"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (also published as "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution") is an essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

 first published in 1946 by the English author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 George Orwell

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...

. The essay discusses a work written by James Burnham

James Burnham

James Burnham was an American popular political theorist, best known for his influential work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years he left Marxism and produced...

, an American political theorist some five years earlier and uses it to criticise the concept of power worship and the failures in analysis that arise from it.

Background

Burnham (1905–1987) was an American popular political theorist, who published The Managerial Revolution, in 1941. In the work, he offered theories about the new form of society which was emerging to replace capitalism, based upon his observations of capitalism's development in the interwar period. He saw much in common between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "New Deal". He perceived that a new society had emerged in which a ruling class of "managers" had assumed all power and privilege. In a later book, The Machiavellians, he developed his theory, arguing that the emerging new élite will have to retain some democratic trappings — political opposition, a free press, and a controlled "circulation of the élites".

Orwell's article appeared as "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" in Polemic

Polemic (Magazine)

Polemic was a British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" published between 1945 and 1947, which aimed to be a general or non-specialist intellectual periodical....

No 3 in May 1946 and in various essay collections, as "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution" in a pamphlet printed by the Socialist Book Centre in Summer 1946 and as "James Burnham" in the summer 1947 issue of University Observer of Chicago.

Orwell discussed Burnham's work again in a further essay "Burham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle" published in 1947.

Summary

Orwell summarises Burnham's ideas in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians and highlights a few inconsistencies. He believed Burnham was fascinated by power and was sympathetic to Nazi Germany while they appeared to be winning, but by 1945 had transferred his sympathy to the U.S.S.R. He noted however that the theme of a new (and probably servile) society - neither capitalist nor socialist - was predicted in many works such as Belloc's The Servile State

The Servile State

The Servile State is a book written by Hilaire Belloc in 1912 about economics. Although it mentions Distributism, for which he and his friend G. K...

, and dystopian novels such as Wells' The Sleeper Awakes

The Sleeper Awakes

The Sleeper Awakes is a dystopian novel by H. G. Wells about a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London, where, because of compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world...

,Zamyatin's We

We (novel)

We is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin completed in 1921. It was written in response to the author's personal experiences during the Russian revolution of 1905, the Russian revolution of 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, and his work in the Tyne shipyards during the First...

and Huxley's Brave New World

Brave New World

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's fifth novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 , the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of...

.

Orwell considers that Burham differs from most other thinkers in trying to plot the course of future developments, and with the benefit of hindsight he identifies Burham's completely erroneous prophecies in 1941 which were

• 1 Germany is bound to win the war
• 2 Germany and Japan are bound to survive as great states and to remain the nuclei of power in their respective areas
• 3 Germany will not attack the U.S.S.R. until after the defeat of Britain
• 4 The USSR is bound to be defeated

Orwell then quotes an essay by Burnham entitled "Lenin's Heir" which posits a continuity between Lenin and Stalin's policies and appears to pay homage to Stalin "a great man". Again Burnham makes false predictions. Orwell identifies the reason for such errors to be the expectation that events will follow the course on which they appear to be set. This, argues Orwell, is a consequence of the worship of power and to some extent of wishful thinking. Orwell also notes that Burnham adopts the general American position of accepting both Communism and Fascism while classifying them as much the same thing. Whereas Englishmen, if they believe they are the same thing, see them as monstrous evils and if not, they take sides.

Orwell concludes that Burnham may be right in identifying a general drift towards oligarchy with the concentration of industrial and financial power, and the development of the managerial/technical class. However his error is in seeing this trend as continuing, and he makes two erroneous assumptions:

• 1 Politics is essentially the same in all ages
• 2 Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour.

Orwell refutes these assumptions and notes that just as Nazism had smashed itself to pieces, so the Russian regime will destroy itself. "The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure."

Reactions

Michael Shelden

Michael Shelden

Michael Shelden is an American biographer and teacher, notable for his authorized biography of George Orwell, his history of Cyril Connolly ’s Horizon magazine, and his controversial biography of Graham Greene. His most recent book, Mark Twain: Man in White, was published in January...

 saw Burnham's work and Orwell's analysis as having an influence on his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...

.

Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...

 saw the article as one of the first predictions that the Soviet Union would collapse

Predictions of Soviet collapse

There were people who predicted that the Soviet Union would eventually be dissolved before the process of dissolution began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989....

if it could not successfully liberalize itself.

Extracts

But subjectively, a majority of Americans would prefer either Russia or Germany to Britain, and, as between Russia and Germany, would prefer whichever seemed stronger at the moment. It is, therefore, not surprising that Burnham's world view should often be noticeably close to that of the American imperialists on the one side, or to that of the isolationists on the other. It is a 'tough' or 'realistic' world-view which fits in with the American form of wish-thinking.

The immediate cause of the German defeat was the unheard-of folly of attacking the U.S.S.R., while Britain was still undefeated and America was manifestly getting ready to fight. Mistakes of this magnitude can only be made, or at any rate they are most likely to be made, in countries where public opinion has no power. So long as the common man can get a hearing, such elementary rules as not fighting all your enemies simultaneously are less likely to be violated.