The market Book

James Burnham is not one of the great prognosticators of the 20th century, and nearly everything he writes in this book is wrong, but he's wrong in that grand tradition of bloviating conservative intellectuals where they really swing for the fences and it's all very engaging and thought-provoking even as it's fundamentally misdirected. Burnham's wit is sharp, his prose is tight, and you can tell he's aiming at some very interesting ideas even as he misses most of them. It's the kind of writing that really gets your brain cranking in response, which I may enjoy even more than reading very well-written and well-considered pieces with which I totally agree. Watching people say foolish things with panache is the reason I read the National Review (which Burnham, appropriately enough, helped found).

The intellectual half-life of this book has been long and fascinating, and could probably occupy its own book or at least an article. The "managerial revolution" as a concept has lodged itself in the cultural consciousness, yet with a meaning nearly the opposite of what Burnham intended. And though George Orwell wrote a scathing review of it on its release (both his review and Paul Sweezy's are very much worth reading in their own right), The Managerial Revolution provided a significant source of inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the geopolitics of which are all lifted directly from this book.

Time (and especially the 1970s) may not have been kind to Burnham's specific predictions, but overall this still packs the same wallop it did in 1942. Get your hands on a first edition if you can, because he says completely insane things about the Nazis and who knows whether that may have been removed later. Definitely recommended.