VIEWSnProphet SustainednJames Burnham and the Managerial RevolutionnWhen National Review published a special obituarynissue on James Burnham soon after his death inn1987, perhaps the most remarkable contribution came fromnthe pen of John Kenneth Galbraith. The Harvard economistnreminisced about the eager welcome with which he andnfellow New Dealers in the Roosevelt administration hadnreceived Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution: What isnHappening in the World when the book was first publishednin 1941. “Here in lucid detail,” wrote Professor Galbraith,nwas the full exploration — economic, social,npolitical — of the case Berle and Means had made.nHere was the world that Marx’s imperative ofncapitalist concentration had foretold. But here,nbeyond Marx, was the world in which the capitalist,nin turn, had been relegated to a bystander role.nThe dividends still came; the power had gone. …nThe Managerial Revolution was widely read andndiscussed. … I was persuaded of its importancenby Washington colleagues in 1941 amidst all thenpressures of wartime price control, for which I hadnjust assumed responsibility.nProfessor Galbraith’s recollections are remarkable because itnwas the central prophecy of The Managerial Revolutionnthat the New Deal was the womb where an embryonicntotalitarian order was being hatched, an order of the samennature as similar New Deals in Hitler’s Germany andnSamuel Francis is a columnist for the Washington Timesnand author of Power and History; The Political Thoughtnof James Burnham (1984).n14/CHRONICLESnby Samuel FrancisnnnStalin’s Soviet Union. If indeed the apostle of postwarnAmerican liberalism and his colleagues in the Rooseveltnadministration welcomed that prophecy, then he perhaps letnslip a secret of state that was never intended for the ears ofnthe vulgar. ‘nFor most of the 50 years since the publication of ThenManagerial Revolution, the architects and high priests ofnthe managerial state have made it their business to deny,nignore, or curse the prophecy. C. Wright Mills and Hans H.nGerth savagely reviewed the book when it was published,nthough much of what Mills himself later wrote in The PowernElite resembled some of Burnham’s formulations, and itnreceived all the wrath of Bolshevism scorned from thenapparatchiks of both the Trotskyist and Stalinist wings of thenmovement. Various writers have often insinuated or evennopenly stated that Burnham plagiarized his ideas from annobscure left-wing nut named Bruno Rizzi, though thenaccusation has now been definitively disproved. Throughoutnthe copious literature on the American corporate economy,nBurnham’s name is still invoked, but usually with disclaimersnof distance, distaste, and embarrassment.nCertainly there was much to criticize in Burnham’snformulation of the theory of the managerial revolution. Thenbook, in its origins, grew out of a protracted polemicalnconflict among the Trotskyists, with whom Burnham hadnbeen joined from 1934 to 1940, and Marxist ideology,nespecially a crude economic determinism, still colored muchnof his thought. Moreover, Burnham made the error ofnassuming that certain contemporary political trends of then1940’s — German military successes in the eariy part ofnWorld War II and the creation of various agencies in then