of ‘private initiative.’ ”

“That all of these features, and many others along with them, will disappear—and disappear in a matter of years, or decades at the most, not generations—is the negative half of the theory of the managerial revolution.”

One is struck immediately by the fact that Burnham was wrong: The features he outlined have not disappeared, at least not entirely. They have been modified, diminished, superseded, suppressed. Elements of the capitalist world persist in the new world of the managers. But they exist in a state of conflict with the opposing elements of managerial economy, society, politics, and ideology, a conflict written about in our newspapers and websites and presented nightly on the television news.

Burnham’s argument was that neither the theory of capitalism’s permanence nor the claim of revolutionary socialism was correct. Capitalism was only a few hundred years old, limited in its geographic extent, and it was not foolish to believe that a few hundred years hence it would no longer condition human reality.

Nor was capitalism all that “natural” to human beings. “It is enough to observe that human nature has been able to adapt itself to dozens of types of society, many of which have been studied by anthropologists and historians and a number of which have lasted far longer than capitalism,” he wrote.

Capitalism did not seem to have much longer to last. It was emerging from the Depression into total war, and the central fact of existence in capitalist societies was not mass affluence but mass unemployment. The word “crisis” was used every day. Nor was this crisis limited to the economic and political system. “The ideologies of capitalism, the bourgeois ideologies, have become impotent.”

Individual liberty, natural rights, parliamentary government no longer seemed to galvanize the public. “When the bourgeois ideologies were challenged in the Saar and the Sudetenland by the ideology of Nazism, it was Nazism that won the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the people.” So too in France, which in the spring of 1940 fell before the German Army in a matter of weeks. “What was Munich and the whole policy of appeasement,” Burnham asked, “but a recognition of bourgeois impotence?”

Capitalism might be doomed, but socialism was not destined to replace it. The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, which prophesied socialist triumph, was bunk. “No deduction from any metaphysical theory can ever tell us what is going to happen in the actual world of space and time.” Nor was socialism the only alternative to capitalism. History and the present day are full of different modes of production.

A classless society would not follow the destruction of private property. “Effective class domination and privilege does, it is true, require control over the instruments of production; but this need not be exercised through individual private property rights.” If merchants did not rule, then priests would—as had happened in ancient Egypt and in medieval Europe, and was happening, in secular guise, in the Soviet Union. “With respect to the three decisive characteristics of socialist society—classlessness, freedom, and internationalism—Russia is immeasurably further away today than during the first years of the revolution.”

Marxist and socialist parties had also failed. The Marxist ideology was no stronger than the capitalist one. “The only branch of the Marxist ideology which still retains considerable attractive power is the Stalinist variant of Leninism,” Burnham wrote. “But Stalinism is no longer genuinely socialist.”

The future was left to neither capitalism nor socialism but to managerialism—rule by technical administrators overseeing massive and complex bureaucracies and corporations. What had given rise to the managers, Burnham said, was the increasing complexity of modern technology and the global economy. As mechanical processes became more specialized, the supply chain more intricate, knowledge became more valuable—and powerful.

“In the earlier days of capitalism,” Burnham wrote, “the typical capitalist, the ideal of the ideologists before and after Adam Smith, was himself his own manager so far as there were managerial functions other than those assigned to some reliable skilled worker in the shop.” Those days were ending.

The capitalist had been an entrepreneur, a self-made man, a believer in private initiative and a strong work ethic. “But, as is well known, the growth of large-scale public corporations along with the technological development of modern industry have virtually wiped such types of enterprise out of the important sections of the economy; with a few exceptions, they remain only among the ‘small businesses’ which are trivial in their historic influence.”

The growth of the state restricted the sphere of capitalist activity. “No matter who runs the government or for what, every new incursion of government into the economy means that one more section of the economy is wholly or partially removed from the reign of capitalist economic relations”—and handed over to the reign of managerial ones.

Managers, whether they are in the “public” sector or the “private,” derive power from government. They wield or influence the apparatus of the state to reward themselves and their allies, to punish enemies, to divert resources to favored enterprises, to push their class interests, to propagate their ideology, to extend, in every direction, their ability to manipulate the economic, political, social, and cultural environment.

“The managers,” Burnham wrote, “will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production.” The capitalists and socialists could fight—did fight—were fighting—the managers. But it was a losing battle.

Even as the managers exerted their class interests worldwide, the ideology by which they justified their rule was still unformed. There were, according to Burnham, three alternative managerial ideologies, each set against the others: “Leninism-Stalinism; fascism-Nazism; and, at a more primitive level, .  .  . New Dealism and such less influential American ideologies as ‘technocracy.’ ”

It was Burnham’s view in The Managerial Revolution that the German fascists were most likely to win the war and emerge victorious in the ideological battle. This was another of his predictions that turned out to be false. Neither Nazism nor Stalinism became the dominant managerial ideology. Neither Nazism nor Stalinism shaped the future in the way Burnham foresaw.

The New Deal did.

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR THE MANAGERS

One of Burnham’s errors was the assumption that Machiavelli’s lions—forceful, nationalist, warlike despots such as Hitler and Stalin—would lead the managerial society. They would not. The future belonged instead to the foxes, to democratic leaders in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who periodically asked the public to endorse their vision of government activism and economic management. The future belonged to the unelected bureaucrats and judges who implemented or legitimated the executives’ plans, often with no oversight or accountability, and who made policy independent of any democratic body.

What Burnham saw in the New Deal was a tentative, halting, piecemeal attempt to overlay a managerial society atop the capitalist and individualist traditions of the United States. The New Deal was neither the beginning nor the end of this process. But it was surely the hinge point. The progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, epitomized by the writings and presidency of Wilson, had been the first to suggest that society had become so complicated, so unequal, so specialized that only a group of experts could administer it to the benefit and the satisfaction of the public. The New Deal was both a continuation and an intensification of the Wilsonian vision.

“The fact of the matter,” Burnham wrote, “is that the New Deal’s liberalism and progressivism are not liberalism and progressivism in the historical meaning of these terms; not, that is to say, capitalist liberalism and progressivism. Its progressivism, if we wish to call it that, consists of the steps it takes toward managerial society.” A society ruled by a technocratic elite.

Americans persisted in thinking that theirs was a polity of limited government, an economy of free enterprise. Burnham argued that this belief was false—and it is even more false today.

The accelerating pace of the managerial revolution was manifest in the growth of the executive branch of government. “ ‘Laws’ today in the United States, in fact most laws, are not being made any longer by Congress,” Burnham wrote, “but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’ How well lawyers know this to be the case!”

Congress had dominated much of U.S. history. Many of the post-founding statesmen had been members of the House or Senate. But with FDR the presidency and the executive bureaucracy assumed a prestige they have yet to relinquish.

“Indeed,” Burnham observed, “most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some more of its sovereign powers to one or another agency largely outside of its control.” What are Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, after all, but multi-thousand-page instruction manuals to government managers—legislative permission slips for the bureaucrats to decide arbitrarily and irrevocably matters affecting the health industry and financial sector?

The managers were on the advance. But their position was also tenuous. Not only were they fighting among themselves in the war, they were also fighting, in each of their respective nations, “the masses” as well as the representatives of the old capitalist order. From the standpoint of the managerial revolution, the outcome of the Second World War was irrelevant—all of the powers vying for supremacy were managerial ones.

So too the masses could be coopted into or made dependent on the managerial regime through jobs and entitlements. The most recalcitrant adversaries of the managers, then, were the capitalists, the businessmen and ideologues of laissez faire and natural right, who in America in particular, because of its decentralized political system, remained strong and enjoyed support from the middle and working classes.

Indeed, the bourgeoisie controlled one of this country’s two great political parties, which deployed the rhetoric of freedom to criticize the managerial New Deal. “There is nothing sham or hypocritical about the Republican-Tory defense of ‘liberty,’ ” Burnham wrote of the 1940 election. “The liberty in question means, in reality, capitalist liberty.”

He went on:

And how.

THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER

It would be wrong to judge The Managerial Revolution solely by its prognostications. Nazi Germany was crushed less than five years after the book was published. The Soviet empire collapsed in 1991. The business cycle, property rights, individualism—they are still here.

If Burnham’s work failed as predictive science, however, it nonetheless succeeded in its description of the new elite. The New Deal persisted, flourished, and was expanded by, among others, LBJ and George W. Bush and Barack Obama. When one refers to managers, or the New Class, or the cognitive elite, or knowledge workers, or symbolic analysts, or the creative class, one is implicitly acknowledging the privileges enjoyed by those with knowledge and education and technical expertise. One recognizes the decisive role played in our society by technocrats and scientists, programmers and consultants, teachers and administrators, social workers and other members of the helping professions.

If James Burnham returned to the United States today, what would he see? He would no doubt home in on Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and the connections, institutional and personal, between both sectors of the economy and the federal government. He would note that the global economy is affected, for good or ill, by the decisions of the managers of central banks. That since the end of the Second World War, European managers have tried to sublimate nationalism by constructing a supranational political and legal entity, the European Union, which is impervious to public opinion. That the military and diplomatic bureaucracy of the United States, where the presidential National Security Council alone employs some 400 workers, has pursued a policy, in fits and starts, of global economic and political integration under the aegis of American military power and the banner of international human rights.

Burnham would see that the state continues to grow in size and influence. The public assesses a president by how well he “manages” the economy. The instruments of fiscal and monetary policy are manipulated, not always successfully, to stimulate economic demand, job creation, trade, and credit. Government subsidizes the cost of homeownership, education, health care, and retirement—even car purchases. Managers determine the correct ethnic composition of housing developments, issue rules affecting thousands of fast-food franchises, order the release of illegal immigrants from detention, use the military as a laboratory for social engineering, and rewrite statutes to achieve their desired outcomes.

The ideology of the managers is well developed, supple, regnant, and on the offensive. It is apparent in talks at the Aspen Ideas Festival, at plenary sessions at Davos, amid the cocktail parties at the Clinton Global Initiative. The natural rights of capitalist society have been reconfigured into human rights—above all, the right of the monistic, autonomous human being to flout the prescriptions of tradition, family, and religion in pursuit of self-actualization.

The theories of multiculturalism and egalitarianism justify the exertion of tremendous effort and resources to lessen racial, ethnic, sexual, and economic inequalities. The ethic of environmentalism requires the enlargement of managerial power over the economy in pursuit of far-off and minuscule reductions in carbon emissions. The imperatives of economic development, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism drive the ruling class to pursue a de facto policy of open borders and mass immigration, which provides a flow of cheap labor to the corporate managers, as well as the plastic material on which the social managers can ply their trade of cultural and economic manipulation.

This ideology of autonomy, diversity, equality, innovation, growth, progress, and internationalism has adherents in government and corporations, in Washington and Wall Street, in the higher and secondary and elementary school systems, in the ruling class and the general public, in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Its more radical variants are on the march, in street protests, classrooms, and boardrooms, bakeries and floral shops, stamping out opposing views and bullying dissenters.

Meanwhile, the remnants of the capitalist regime fight a rearguard action, struggling to preserve their inheritance. The unrepentant libertarian Koch brothers, the traditional religious believers, the “leave-us-alone coalition” of taxpayers and gun-owners and homeschoolers, and other believers in the bourgeois ideology are demonized, caricatured, mocked, investigated, castigated, demeaned, and subverted.

What we are witnessing now, Burnham would say, is a crisis in the managerial system, and a reaction to elite cloddishness and overreach. “Managerial crises will, it would seem, be technical and political in character,” he wrote. “They will result from breakdowns in bureaucratized administration when faced with, say, the complicated problems of sudden shifts to war or peace or abrupt technical changes; or from mass movements of dissatisfaction and revolt which, with the state and economy fused, would be automatically at once political and economic in character and effect.”

Such a breakdown is readily apparent. The economic ministrations of the Federal Reserve, of the Chinese authorities, of the Eurocrats have not produced the sustained and potent growth necessary for true recovery and social peace. Managerial boorishness, from the IRS targeting of taxpayer groups, to the failure of HealthCare.gov, to a dithering and inconclusive war against ISIS, to the Snowden NSA breach, to the horrific scandal in the VA hospital system, to the massive OPM hack of personal data, to the recent EPA fouling of the Animas River in Colorado has soured the managed on the managers.

In the midst of these follies, however, our elites continue to publicize and promote and impose an agenda that is alluring and persuasive only to them: climate change, gun control, free trade, criminal justice reform, transgenderism, and, year after year, election cycle after election cycle, “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Governments around the world cannot control their borders, they cannot sustain economic prosperity, they cannot operate within budget, and yet every day they announce new initiatives to close the educational achievement gap, end gun violence, travel to Mars, establish universal health care, and reduce the inequalities between Elon Musk and the latest refugee to arrive at Dulles airport.

The slogans of equity, fairness, and social justice, James Burnham would point out, are a veneer for the rule of the managers, for the maintenance of their wealth and status, for the preservation and extension of their rule. Is it any wonder, then, as so much of our political culture and business culture, liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican, has fallen under the control of the managers, that the electorates left unnoticed or unaddressed by them would revolt?

It is these radicalized middle Americans, incensed at what they see as out-of-control immigration, rising crime, national transformation, and a corrupted and aloof Republican and Democratic leadership, that have so quickly rushed to embrace such unlikely tribunes of the people as Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Bernie Sanders. Trump’s message, for instance, is little more than a withering critique of the managers and a call for better “management.”

“Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old,” wrote Burnham, “so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come.” What might sound like a dissonant and jarring cacophony may actually be the siren that announces the latest development in the evolution of the managerial regime.

The activist base of the Republican party is clinging to pre-managerial beliefs of individual and national sovereignty, of independence, family, property, liberty, citizenship, and nationhood, in the face of its own leadership, practically the entire Democratic party, and the media and cultural establishment. And this struggle to preserve their traditions will outlast the latest hiccup in managerial rule—even if the tribunes of bourgeois capitalism are destined ultimately to lose the struggle.

MACHIAVELLIANS AND MORALISTS

Reading The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians is like stumbling upon a desolate moonscape. The expanse is vast, dark, chilling, hypnotic. But is this vision real—or a mirage? Burnham was the first to admit that many of his predictions were wrong. Is the rest of his approach just as mistaken?

It is worth returning to James Burnham for this reason: He, unlike most commentators of his time and ours, was thoroughly uninterested in and unenthusiastic about all the available political alternatives. What value he holds is in the clear-sightedness and detachment of his approach, his willingness to follow a line of inquiry to its sometimes uncomfortable conclusion, his recognition that conflict boils beneath genteel surfaces.

What makes one reluctant to embrace Burnham fully is the knowledge that reality is far too manifold and varied to be reduced to any one scheme. Invisible qualities like faith, hope, virtue, honor, charity, and affection are powerful motivators of human action that Burnham is too ready to dismiss. There are no laws of history, class is a simplifying and amorphous concept, and there are plenty of men and women who do not want to hear, who could not bear to hear, who should not have to hear that the beliefs that sustain them from day to day are nothing more than myths.

The rejection of ideology threatens to become an ideology in itself—a narrow view of human life that excludes unquantifiable yet very real characteristics of humanity. Missing from both of these books, for example, is any lengthy and serious treatment of religion, which Burnham dismisses out of hand. But he clearly did not anticipate the resurgence of orthodoxy that has been gripping the world for decades, pulling religious believers into politics, and fostering extremist movements in all faiths, most prominently in Islam.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest challenge to managerial rule is that posed by political Islam, in all its variants, which offers a holistic critique of modern society, and is clearly able to inspire men to action. Or perhaps political Islam is just another outburst from Machiavelli’s lions, one that will be cleverly squashed by the managerial foxes.

This durability of religious faith suggests that Burnham’s outlook is incomplete. The reader intrigued by his icy vision must nonetheless remember that human beings are not all evil, that society is not always in conflict, that there are many for whom the ideas of human freedom and dignity are something more than formulas of power. Clearly some ideologies are nobler than others. Indeed, the perseverance of the bourgeois idea into the 21st century is something of a rebuke to Burnham’s approach. The managers have not won entirely—at least not yet.

Matthew Continetti, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon.