The Managerial Revolution

What Is Happening in the World

By: James Burnham

Narrated by: Keith Hahn

"Burnham has real intellectual courage, and writes about real issues." (George Orwell)

Burnham’s claim was not that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism” - rule by managers.

Written in 1941, this is the book that theorized how the world was moving into the hands of the "managers". Burnham explains how capitalism had virtually lost its control, and would be displaced not by labour, nor by socialism, but by the rule of administrators in business and in government.

This revolution, he posited, is as broad as the world and as comprehensive as human society, asking "Why is 'totalitarianism' not the issue?" "Can civilization be destroyed?" and "Why is the New Deal something bigger than Roosevelt can handle?"

In a volume extraordinary for its dispassionate handling of those and other fundamental questions, James Burnham explores fully the implications of the managerial revolution.

Praise for James Burnham:

"The stoic, detached, empirical, hard-boiled, penetrating, realist mind of James Burnham is something to behold, to admire, to emulate." (National Review)

"James Burnham was an astonishing writer. Subtle, passionate, and irritatingly well-read." (New Criterion)

"The immense significance of Burnham’s approach is potential. We can ignore it only at the risk of being disarmed by the future course of events." (Irving Kristol)

James Burnham was an American popular political theorist. Burnham was a radical activist in the 1930s and an important factional leader of the American Trotskyist movement. In later years, as his thinking developed, he left Marxism and turned to conservatism, serving as a public intellectual of the conservative movement. He also wrote regularly for the conservative publication National Review on a variety of topics.

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Robot narrator

Narrator constantly pronounces words wrong to the point i have to go back and relisten to catch what was even being said

Read by a computer, interesting theory, not quite accurate.

The worst thing about the book is that it sounds as if it were read by a computer. The idea of the managerial revolution is interesting. I think parts of it played out as the author predicted but a lot of it didn't. (Written in 1941). Although the U.S. does seem to be increasingly run by managers, the societies that were the most managerial in nature (Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union) are no longer present. The capitalist system ultimately won (for now). The prediction that a capitalist economy could not produce war material as fast as a managerial economy turned out to be hilariously false. The military industrial complex is alive and well still to this day. The book is about as dry as Marx Capital but more reasonable in length.

Is the narrator a text-to-speech program?

Terrible performance. I’m wondering now if I can find a better free version somewhere. The narrator sounds like a robot.

Fascinating Book, Mediocre Narration

Very interesting book, worth a listen. The narrator is poor, monotonous and dull. Still, I would recommend the book despite the reading. It is very helpful in breaking out of the capitalist/socialist dialectic.

Great book.

This book has been in my to read list for a long time and I'm glad I finally got to it. A lot of predictions unsurprisingly did not come true but quite a few of them did. The author builds a very interesting framework.

The narrator however was bad, barely tollerable. Any third rate Podcaster willing to look up an occasional pronunciation could have done better. I still finished it but if another recording had been available I would have probably returned it.