BOOKS
place, we may observe that it really doesn't make much difference
which of the two groups is to be correctly regarded as the new
ruling class.... In either case, the general structural and insti–
tutional organization will be the same•... To say ihat the ruling
class is the managers is almost the same thing as to say that it is
the state bureaucracy. The two have, by and large, coalesced.
83
In a few casual words, Burnham blows up the foundation of his elab–
orately constructed thesis. But-and this is the important point-he
him–
self is not aware of this because he is not aware of any significant differ–
ence between the political and the managerial bureaucracies.
This he
makes clear when he writes (pp. 156-8):
Modern politicians-that is, politicians of the types found
in the present Russian and German regimes . . .-are in reality
not unlike modern managers. They direct masses of people in
ways analogous to those used by managers in directing produc–
tion; they have similar habits of thought, similar methods. . . .
[There are] moral prejudices against regarding war and propa–
ganda and diplomacy and policing as 'economically productive'
processes; though, in a complex society, above all in a society so
integrated as under a managerial structure, no clear line can be
drawn between them and the remainder of the economy. Armies
and police forces and courts and fireside chats and prisons can
be looked on as among the means whereby society produces
goods....
It is not difficult to show that this conception conflicts fatally with his
previous contention that the managers, not the politicos, are· the ruling
class because it is the former who "in practice" direct the productive
forces. For if a war is to be considered an economic process, it clearly
dominate~
any conceivable managerial field, and
if
Hitler and Stalin are
also managers, they are so by virtue of their control of the State power,
which determines
for what end
the economic machinery is to be set in
motiqn. But I am interested in these passages less for the additional flaws
they expose in Burnham's thesis-there's really no end to such openings!
-but rather for what they tell us about the
meaning
of the thesis.
The dangerous thing about
The Managerial Revolution
is that its
author
assumes
his most important premise, the identity of managers and
politicos (the two passages just quoted are almost all he has on this
crucial point). Having assumed this,
BurnluJm presents his thesis almost
exclusively in managerial terms
(a strategy which in itself suggests the
falsity of his primary identification of managers with politicos). Thus
while he defines very closely just what he means by a manager-the one
.erious slip into scientific method, in fact, in an otherwise admirable job
of special pleading-he nowhere defines even approximately what he
means by a political bureaucrat. And why does he call it the
managerial
volution if the new ruling class also includes the politicians? As Burn–
ham
states himself, "the name given to the theory ... is not unimportant.''
