CHAPTER 4The New Elite
When James Burnham left Marxism in 1940, 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. They were the wave of the future.
The book does not completely jettison Marxist, Leninist, and Trotskyite principles. In fact, the title of the first chapter is one that V. I. Lenin and later Leon Trotsky regularly used: “The Problem.” Lenin wrote pieces called “The Balkan Problem,” “The Problem of the New Economic Policy,” “The Problem of Resettlement,” “The Liberals and the Land Problem in Britain,” “The Essence of the Agrarian Problem,” and “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign.” Trotsky would later write pieces titled “Problems of the British Revolution,” “Problems of the Spanish Revolution,” “Problems of the Chinese Revolution,” “Problems of the Soviet Regime,” and “Problem of the Ukraine.”
Part of the problem for Burnham was social revolution. Consistent with Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, The Managerial Revolution preaches revolution and the imminent dawn of a new era. It asserts at the beginning, “We must be careful not to permit historical judgement to be distorted by the staggering emotional impact of war itself. If a major social revolution is now in fact occurring, the war is subordinate to the revolution. The war in the final analysis—and future wars—is an episode in the revolution.”1 War signaled revolution and a new age; they all remained inexorably bound.
In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham predicts that capitalism would disappear, probably within a couple of decades.2 Capitalism's greatest fault is its mass unemployment.3 This defines sick civilizations, such as Athens in its dying years, Rome before its fall, and even displaced serfs and villeins characterized the late medieval period.4 Mass unemployment crushes society, bleeding it to death. Moreover, public and private debt were skyrocketing. And farmers were struggling to produce food. Consistent with Karl Marx, Burnham asserts that capitalism could no longer organize human affairs. Describing the recent rise of “technological unemployment,” he insists that not even technology could help; it only contributed to capitalism's failure.5 What about war? Burnham suggests that not even total war could solve this problem.6
Burnham argues in The Managerial Revolution that the waning of capitalism was also demonstrated by the decrepit nature of its dominant ideology. Liberalism (Burnham meant classical liberalism here) was passe, as shown by the fact that England and France could not thwart the advance of Nazism. The former Marxist believed that the social sciences showed that bourgeois ideologies were just temporary expressions of a particular time period, not universal values.7 The bourgeoisie have lost faith in their ideologies. For Burnham, nothing established liberalism's failure more clearly than the fact that England and the United States had to impose a draft when unemployment surged, as the fate of their nations hung in the balance.8
Until this point, Burnham's analysis preserves elements of Marxism: he relates economics and ideology, he insists that capitalism is outmoded, and he argues that technology will facilitate its collapse. He even writes that violence signaled the dawning of a new era in history. But Burnham deviates from Marxism by declaring that capitalism would not be replaced by socialism. Chiding Marxists for thinking that socialism was the only alternative to capitalism, he contends that myriad economic systems could replace capitalism.9 Burnham argues that Russia provided an example of a society that experienced a socialist revolution yet saw little real progress toward a classless society.
So, if the decline of capitalism was inevitable, yet the victory of the proletariat unlikely, what would happen next? Burnham predicts the rise of what he called a managerial class led by a group that included “operating executives, production managers, plant superintendents and their associates.”10 This class will supplant the bourgeoisie owners. Managers may run factories or a department within a factory. Or they may run mines, newspapers, railroads, or even government offices. The managers will work either with the state or for the state because Burnham assumes that private industry will fall under some form of state control. Yet, significantly, managers determine the policies by controlling production.11 This makes them the ruling class.
Burnham invokes The Modern Corporation and Private Property to explain how managers relate to the capitalists. According to Burnham, the authors show that most corporations were in fact “management controlled,” meaning that—unlike the capitalist stockholders—managers owned just a small percentage of shares of their corporations. But capitalists yield daily operations to managers because managerial expertise generates the capitalist profits. Managerialism is a natural result of the historical development of capitalism. Like Marx, Burnham believes that the capitalists have in fact birthed their own gravediggers. They are just managers, not workers.
While trying to explain why managers and not workers represent the wave of the future, Burnham argues that in the waning capitalist era, the working classes had not gained control of any of the instruments of production, unlike the capitalists in the late feudal era.12 Marxists had suggested trade unions could fix this; Burnham calls this argument an illusion because experience showed that trade unions were not anticapitalist.13 Instead, the former Marxist predicts that the managers would rule society and conquer the state: “The state—that is, the institutions which comprise the state—will … be the ‘property’ of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them in the position of ruling class.”14 The victory of the managers over state and society is inevitable.
Launching a theme that would become central for his future political philosophy, Burnham dedicates a chapter to “The Struggle for Power.” He asserts as an axiom that in modern societies, a small group of men exercise most of the power.15 During the medieval era, says Burnham, the ruling class of feudal lords owned the most land and had power. During the capitalist era, the ruling capitalists had the most money and obtained power. Now, an ascending class struggles against the decaying capitalist class in their quest for power: “What is occurring in this transition is a drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of the ruling class, by the social group of class called managers…. This drive will be successful. At the conclusion of the transition period the managers will, in fact, have achieved social dominance, will be the ruling class in society.”16 This power-struggle rages between the capitalists and an incipient class that was poised to rule over society.
According to Burnham, however, the managers will not necessarily make the most money; they were more concerned with power and privilege than profits.17 Separating the managers from wealth is important because it distinguishes Burnham's powerful ruling class from Marx's. For Marx, the powerful elite control the means of production, and this generates them wealth. For Burnham, the new ruling class holds various positions in the state and society that allow them to exercise power over the production of goods.18 Some are executives. Some are technicians. Some are corporate managers. Some are bureaucrats. They are privileged and they direct the economy, but they are not necessarily the wealthiest, at least not immediately.
The Managerial Revolution conceives of an elite privileged class that would use the state to advance its social, economic, and political interests. Burnham compares this class to the Catholic College of Cardinals, a separate group that determines who has power in the Catholic Church.19 And they control who enters their ranks. The managerial elite self-perpetuates because its dominance means it controls recruiting.20 Potential disrupters can easily be excluded.
Managerialism was progress. It would be slightly better than capitalism for the masses because the production of goods would increase.21 For Burnham, a managerial economy would not prevail if it could not solve some of capitalism's problems.22 Economic recessions and depressions that characterized capitalism would wane since managerial society would more effectively utilize manpower because of greater centralization.23 A centralized managerial economy could plan more effectively, “in a way that is not possible for a capitalist economy, with its system of divisive and uncoordinated control.”24 Writing in the early stages of World War II, Burnham extolls the virtues of a centralized, planned economy. Collectivist rule of the managers will dominate the future of society.
So, too, would their corresponding ideas. The new managerial era will lead to new modes of thinking, as Burnham suggests: “In place of capitalist concepts, there are concepts suited to the structure of managerial society and the rule of the managers. In place of the ‘individual,’ the stress turns to the ‘state,’ the people, the folk, the race. In place of gold, labor and work. In place of private enterprise, ‘socialism’ or ‘collectivism.’ In place of ‘freedom’ and ‘free initiative,’ planning. Less talk about ‘rights’ and ‘natural rights’; more about ‘duties’ and ‘order’ and ‘discipline.’”25 The ruling class (the managerial elite) foists ideology upon the people for the ex-Marxist. They prepare the “psychic atmosphere” (culture) for managerial rule.26
Burnham highlights the expanding role of the bureaucracy, a class he predicts will become nearly indistinguishable from the managers because the managers will wield power through the growing bureaucracy.27 The Managerial Revolution contains details about how the New Deal had created a new class of bureaucrats who played a critical role in the new American society by assuming roles previously reserved for the private sphere. Predicting that the power of the bureaucrats would grow immeasurably, Burnham contends that no fundamental difference will exist between the managerial state and the bureaucratic one as both will have the same type of economy, ideology, and political institutions.28 They cooperate.
Burnham holds that political power will shift from elected representatives to these unelected managers and bureaucrats. The latter were already usurping political power from Congress, evidenced by the fact that “laws” were no longer made by Congress, but rather by government agencies, such as the “NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”29 Most recent laws passed by Congress in fact had increased the power of government agencies.30 Burnham concedes that the United States had yet to reach the same stage as the USSR and Nazi Germany—Congress would occasionally discipline or even abolish an agency.31 But present trends favored the bureaucrats.
Burnham's ideas about the bureaucracy and its importance largely come from Trotsky. Marx, Engels, and Lenin and even Marxist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin grappled with the concept of bureaucracy, but Trotsky's analysis was the most complete. He had struggled politically with the bureaucracy in his efforts to thwart Stalin—and lost. Even before Lenin's death, Trotsky wrote that the bureaucracy was the enemy of the party, implying that the bureaucracy was the enemy of the people.32 In 1927, Trotsky wrote that the USSR was increasingly coming under the control of “an innumerable caste of genuine bureaucrats.”33 In The Revolution Betrayed, he partly blames the bureaucracy for socialism's wayward path in the USSR: “The new ruling caste soon revealed its own ideas, feelings and, more important, its interests…. The bureaucracy conquered something more than the Left Opposition. It conquered the Bolshevik party.”34 Trotsky suggests that a new bureaucracy could replace the decaying bourgeoisie as a new oppressor class, meaning it had to be resisted in order for democracy to succeed.35 He interprets the bureaucracy as a politically independent force—neither left nor right. It pursues only its own interest and seeks to maintain its privileges. And it could—at least temporarily—rule the Soviet Union.
The Managerial Revolution is partly a neo-Trotskyite treatise. Burnham based his predictions about the powerful managerial–bureaucratic class on Trotsky's interpretation of the Soviet Union. Burnham first presented his notion that a society can be neither capitalist nor socialist while emphasizing the bureaucracy in his 1937 response to The Revolution Betrayed, in which he describes the Soviet Union in Trotskyite terms: “The Soviet State at present is primarily the instrument of the privileged strata of Soviet society—the bureaucracy, Army (particularly the upper ranks), the GPU, the richer collective peasants, the technicians, intellectuals, better-paid Stakhanovites, etc.; and the instrument also of the sections of the international bourgeoisie toward which the State gravitates. Is this not the fact?”36 Adhering to Trotsky's view of the Soviet Union, Burnham argues in this 1937 article that the real rulers would be more subtle managers and bureaucrats. Bland, nameless and faceless, they controlled the levers of power. Burnham continues, “Is this a ‘no-class’ state? Of course not. It is simply not, primarily, the instrument of either of the two major classes in contemporary society.”37 He agrees with Trotsky that the Soviet Union was ruled by a privileged bureaucracy.
Trotsky believed this was a temporary stage in Soviet development until the workers prevailed, whereas Burnham speculates in The Managerial Revolution that this was the next stage in human history. Everyone was traveling along the same road, albeit at different speeds. Significantly, he did not distinguish between Nazism and communism—they were both already managerial societies because Stalin and Hitler had dismantled capitalism and were coordinating policies with the managers.38 The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 showed that the two nation-states could collaborate; economic and social relations between them swelled as German managers and goods moved east.39 At the same time, Russian boundaries expanded west.40 Burnham places Japan in the camp of managerialism, too. He even suggests that Russia could split in two parts: a European West and a Siberian East that would cooperate with Asia.41
The Managerial Revolution is determinist. It holds that the United States was a burgeoning managerial society and although geographically separate from Europe, the United States cannot resist worldwide trends.42 The New Deal was displacing capitalism; it represented a new stage on the road to managerialism. Agriculture had become dependent on state subsidies and the state was now the “greatest banking establishment.”43 Burnham argues in The Managerial Revolution that no one could deny that the New Deal “moves in the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism. The New Deal is a phase of the transition process from capitalism to managerial society.”44 The forecaster adds that he did not necessarily like where the world was going, but he had to report what was true.45
Written mostly in 1940 when the future seemed to belong to Germany, USSR, and Japan, The Managerial Revolution predicts that this trend would continue, with the United States maintaining its privileged position in the Western hemisphere. The rest of the world would coalesce around these hegemonic centers. This tripartite division of the world is based on the ideas of Halford Mackinder, a turn-of-the-century geographer and geopolitical strategist. Burnham does not cite him in The Managerial Revolution, but he does refer to Mackinder in future writings. Mackinder insisted that geography played a pivotal role in international relations. Believing that Europe and Asia were one great continent, he divided the world into three strategic regions: (1) the World Island, consisting of Europe, Asia, and Africa; (2) the Offshore Islands, comprising Japan and Britain; and (3) the Outlying Islands, North and South America. The World Island, the largest and richest of all land combinations, had at its center the “Heartland.” This was roughly Eastern Europe (and subsequently the Soviet Union). Mackinder declared that whoever controlled it controlled the world. This idea would dominate Burnham's post–World War II writings.
Would these managerial societies be totalitarian like Nazi Germany and the USSR? Or would they be democratic? Before answering, Burnham waxes philosophical by critiquing ideology and political concepts. He holds that ideologies are often “the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events—though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theory.”46 He gives the examples of Marxism, the doctrines of the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, Nazi racial doctrines, and even some religious beliefs. Burnham chastised popular political concepts, too. For Burnham, freedom was a term better used as “freedom.” He contends, “Freedom is by itself an incomplete term; there is no such thing as freedom, pure and simple; it must always be freedom from things and for something.”47 He continues: “If you want to be free of hangovers, you must restrict your freedom to drink larger amounts of alcohol. When slaves were freed in the South, planters were no longer free to own slaves.”48 Freedom is not an absolute value, but a relative one.
When it came to explaining the totalitarian or democratic nature of future managerial societies, Burnham equivocates. He argues that totalitarianism, impossible in past ages, had been facilitated by modern technology as it allowed the state to intimately control the lives of its people.49 Privacy has been vanquished. Burnham predicts that the executive branch would expand in concert with the bureaucracy, at the expense of institutions, such as congress and parliaments.50 A managerial society, however, cannot be completely totalitarian because it must be attuned to popular demands to satisfy them.51 A totalitarian government separates itself from the needs of the people, so it cannot thrive. It lacks knowledge of what its citizens needed because everyone was afraid to provide true and unbiased information; the USSR proved this.52 Democracy, in contrast, leads to openness, and knowledge of the people's needs. Moreover, democracy allows the masses to “let off steam” without ruining the social fabric of managerial society.53 Revolutionary fervor builds in totalitarian systems because no other outlets exist. Given all of this, Burnham asserts that the totalitarian managerial societies were just transitory phenomena. More democratic managerial societies would emerge.
Yet they would not necessarily be democratic in the modern sense of the word. Providing ideas he would explore in more depth in future works, Burnham theorizes that not everyone can have equal political rights because the ruling classes always keep their privilege.54 They must maintain control of the “instruments of production.”55 Moreover, opposition groups, so important in democracy, would wane in managerial society because they required different factions to position themselves for and against, such as labor against capital, or light industry against heavy industry.56 Burnham acknowledges that this was all speculation. Managerial society could produce some sort of democracy that simultaneously accorded some power to the people while also allowing the managerial class to maintain its privileged status.57 The purported prophet did know this: the democracy of capitalist society was moribund, and a new society was emerging.58 World War II was just the birth pains.
The Managerial Revolution represents a broader trend in American political and social life in the 1930s and 1940s: the shift toward centralism. The tendency began with the onset of the Great Depression and the ensuing government responses, such as the New Deal. The pace quickened during World War II when Western governments wrested even more economic and social power away from private interest. Ensuring that it produced everything needed to win the war, the US government created numerous agencies that directed the production of the economy. Civilian goods, such as automobiles and nonessential foods and textiles, were shuttered for state purposes. The question was whether these were temporary, makeshift solutions to the problem of Nazi and Japanese expansion, or whether they represented (and should they) a permanent trend in world history? For left-wing socialists, the days of unregulated, unplanned economies were over. Right-wing fascists agreed.59 And so did James Burnham.
Burnham may have been influenced by Bruno Rizzi, author of Bureaucratization of the World (1939). Published in France under the name “Bruno R.,” many copies of Rizzi's work were confiscated by the French state, but his ideas still circulated among Marxists. Trotsky made numerous allusions to “Bruno R.” in 1939 and even called Burnham a “semi-follower” of Rizzi's.60 Rizzi adhered to Trotsky's position that the Soviet Union was not really a socialist state, but rather a bureaucratic one: “The Soviet state, rather than becoming socialized, is becoming bureaucratized; instead of gradually dissolving into society without classes, it is growing immeasurably.”61 The Soviet Union was merely bureaucratic collectivism. The bureaucrats exploit the masses, too. Trotsky believed that the Soviet Union's path toward bureaucratic collectivism was a temporary aberration. Rizzi disagreed. He argued two years before The Managerial Revolution that Stalinism, fascism, and even the New Deal were all manifestations of a single trend that represented the future.
Accusations of plagiarism emerged shortly after The Managerial Revolution appeared, even by Rizzi himself.62 Burnham said he had heard of Rizzi through Trotsky but had not read his work.63 Rizzi claimed Burnham was lying.64 Over ten years after the publication of The Managerial Revolution, Rizzi and Burnham exchanged cordial letters. Telling Burnham that he presented his ideas to Trotsky in 1938, Rizzi inquired where Burnham had first learned of him.65 Burnham replied that he could not remember that exact piece in which Trotsky had referred to Rizzi, but he was certain it was in 1939.66 Burnham maintained that he had tried for many years to obtain a copy of Rizzi's work and requested a copy of the Bureaucratization of the World.67
Burnham acknowledged his debt to Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System (1921).68 This collection of essays analyzes America's economy in the aftermath of World War I. Declining industry and rising unemployment meant for Veblen the dawn of a new economic era. What would come next? Veblen predicts the rise of expert engineers—a class separate from the factory owners—who would and should guide production. He asserts, “This incoming industrial order is designed tocorrect the shortcomings of the old.”69 Veblen stresses concepts like “collective ownership” and “absentee owners” when attempting to explain how the new class would effectively allocate resource in the next stage of economic development.70
The Managerial Revolution was a hit. One review called it “the most widely read essay in social theory and philosophy of history to appear in recent years.”71 The New York Times spent multiple days reviewing the book, concluding that it was “extraordinarily impressive in some respects” and that “its scope and implications are enormous.”72 Noting that its readers hotly debated the book's prognostications, Fortune magazine called it, “the most debated book published so far this year.”73 Time magazine called it “one of the top books of 1941.”74 Foreign Affairs opined “in spite of its inconsistencies, schematic dogmatism and other faults, this provocative book may have a deep influence on the social and political thought of our time.”75
The reviews were not consistently favorable. Numerous reviewers slammed the book. Dwight Macdonald (also a former Trotskyite and now editor of Partisan Review), in an eight-page review titled “The Burnhamian Revolution,” spent most of the space criticizing the work. Macdonald wrote: “Logically fallacious, Burnham's thesis is also historically baseless. Although he frequently claims that the revolution it describes has already taken place to a large degree, he mentions only one specimen of the manager in the whole book … and not a single managerial party, program or even a group.”76 Criticizing his former comrade for his lack of data, MacDonald insisted that a vast gulf existed between what the author said and what the author did. Burnham discussed the scientific method, but he never employed it.77 McDonald even wrote the work resembled propaganda.78
Marxists were even less impressed. Trotskyite Albert Glotzer (using the pseudonym Albert Gates) dismissed Burnham's book by arguing that its popularity stemmed from its prediction that socialism was not the wave of the future. Loving this argument, the bourgeoisie promoted Burnham's work, ensuring its popularity.79 Marxist economist Paul Sweezy wrote a full-length article reviewing the book. Titled “The Illusion of the ‘Managerial Revolution,’” it too took issue with Burnham's contention that some sort of new economic system had emerged in Germany under Hitler. Yes, Hitler directed more state control of the economy, but profit margins had returned to, or surpassed, their predepression levels for German industrialists, showing that the capitalists had benefited from the Nazi regime.80 And, yes, the Soviet Union had not achieved socialism by most measures, at least not yet. But Marx's and Engels's theory of revolution “makes specific allowance for a period of transition, significantly called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat.’”81 There was no timetable for the completion of revolution. Joseph Hansen, a Trotskyite, wrote: “As Trotsky predicted, this petty bourgeois snob has swiftly completed his evolution into a rabid enemy of Marxism … The essence of Burnham's alternative is borrowed—without acknowledging the source—from Bruno R., an Italian who developed the theory that capitalism is being replaced by a new kind of exploiting society.”82
Mixed reviews and inconsistencies aside, Burnham became a respected public intellectual. John Kenneth Galbraith maintained that The Managerial Revolution was more popular than Berle's and Mean's The Modern Corporation.83 Burnham's predictions about the collectivization of Western society prompted a litany of responses over the next several years. Some of these books became classics in twentieth-century thought, especially among conservatives. The Managerial Revolution provides part of the context for Peter Drucker, Ludwig von Mises, Fredrich Hayek, and Karl Popper. The Future of Industrial Man (1942), Bureaucracy (1944), The Road to Serfdom (1944), and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) must, to some degree, be understood as rejections of the collectivism that Burnham predicted would sweep around the world. Written during World War II, the authors of these books had agreed with Burnham that Nazism and communism were related ideologies. Unlike Burnham, however, they had feared both; the authors had left Central Europe in hopes of finding economic and social freedom. Insisting nothing was inevitable, they champion free economies and open societies.
Peter Drucker reviewed The Managerial Revolution in 1941 and recognized that the book continued Marxist themes, such as the idea that social, political, and economic development followed advances in technology. He ends his review by proclaiming, “All in all, it is one of the best recent books on political and social trends; it will probably become the Bible of the next generation of neo-Marxists.”84 Drucker's The Future of Industrial Man (1942) contests Burnham's thesis by arguing that modern industrial society should be—and could be—free. One way to achieve this was through decentralization: Drucker suggests that the managerial elite held too much power, and to curb it, businesses and corporations needed more decentralizations. He also questions Burnham's thesis about inevitability by reasoning that if Germany had developed along pacificist lines instead of militarist, this would have been seen as the logical outgrowth of the Reformation, Kant, and Beethoven. If tyranny had swept across England, it would have been the logical culmination of Cromwell, Hobbes, and Bentham.85 Drucker maintains that Nazi victory in World War II was not assured.86 He offers a more optimistic vision of the future than Burnham, one at least less collectivist, rigid, and determinist.
Another émigré, Ludwig von Mises, lauded the freedom that capitalism seemingly promoted. His Bureaucracy (1944) refutes the idea that we should passively accept that the world was moving toward managerialism. Von Mises summarizes Burnham's position as follows: “Managers, responsible to nobody, will become a hereditary aristocracy; the government will become mere puppets of an omnipotent business clique.”87 Noting that for adherents this phenomenon was inevitable, Bureaucracy challenges this by demonstrating that bureaucracy can be foiled by restraining government interference.88 Von Mises continues that bureaucracy is not inherently bad because government needs it to function; only when bureaucracy interferes with all aspects of human life does the system becomes totalitarian.89 Capitalism thwarted this because no industry will ever fall prey to bureaucratic collectivism as long as it remains profit motivated.90
Von Mises's colleague, Friedrich Hayek, reviewed The Managerial Revolution. He notes that for its author, although Roosevelt is the face of the New Deal, the real representatives are “administrators, technicians, bureaucrats, who have been finding places through the state apparatus.”91 Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) describes The Managerial Revolution as a “significant book.”92 In his book, Hayek reduces economic theorists to two groups: individualists (like himself) and collectivists (or totalitarians). The latter tacitly included Burnham, Nazis, and communists because they favored a state-centered economy designed to promote the greater good.93 Hayek insists that this paved the road for totalitarianism: “The authority directing all economic activity would control not merely the part of our lives which is concerned with inferior things; it would control the allocation of the limited means for all our ends. And whoever controls all economic activity controls the means for all our ends must therefore decide which are to be satisfied and which not. This is really the crux of the matter.”94 The economic philosopher contends that economic planning meant controlling the people, so whereas Burnham analyzes the rise of centrally planned economies neutrally, Hayek laments the phenomenon. Not accepting Burnham's ideas that freedom was relative and arbitrary, Hayek holds that expanding government should be feared because the more government grows, the more restrictions it will impose on personal freedom.
Hayek's friend Karl Popper also feared Burnham's predictions might come true. He refers to Burnham in the introduction of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), writing that “those minor prophets who announce that certain events, such as a lapse into totalitarianism (or perhaps into ‘managerialism’), are bound to happen may, whether they like it or not, be instrumental in bringing these events about.”95 Burnham may not have realized it, but for Popper, his predictions about the inevitability of managerial collectivism fueled the totalitarian fire; they became self-fulfilling prophecies. Popper contends that these ideas discouraged individuals from fighting against totalitarian regimes, which he equates with collectivism.
Burnham continued The Managerial Revolution's pessimism about the prospects of real democracy in a 1941 article titled “Is Democracy Possible?” The more skeptical Burnham rears his head here. He contends that democracy's biggest enemy is always whatever force dominates society—this can be the Church, or military, or landowners, or capitalists.96 Currently in advanced civilizations, it was the state.97 And who controlled the state? He continues to predict that state and society are headed toward some sort of centralized managerial or bureaucratic control.98 What about the people—those who have power in democracy? Burnham announces that they always lose, so real democracy can never prevail: “Democracy can never win. Democracy always loses, because the forces of democracy, in winning, cease to be democratic.”99 Burnham suggests that it was a law of nature that most people could not be winners.100 Thus, democracy could never prevail.
After leaving Marxism, the cynical Burnham rarely envisioned a future that belonged to the people. He always distrusted the ruling elite, but any faith he had in the masses collapsed, too. In fact, he even questioned how much the masses really cared about democracy, anyway. Weren’t they more concerned with patriotism, morality, and economic security?101 He reduced politics to a power struggle between competing elites. Any semblance of democracy was fleeting. These ideas were expanded in his next work, a work inspired by one of the most cynical of all thinkers.