dominate owners and stockholders but also to the wholensocial, political, and cultural revolution that he predictednwould ensue from managerial rule.nBurnham interpreted the events of the 1930’s in terms ofnthis theory. Contrary to what Trotsky maintained until hisndeath, Stalinist Russia was not a “workers’ state” that wasntemporarily deformed by Stalin’s dictatorship but was a fullyndeveloped managerial state in which the logic of thenrevolution had been carried to its full extent of totalitarianism.nSimilarly, collectivist organization in Nazi Germanynalso represented the coming to power of the managerial classnof the National Socialist Party in opposition to the old rulingnclass of Junkers and the incompetent administrators of thenWeimar Republic.njS?’nIn the New Deal, Burnham saw the beginnings of ansimilar regime in the United States. The New Deal reliednon the Caesarist leadership of Roosevelt in much the samenway that Russia and Germany relied on that of Stalin andnHitler. It created a large bureaucracy in the federal executivenbranch, and it sought to override congressional, state, andnlocal authority with the centralized power of the New Dealnadministrative agencies and to manage the economynthrough these agencies. It allied with various “progressive”nbusinessmen and managers in modern corporations againstnsmaller and older forms of entrepreneurial capitalism, and itnsought to rationalize or justify its power through an appeal tondemocratist, collectivist ideologies that challenged and rejectednthe classical liberal formulas of the old entrepreneurialnbourgeois class. “The fact of the matter,” Burnhamnasserted,nis that the New Deal’s liberalism and progressivismnare not liberalism and progressivism in the historicalnmeaning of these terms; not, that is to say, capitalistnliberalism and progressivism. Its progressivism, if wenwish to call it that, consists of the steps it takesntoward managerial society.nInternationally, Burnham saw Worid War II as “the firstngreat war of managerial society,” in which the managerialnsuperpowers would contend for world domination. Managerialnelites existed in those areas of the globe in whichnadvanced industry flourished, which Burnham identified asnWestern Europe, the United States, and Japan, and thesenstates or transnational blocs under their control would be thenmain contestants in the struggle for the world. The nation-n16/CHRONICLESnnnstate would no longer be a useful form of collectivenorganization, and “the comparatively large number ofnsovereign nations under capitalism is being replaced by ancomparatively small number of great nations or ‘superstates,’nwhich will divide the worid among them.” Sovereigntynwill cease to exist or be restricted to the superstates.nBurnham’s conclusions about the future of the world werenthus pessimistic: the managerial states would be totalitarianninternally and irhperialistic externally, and they wouldnplunge the worid into global wars until one or some of themnhad subdued it. He saw the new managerial class as beingndriven not by ideas (which it used only for its ownnconvenience) but by the economic logic of the technicalnskill by which they held power in the mass economic,npolitical, and social organizations they controlled.nIf this was the world that the young Mr. Galbraith and hisncomrades were so eager to construct, Burnham himselfnmade clear that he was not advocating or supporting what henpredicted. “I have no personal wish to prove the theory ofnthe managerial revolution true,” he wrote. “On the contrary,nmy personal interests, material as well as moral, andnmy hopes are in conflict with the conclusions of thisntheory.” In his second book. The Machiavellians: Defendersnof Freedom (1943), Burnham recast the theory, excisingnthe Marxist and economic determinist elements and reformulatingnthe same predictions in a framework drawn fromnthe classical theory of elites of Vilfredo Pareto and GaetanonMosca. In a preface to a 1960 reprint of The ManagerialnRevolution, the older Burnham (he had been 36 when thenbook was originally published in 1941) acknowledged thatnhis original expression of the theory “now seems to me toonrigid and doctrinaire. . . . Events have proved some propositions—nparticulariy some of the political as distinguishednfrom the sociological and economic conclusions—wrong ornincomplete.” He believed the prediction of a struggle for thenworid among “a small number of great political aggregates,nor superstates, has been confirmed,” but today, he wrote, “Inwould allow for a greater range of variation within thengeneral managerial form.”nYet not all of Burnham’s later qualifications may bencalled for. Obviously, there were flaws in Burnham’snpredictions, but it is impossible to read The ManagerialnRevolution today without a haunting sense of familiarity.nNazi Germany and Japan were defeated, but the UnitednStates and the Soviet Union soon emerged as the dominantnsuperstates of the postwar world, and regional and transnationalnalliances, organizations, and security pacts took overnsome of the actual functions of traditional nation-states. ThenNew Deal agencies were abolished, but new agencies soonncame into being that managed and manipulated the economynand society in much the same way or in even morenradical ways, and smaller independent businesses and thensocial and cultural order associated with entrepreneurialncapitalism continued to wither as the bureaucratic, centralizednstate and the bureaucratized managerial economyncontinued to coalesce. Congress and states were not abolished,nbut the “imperial presidency” has flourished almostncontinuously since Roosevelt’s day and has relied on an everngrowing number of bureaucrats rather than elected oflicialsnas its core. Collectivist formulas have also flourished, and then