The Managerial Revolution

1. In 1941, James Burnham published “The Managerial Revolution,” which boldly asserted that Capitalism was not only dead, but destined to be replaced by Managerialism- or “rule by managers.” pic.twitter.com/LOZbuFXHMO

— Lafayette Lee (@OrangePartisan) May 13, 2021

For Some It May be Cultural Suicide, for Others It is Subversion

Some people thought James Burnham’s identification of liberalism with civilization’s suicide was hyperbolic. In light of American institutions’ embrace of anti-Americanism, what would they say now? My thoughts today @theamgreatness https://t.co/9LCzUhgcZC

— Roger Kimball (@rogerkimball) April 25, 2021

Ed Welsch on James Burnham

A show you need to hear, on a book you need to read: James Burham's "The Managerial Revolution."

His theory of power still explains the West-- and particularly the DC Beltway-- better than any other.

With @EdwardWelsch from @ChroniclesMag https://t.co/33mQ1GKcLz

— Jeff Deist (@jeffdeist) December 23, 2020

Trump v. the Managerial State

Won't Disagree with This Headline

Replace the Elite https://t.co/3fzQkHx2aF

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) August 15, 2020

First Things

Patrick Deneen reviews The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite by Michael Lind.

Deneen:

Not unlike the managerial elite he criticizes, Lind fails to draw the correct conclusion from his own analysis. What’s ­needed is not “democratic pluralism” in which the ruling class remains a neoliberal, managerial elite who strategically concede some wealth and status to their inferiors. What’s needed is a fundamental displacement of the elite ethos by a common-good, popular conservatism that directs both economic goals and social values toward broadly shared material and social capital, toward the support of family and community life. We do not need libertarian overlords who buy off the working class with some welfare, nor a federal government that doles out tax receipts to localities, nor secularists who grudgingly grant some space to religious believers, but a ruling class that is itself informed by the very values that Lind believes were once regnant as the price of admission to elite status itself. Only the fear of not conforming to the regnant ethos will sufficiently move elites, but that fear will arise subsequent to the wholesale defeat, displacement, and discrediting of the regnant elite ethos.

This means, contra Lind, that what is needed is not “democratic pluralism,” which Lind envisions as a balance of power between an otherwise exploitative ruling class and an electorally powerful underclass. Rather, the current ruling class needs to be displaced by the ethos of the underclass: people shaped by and supportive of guild, ward, and congregation. The ruling class, no less than the working class, should be shaped by commitments of solidarity and subsidiarity, and not merely accord grudgingly with those who are. Lind regards the revival of such institutions as the Church as an unrealistic goal and calls for some sort of functional equivalent. Yet the decline of organizational forms of unions, local politics, and Church has been significantly advanced by the ­individualist, materialist, and secular ethos embraced by today’s managerial elite. If these institutions declined due to sustained efforts by the managerial elite, their renewal can be effected through the displacement of that elite with a different one informed by an opposing ethos. The power sought is not merely to balance the current elite, but to replace them. In the end, there is no “functional equivalent” of solidarity and subsidiarity, and only a leadership and working class steeped in such values will restore the ­republic.

This is the conservative fantasy, that they will gain power -- the "illiberals" or common-good conservatives will enact common-good conservatism when they get power, after enlisting the support of the working class. Tell me, who is going to provide the financial support to make this happen? Donald Trump? How are they going to overcome the gatekeepers within the Republican Party who act on behalf of the oligarchy?

James Burnham and the Asia-Pacific: 1941–1978

In a new essay for @ubookman Francis P. Sempa considers the life of James Burnham (1905–1987), an American political philosopher and public intellectual who traveled the intellectual journey from Marxism (the Trotskyite version) to conservatism. https://t.co/wY5pmEri1d pic.twitter.com/h6Y15Y5p3g

— Russell Kirk Center (@KirkCenter) July 8, 2020

Kirk Center

Jerry Salyer reviews Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right

Some interesting biographical notes on James Burnham.

CWR Dispatch: When Marxists make Right
While Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right focuses specifically upon those who for one reason or another became disillusioned with the establishment left over the course of the Cold War, it is surely relevant for our own time.

Lexington Books: Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right edited by Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers

Paleo Realism

AmConMag: What the Machiavellians Can Teach Us About the National Interest by Chilton Williamson Jr.
It was through them that James Burnham learned to renounce ideology and see the world as it actually is.

James Burnham's Checklist

Are you a liberal?

Daniel McCarthy on James Burnham

American Machiavelli
James Burnham reveals how our oligarchy rules.

Right Focus, Wrong Target

If you want to protect the family, the foe is not the Enlightenment so much as the Modern State, which is jealous of its power and seeks to prevent families from gathering strength with other families.

Forget the Enlightenment—Focus on the Family

How the West Really Lost God
by Mary Eberstadt.
Templeton Press, 2013.
Hardcover, 268 pages, $21.

A. W. R. HAWKINS

In light of that, a review of Burnham: ‘Only Power Restrains Power’
James Burnham’s The Machiavellians at Seventy.
FRANCIS P. SEMPA

Appeals to justice, natural law, and so on are ineffectual in the face of a foe determined to hold power and exercise it as he sees fit. He may be sincere in his disagreement, but a sincere believer in political error who seeks to carry out his agenda is still a threat to the common good.

Alt Right: The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham by Matt Forney

Plus:
What You Need to Know about Paul Gottfried by Seth Bartee

Daniel McCarthy, Kendall and Burnham Reconsidered

It's not clear to me what the viewpoint of this blog's author might be, but I did find this post, The Machiavellians: Principle I, which links to a pdf file of James Burnham's The Machiavellians (the original object of my search).

James Burnham's test for liberalism

Who are the liberals? by James Panero

There seem to me to be a few questions that should not be used to separate liberals from traditional conservatives:

5. In political or military conflict it is wrong to use methods of torture and physical terror.

14. Colonialism and imperialism are wrong.

15. Hotels, motels, stores and restaurants in southern United States ought to be obliged by law to allow Negroes to use all of their facilities on the same basis as whites.

By Federal law? No. State or local law? Perhaps.

30. There are no significant differences in intellectual, moral or civilizing capacity among human races and ethnic types.

Here we should distinguish between natural potential, and the potency of habit and culture.


(via VFR)

James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (published by Transaction Publishers)

Of this book Mr. Scott Richert writes in the current issue of Chronicles:

Burnham's 1959 book Congress and the Americna Tradition is his most conservative, and most consistently underrated, work. Asked by publisher Henry Regnery, in the wake of the McCarthy hearings, to write a defense of Congress's investigatory powers (which are never mentioned in the Constitution), Burnham gave Regnery much more: a serious work of political history that revives the Framers' understanding of the nature and role of Congress and places that understanding within the Anglo-American (and more broadly European) political tradition. (20)

(source of photo: National Review and the Triumph of the New Right)
James Burnham
Sempa James Burnham (I)
08/23/01 - James Burnham, The New Class, And The Nation-State
James Burnham and the Struggle for the World by Daniel Kelly

Also by Mr. Burnham: The managerial revolution. George Orwell wrote an essay on this book, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (wiki).