 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast, the show where we are not afraid to read and review and tackle important books in the world and in hopes of getting you to consider and read some of these original and primary sources as well, because I think we can all agree that we have become too dependent on the commentary and also on social media for sort of shaping our worldview. And sometimes it's helpful to slow down and get back to those primary sources. Now, those of you who've been listening along, we've had some great shows recently. We've delved in some history and some other areas outside of economics, and we're going to continue to do that today. You may recall that last week I did a solo show on a book by Yannick Wasserman called The Marginal Revolutionaries, which was a left progressive critique of the Austrian school. And you may recall my mention in that show of having reviewed the book for Chronicles magazine. And Edward Welsh, who is the executive editor of Chronicles and also at the Charlemagne Institute, was kind enough to reach out to me for that review. And he is our guest this week to discuss a very important book by a very important thinker. So all that said, Edward, I want to thank you for joining us. It's my great pleasure. Thanks for having me. So, you know, a lot of people over the years have told me I need to read James Burnham. I have read him in sort of fits and starts. But his most famous book, I believe, is called The Managerial Revolution. What is happening in the world? And so this book came out in 1941. It went back and found our library copy. Edward, it's actually hard to get this book on Amazon. It's expensive. There's used versions out there. Fortunately, we possessed it and own it in our building here. But, you know, he's really one of those guys who is sort of the guy behind the guy. He's not as well known even amongst American conservatives as he probably ought to be. Absolutely. Yeah. And he influenced so many different people. I mean, certainly he influenced the editor of our magazine Chronicles, who is Paul Gottfried. But he influenced Sam Francis. And, you know, even before that, he had a huge influence on George Orwell, which is kind of an interesting story. Well, and of course he had a couple of decades later after writing this book during the Cold War at National Review where he was an editor. You know what's interesting to me is reading Burnham's history as a young Marxist and an academic is just how many commies there were at National Review over the years. I mean, this is, I'm sorry, I have a little bit of a problem with this. I'm not as trusting of former left-wingers who are now died in the Wolf Conservatives. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there was, well, I mean, Whitaker Chambers was one as well, who, you know, became a huge figure in the Alger Hiss case. He was actually a communist agent and became one of their big writers. And of course, that goes into the pedigree that the neo-conservatives have as a rising from Trotsky and Burnham was, I mean, he's been criticized. I know that, you know, certainly Paul doesn't agree with this as a neo-conservative. In fact, the first neo-conservative. And there are various reasons why that label doesn't quite fit for Burnham. But certainly, yes, there was this, a lot of the Trotskyites, who basically were pushed out of Russia after the Stalinists took control, kind of became strident anti-communists and attached themselves to the American right. Well, I think it's also worth noting. I always like to look at the person behind the ideas that he had a relatively privileged upbringing with a father who was, I believe, a railroad executive. He went to Princeton, he went to Oxford, he married a wealthy girl. So this is not a guy who developed his Marxist class consciousness from some sort of privation to put it mildly. Right, and I think that was the case with a lot of the fellow travelers and supporters of communists during that era in the West. Well, so this book comes out of the 1930s and all the hardships of the Great Depression where he is a full blown Marxist, but he's starting to change. He's starting to take the lessons of that and shift his thinking a little bit. So, I mean, let's start with this. There was this sort of idea that in Marxist thought that you start with feudalism and that's replaced by capitalism. And ultimately it leads us to our paradise of socialism. But I think one of the central thesis, theses of this book is his rejection of that. Yeah, he eventually, I mean, he started out as a Trotskyite. So the Trotskyite's idea, if I had it correctly, is basically that the Soviet Revolution was a failure and it had been subverted by Stalin. And he eventually came to reject that view and he saw the Stalinist version of communism as actually just grown up Leninism. It was not a perversion of the stuff of the movement that had arisen out of 1917 and the Russian Revolution. It was actually just a fulfillment of it. And the reason that he felt that way was he saw that basically his thesis is that what was going on across the world, not just in Russia, but certainly in Soviet Union was the real revolution was a new managerial class taking control from capitalism. And it was not essentially so it was not socialist because socialism would eliminate all class distinctions in society and basically in this sort of utopian view, the workers would all just sort of communally take care of the means of production and share resources equally or at least according to need. And what he saw instead was that actually what happened was the managerial class was coming over and taking over the means of production indirectly. And how he defined the managerial class is that as opposed to the capitalists in an earlier, simpler age who owned the means of production outright, the modern world after World War I is where he pins it. After World War I, that modern world became so complex and the means of production became so complex. Technology was advancing at such a rate that required this new class of specialists who weren't scientists and engineers themselves, but they were organizers. They were managers who could look at multiple systems and organize the means of production. And although they started out as employees, eventually the servant became the master and displace the master because the capitalist owner himself would be he'd own his shares of stock or his control certificates of some corporation and he'd be down in Boca Raton or whatever, dissonning himself and then all the work was being done by these managers. Eventually the managers realized they don't need that owner. And so this was not just happening in his view in Russia, although it was most advanced in Russia. He felt it in 1941, but it was starting to happen. He basically saw the fascist regime of Adolf Hitler and Mussolini as well as in the New Deal politics of 1930s America as different versions motivated by different ideologies of the same trend. And of course, I think identifying the New Deal as just a variant on this is one of the reasons the left doesn't particularly like Burnham or this book. I mean, if he's right, if his managerial class analysis is right, then that punctures a lot of Marxist class analysis and it also suggests that exploitation isn't only the result of capitalism. Right. Yeah. So the way that he basically he saw this was a deception. He saw, he saw that basically the struggle between socialism and capitalism was a red herring. It was, I'll quote from the book. He said, the word socialism is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favorable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is actually the basis for a new kind of exploiting class society. And one of the things that was open, you know, I think about, you know, one of the books I read this year as well is his Whitaker chambers witness which is his recounting of his conversion from becoming. Now, this was his colleague, this was Burnham's colleague eventually at the National Review when we're both there under Buckley and his conversion from being communist agent to then becoming sort of an anti communist crusader both at first a time magazine and then after the Alger Hiss trial at National Review and, and basically, well, he had the same kind of disillusionment which was common among communists in the west at that time, where when the revolution was under control they thought that all these good things would happen that Marx talked about instead the Stalinist purges happen and they had to totally it kind of crushed their world view. And for a while it was hidden. I know it was the New York Times I think it was writer Walter Duranty who kind of was helped, you know, gild the lily about Soviet Soviet Russia and hide from the West fellow travelers what was really like, but by the time it was writing manager of revolution 1941, it was clear. And so he had to basically look at that. And he rejected the Trotskyites viewpoint of things eventually because the Trotskyite said it was a perversion. He said no it's basically, it's basically a fulfillment of of what's going on and his comment about it was said that, you know, again I'm going to look at the book here. Russia could never have betrayed socialism because its revolution never had anything to do with socialism. It was really a manager revolution in disguise. And one of the ways he did his analysis on this was he said, you can, you can discover who the ruling group is in any society by seeing what group gets the biggest incomes. You know, hearing reports of basically how society was structured in Russia. And at first when the revolution would happen over the works would take the workers would take over the factories and they would kick out the capitalists. But eventually when the end and the Soviets let that happen for a while but eventually when the Soviets came in they put their workers and they put their, their, their party officials in to control the workers and who would basically receive beneficial treatment as being the, you know, they would be able to control the means of production and thus get preferential distribution of the resources. And this this vision that he had directly informed because he is read by George Orwell animal farm, you know the pigs and some are more equal than others that that comes directly from from this book and Orwell's reading of You know, from my end of things, there are a lot of libertarians myself for a long time included who were sort of hung up on this idea that well, there's two ways to organize society. There's the political means and the economic means, which means, you know, liberty and property or politics and collectivism. And the 20th century is in many ways a story of a third way some sort of semi socialism or social democracy safety net however you want to portray it. And I think that's the trend of the 21st century in terms of political globalism. But, but what Burnham brings together for me anyway is there is a third way. I've always pooped the idea of a third way. There is a third way it's nasty. It's called managerialism. So it really is an alternative to capitalism as we know it I think as he explains pretty capably in the book. And you can also just see the way that you can look at his analysis that he's writing about 1941 and about sort of he's writing about the betrayal of the Soviet Revolution basically the betrayal of socialist true believers and versus the reality of what actually happened. And if you look at events recently. I mean, right now, conservatives in America are experiencing the sting at least the ones who had supported Trump, the sting of feeling that they were betrayed by the establishment they were betrayed by Fox News they were betrayed by the Supreme Court and all those good federal society judges who Trump helped usher into power and basically Burnham's analysis is saying that there is a smokescreen about the real battle that is going on and so the participants in this battle. I think they're fighting for, you know, worker freedom or whatever but they're actually bringing about the ends and means of this, this managerial elite. And in the same way in America here, you basically have a one party system, a managerial elite, which is ostensibly called the right and the left. And it's all based in the Washington DC corridor, you know, and as well as the halls of power and other, you know, big blue urban centers for media and Hollywood film stuff, but basically, these people are kind of working together and the Trump revolution of 2016 was an overturning of of their control. And so when it came to helping Trump basically contest the results of this election, whether it was, you know, fraudulent or not, basically no one lift a finger to help or only very reluctantly come because to help them because the people that they want to control that Trump represented, who Sam Francis, who was influenced by Burnham called the middle Americans, you know, they want to put them back under the thumb of control rather than, you know, have this sort of, you know, they wanted to return basically the neoliberal, neoconservative consensus which has controlled the country for decades. Well, if we want to talk about managerialism in the current context, certainly Burnham's proven right by the last four years, the deep state, which is actually just the administrative state in plain view, it's not deep or conspiratorial or hidden, but it's Trump's inability to control his own administration, I think, which proves in the big sense that Burnham was right. Oh, absolutely. Yes, the managers are in control. And these people are, as Burnham said, the easiest way to discover what the ruling group is in any society is usually to see what group gets the biggest incomes. I was just looking that up and there's a MSNBC article from last year with the latest statistics on that. The top five highest earning counties in America are all adjacent to Washington, DC. Luton County, Fairfax County, Howard County, and Maryland Falls Church, Arlington, they all have between 100, and these are the people, now this is your salary, right? So this is your annual income. So certainly there are these rich plutocrat capitalists out there, but the people who make the most just on a yearly income who are, you know, benefiting off the system are all around that corridor of power in Washington, DC, which I mean, in Burnham's analysis, there you can pinpoint who rules the country. And the elected politicians are just, they're just temporary. So absolutely, it is analysis, that alone, that fact alone should get people to read this book. Now I think one of the reasons people don't read the book or I think one of the reasons it's sort of been forgotten is because he wrote it, you know, two years in the World War II and he had a lot of predictions in there that didn't pan out. Like he actually was, you know, it's probably the most cynical book ever. He says he has a scientific perspective on any, he issues ideology and kind of looks with contempt towards ideology, whether it's socialistic, neoconservative or capitalism. But he was looking very glassy eyed at World War II and he felt the Nazis were going to win. And he also felt that the Russian Revolution, the socialist communist revolution would be irreversible. So if you think and the managerial, basically the managerial elite would be firmly that the revolution would be completed the managerial revolution in about 50 to 60 years. Well, that seems to be at least temporarily proven wrong by, well, not only the results of World War II but then 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a new capitalist apparently, you know, for a while a capitalist regime was instituted in Russia. But of course, we know that that was pretty short lived. And eventually, you know, probably the most, the ultimate managerial elite executive, you know, this mid-level KGB guy came to rule Russia. And he came in and kicked out all the oligarchs and plutocrats and resumed Russia to control in a, you know, in a post-Soviet state, which is really a managerial revolution state. Well, and if we think about managerialism as a class rather than an ideology, I mean, you mentioned those five or six rotten counties around the Beltway, which are bleeding us. You know, you could go there and find that people at Cato or AEI or NPR or MSNBC, for example, that their values and their lifestyles and their worldview that are very aligned that they have to share the same cultural sensibilities. And that's far more important than their presumed ideological differences. Yes. And that is another, that is another very interesting insight he has in this book, is I mentioned his contempt for ideology. He talks about how flexible the ideologies are for all these, the true systems, you know, the Marxian analysis that looks at who has economic control. And then the political, he views the ideologies as mere rationale, and they could be changed out. And so he talks about, you know, Soviet, you know, the Soviet, the Marxist, the Soviet version of, or Leninism is being one ideology, Nazism is being one ideology. And then New Dealism, all being different ideologies, which kind of obscured the underlying nature of this power structure, which was managerial revolution. And, you know, actually Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles, he wrote back in 2002, he wrote a book called Multiculturalism and Politics of Guilt. And he talked about the current ideology, which was coming into power, which had actually been established in power, but which is now completely out of control. And he called it the therapeutic managerial regime. And it's this idea, kind of from the cultural, we call it cultural Marxism or whatever political correctness or, you know, woke politics, the woke ideology. It's this idea that the American people need to be fixed. They need to have their mentality fixed. They're all inveterate racists or, you know, bigots and homophobes. And really the only thing that can fix the American populace is this regime of managers. In a way, you think about it, you know, if you have, when the managers get in control, they expand their power by continually finding new things to fix in society. And that's the way, suddenly you get a picture of society that explains recent events. Why does the left push so much for global warming? Or why is this big deal being made out of COVID now? I think you can look at that and see, it's just a new jobs program for the managerial elite. They need to come and save, you know, the middle Americans, the average person from themselves or from these great global catastrophes which threaten them. Well, and I think that also explains why both left and right are progressive in effect, the need to perfect humans. Absolutely. Yeah. But I guess what strikes me is he predicts super states. Oh, yeah. Part of what managerialism requires is globalism in the political sense of the word. We have to get rid of our stubborn attachments to place or family or tradition. Yes. And you know, that's, that's something that I read about, you know, you get an impression, I think it is true. Also looking at some of his later books, The Machiavellians and The Death of the West was the other one that he wrote. He kind of embraces a globalist viewpoint. And he was arguing, you know, for sort of a unipolar American hegemony. So Burnham actually seemed to endorse this. I think the difference that he had from the neo-conservative view is the neo-conservative view I think he would look at as an ideology that was trying to export American liberal democracy. You've seen it as sort of a part of the old capitalist because the neo-conservatives were pushing this idea of sort of American capitalism or a version of it that needed to be, you know, sent all around the world and to convert the world to that. Burnham had no desire to really make converts or to, you know, export, you know, American-style capitalism to Baghdad or Afghanistan. Well, you mentioned earlier this in the economic or business sense. He discusses this distinction between ownership and control. And it almost mirrors in a distant way the idea of worker alienation, I guess, in a sense. But if you think about it, entrepreneurial capitalism at the turn of the 20th century and even into the 20th century was much more direct where the owner was actually the person working and managing the firm. But today it's so disconnected. I mean, if either one of us buy a couple of shares of Google or Apple or something, there's these really smart software guys and gals working at Google and Apple. And we're very far removed from them as a shareholder. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think he divided into four different classes of ownership and controlled. And he talked about, you know, and the very very last, the last level of the fourth one was the small shareholder who basically are just bought off with small dividends or share appreciation or their, their viewed with contempt basically for by by every other, you know, by both the workers, by the managers, and by the capitalists who still, you know, as such as they still exist and ownership of this as shareholders are irrelevant. I do think it's also, you know, he talked about how the way in which this subtle control would happen is that, you know, at least in the beginning, the shareholders and the capitalists who had the ownership they would essentially be bought off by the managers as the shareholders exercised real control. They would still give preferential distribution of, you know, the proceeds of capitalist enterprise to the owners in the meanwhile, they would be expanding their power and their sphere of influence and edging out the profits from real control and they would do that first of all, first of all, by just expanding outright government control of the means of production. And we've seen that grow and he predicted that basically that would continue to grow from World War one on, you know, and we've seen, you know, government increasingly get involved in health care and energy production and you know, regulation of all sorts. The other way he would have to do it is through indirect control, not only through regulation but I think that the way it's done now too is, I think about, there have been a variety of executives fired for making politically incorrect comments. And, you know, I've worked for, I've worked for corporations earlier in my career as well, in the way that, you know, the, the corporate HR enforces sort of all these crazy diversity rules that come from the federal government or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on exactly the composition you need to have for your workforce, or, and even through the SEC, if you don't control your, you know, make sure your business is a certain way, you know, or avoid all the niceties of political correctness, you can be sued, and then that is a threat. You could be sued by shareholders or investors and that can kick you out as an owner as well. So basically, there are all these ways in which the government indirectly, not just the government, I should say, or the managers using the power government, indirectly are ousting and edging out the capitalist class from control of society. And even if we are owners of a sword, let's say, through a publicly traded company, you know, not only is that far away, but we've sort of done away with the idea of getting paid income in the form of dividends. Now everything, all the wealth is just the, the idea that the stock price will go higher and higher and I'll sell it someday. You know, there's no longer this, this, this sort of desire to pull income out of our ownership as we own it. And I think that's something that, that Burnham was pressioned about, that there'd be an increasing level of disconnect between, let's say, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and the people spending whatever per share to be in bed a little bit with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Yes. And at the same time, this managerial regime, and both in the government and in the private sector would find a way to co-opt these co-opt these executives, these big plutocrats, these capitalists, because, you know, I think about how like Jeff Bezos has this $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense, the big tech, you know, the big tech social media giants, they're co-opted by our intelligence services. And I was thinking about that and he has this paragraph in which he says, in the managerial society, politics and economics are directly interfused. The state does not recognize its capitalist limits. The economic arena is also the arena of the state. Consequently, there is no sharp separation between political officials and so-called captains of industry. The captain of industry is by virtue of his function at the same time a state official. Yeah. And what's so interesting about this book is its application to areas outside of just, let's say, the federal government and the deep administrative state and also big corporations and business. I mean, you could say that managerialism has swept the West when it comes to universities, when it comes to the military, when it comes even to churches and synagogues and their leadership. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, again, this is where both Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried in following up on Burnham in their works, they predicted a lot of this about how this control would start to change the culture and it would be the ultimate battle in society would be between the elite and the normal people. And the normal people would start to see every aspect of their lives infringed upon by the manager elite. They would not be content to just control politics and economics as Burnham wrote, but also the culture at large. And, you know, this is the thing where we talk about at the Charter made Institute and with Paul and we talk about what should we be arguing for. And, you know, Chronicles magazine was founded, you know, 45 years ago next year. And it's called Chronicles, the magazine of American culture. And so long before, you know, Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream from culture that was really the policy of the magazine editors that they need we need to fight back against the Marxist on the cultural level to prevents basically what has now started to transpire where this control, whether it's called Marxism or managerialism or whatever is totally changing the American culture. I mean, it's partly changing composition of American culture through a wide increase in immigration since 1962. And it's also changing our more age. I mean, there's been a huge push to embrace all sorts of all sorts of sexual lifestyles that used to be anathema really to the religious conception of the founders of this country. You know, homosexual marriage now transgenderism seeing these things as legitimate identities and protected classes of people. These are all sort of the results of the managerial class and especially a leftist ideology infused managerial class controlling society. You get this sense from Burnham to that especially given he became a rabid Cold Warrior at National Review in the decades after this, you get this sense that Burnham and people like him don't really care so much about cultural and social issues. They're willing to give the people what they want so that they can be left alone like neoconservatives to focus on what they really want, which in his time was defeating the Soviets. But then you take that away. You take away the raison d'etre in 1989 and and what do you have left. Yes, and it's kind of odd that he would focus on that because you think that, you know, reading reading this book, you would think that he'd realize that the Soviets aren't the real enemy it's the managerialist I mean, in a way, it's like, I think of, you know, Philip K. Dick wrote the book The Man in the High Castle, you know, it's now that series on Amazon, I think it is Amazon crime and, you know, it's this re-envisioning of post World War two history which really the access powers defeated America. It's one of my favorite novels, even before the series came out but the the author talked about he was inspired by because he had a sort of a vision a waking dream of the reality that even though those the Nazis or the those those totalitarian powers were defeated in World War two, they'd actually taken root subtly into American society. So he was he was writing in a fictionalized forum about what he felt was actually the underlying reality of society that, you know, without using the words managerialism or whatever, that somehow this a totalitarian controlling ideology had taken root in America, even though the Nazis were defeated and the Soviets were contained after the Cold War. At the end, I think we do have to give him his due though on a couple points. Edward first is that he takes pains to point out that, and I'm quoting him, I have no personal wish to prove the theory of the managerial revolution true. On the contrary, my personal interest material as well as moral, my hopes are in conflict with the conclusions of this theory. So despite some of his critics from the left, he was at least not ostensibly claiming for himself the mantle of promoting managerialism. And the other thing is, I think he does a really important job for us here in that he makes a very strong case that the kind of managerialism to which we all become so accustomed. America, which once was a seed of your pants rugged individual results or in a country now where this sort of like everything's process, he makes the point that managerialism is not liberal. It's ill liberal. And I think we've, we've missed that to an extent. Yes, he goes out right and says that it's it's totalitarian. And that was an interesting point that he made about this. He talked about how he said that basically, you know, this managerial state, you know, and as you say he says I don't wish for it but he kind of said he thinks it's inevitable that it's going to go that way. And so we basically have to be clear eyed and adapting to it. And what he said is that, you know, he said they need sort of a limited democracy. I think he called it a steam reveal release valve. Yes, he said experience shows that a certain measure of democracy is an excellent way to enable opponents and the masses to let off steam without endangering the foundations of the social fabric. Discontent and opposition under an absolute dictatorship, having no mechanism for orderly expression tends to take terroristic and at times of crisis, revolutionary forms. And he said ultimately, he said the word dictatorship there he felt that ultimately this managerial class would be a dictatorship in fact or totalitarian in fact, and that even if it maintains some of the trappings of democracy. This would be essentially just sort of a sob or a way to distract the masses and to get them to, you know, to not resist too much against their control in a way if you're going to be very cynical. If you're cynical about two party politics in America you have to say that it seems like part of his vision came true. Well, when it comes to steam control I think some of our listeners will recognize the Reverend Bacon character in Tom Wolfs Bonfire the Vanities but look, we got to wrap this up but I do agree with you. I think this is mostly Kabuki theater and that democracy is just a way to give us sort of an illusion of control. But ladies and gentlemen, James Burnham is the kind of person you need to be reading. We're going to link to the book on Amazon if you want to spend that much for someone's used copy out there. I'm also going to post a link to sort of some cliff notes on Burnham and on several of his books by the aforementioned Sam Francis. And as I think a really interesting treat if some of you have a few extra hours over this wonderful Christmas week, we are going to link to a lecture that Dan McCarthy gave to I believe some Charlemagne interns perhaps on Burnham which is about an hour long and really good. Dan does a good job of kind of summarizing Burnham if you're interested in some of his background. So all that said, again, our guest is Edward Welch. He is the executive editor at Chronicles Magazine. You can find him and you should find him on Twitter at Edward Welch. All one word, Edward Welch. It's W-E-L-S-C-H Edward Welch. And also I encourage you to check out Chronicles. I am a subscriber to Chronicles. It's one of my favorite things to get in the mail. I like to get old fashioned physical magazines. My wife particularly likes Anthony Esselen who is frequently a contributor to the magazine. And Edward, I want to just thank you so much for your time. Thank you, and let me just also add, please visit us at www.chroniclesmagazine.org. You can subscribe to the magazine for only $5 a month and we'd love to have you. Excellent. Thanks, Edward. The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org. Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org. Thank you.