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of the intelligentsia. The analogy extends to his style, which appears
to
be
crystal-clear-until one tries to determine precisely what is being
said. "It takes a lot of
per~istent
ploughing through Lippmanniana."
writes Rodell, "to make plain how often the smoothness of the Lipp–
mann style masks a muddiness of meaning, or even no meaning at all."
I have done such ploughing before, in a lengthy review of
The
Managerial Revolution
in the January-February, 1942, issue of this
magazine. There I showed in detail-as did H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills in an equally exhaustive and damning; review in
Ethics
for January, 1942-how scientifically shoddy and ethically pernicious
that book was. Burnham never replied to either review, as a serious
theoretician would have felt called on to do. Indeed, he himself
seemed to lose interest in "managerialism" almost as soon as the
book was off the press; he has written almost nothing about it since
then, hardly referring to it in his second book, and not even using the
word in the present article, which is about the foremost "manager"
of our times. For, like all his recent political attitudes, "managerial–
ism" was a strictly
ad hoc
theory, designed for the period of the Hitler–
Stalin pact, when the two great "managerialisms" were arrayed
against the decadent bourgeois-democracies. Its hero was Hitler, then
at the summit of his power. When Hitler attacked Russia a few weeks
after the book appeared, he made hash of Burnham's theory of the
war as a principled struggle between managerialism and capitalism;
and when he began to meet reverses after the halcyon 1940-1 period
(during which
The Managerial R evolution
was written), Burnham
increasingly lost interest in managerialism and its hero. Now that the
Red Army is a few miles from Berlin, he unrolls the red carpet of
his
appreciation before the new conquering hero.
One way of evaluating James Burnham's intellectual career is
as a restless quest for a Father, for authority, from Thomas
Aquinas to Trotsky to Pareto to Hitler and Stalin. A certain ambi–
valence has become noticeable in his attitude toward the last two
Fathers: he is fascinated by their power and success and repelled by
their moral qualities. The attraction and repulsion combine in a
masochistic way: ' "Beat me, daddy, eight to the bar." All this would
be of merely biographical interest were it not that Burnham is a
clever journalist who is able to communicate his political Father
fixations to, a large audience. And since there is already today among
our intellectuals a strong tendency to submit to authority, Burnham's
personal values have become somewhat of a public menace.
Now what I want to do here is to show, first, that Burnham's
parade of scientific method is so much hocus-pocus, concealing super-
