Third thoughts on James Burnham.(Ryan)

JAMES WHO? Does he ring any bell in your mind? If he does, you are probably about eighty years old, and blessed with a good memory. Last week I tried Burnham's name out on three former academic political scientists of riper years: "Y-e-e-rrs. Writing in the 1940s, wasn't he?" "Do you mean that American ex-Trotskyist who made a great splash about a coming 'managerial revolution' or something?"

"No one's even mentioned Burnham's name these last forty years, that I can recall. What on earth made you think of him?"

The answer to the last question was simple. George Orwell's book of essays Shooting an Elephant contains a piece called "Second Thoughts on James Burnham", written in 1949. Though Burnham may be today forgotten, and his writings regarded as rubbish, Orwell's brilliant essay preserves Burnham's ghost--or perhaps anti-ghost; he remains interesting, not so much for himself as for what a master writer has written about him.

Put with brutal but not unfair brevity, Burnham predicted that the Marxian proletarian revolution--still confidently awaited by left-thinkers of the 1940s--would not happen. The workers, so far from being emancipated, would continue to get the rough end of the pineapple, as they had from the beginning of time.

The "capitalists", however, the actual legal owners of all the stocks and shares and funds, the men with the cigars, fur coats, champagne and limousines--they would be superseded and vanish, as drones should. They would be displaced by the now impatiently waiting "managerial class"--the technicians, factory managers, scientists, top accountants and smart lawyers. (If Burnham were writing today, he would undoubtedly have included the computer and information technology whizzes--Bill Gates and his mates.)

There was no prospect of the managerial society being democratic, or even particularly humane. That would be far too untidy, unpredictable, uneconomic, for such rulers. Their society would be rigidly disciplined, oligarchic and, if necessary, cruel.

Both in The Managerial Revolution and in his later The Machiavellians, Burnham seems almost to gloat over the amorality and odiousness of the society he foresaw for the future, and which he foretold with an air of cool certainty. The smug face which looks out from the cover of the Pelican edition of The Managerial Revolution is not a visage easy to love. In a later article entitled "Lenin's Heir", Burnham extols Stalin as a great man, largely on the grounds of the appalling magnitude of his crimes: only a truly great man could be so wholly monstrous. Power was always gained by violence and retained by fraud--so what? It didn't trouble James Burnham.