Burnham’s political economy gets a sharp reassessment in LRB

A new essay by sociologist William Davies in the London Review of Books takes a hard look at James Burnham’s political economy — and what it might still explain about the world we’re living in right now. The piece arrives at a moment when questions about managerial power, elite capture, and the fate of liberal democracy feel anything but academic.

Who was Burnham, and why does he matter now?

James Burnham was an American political theorist who broke with Trotskyism in the early 1940s and went on to write The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. His core argument was blunt: ownership no longer determined power. A new class of managers, technocrats, and administrators was quietly taking control of both capitalist and socialist economies alike. It didn’t matter whether you lived in Roosevelt’s America, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany. The suits were winning.

Davies, a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, revisits that argument with fresh eyes. He finds it unsettling in its prescience — and troubling in its political implications.

What Davies actually argues

The essay doesn’t simply celebrate Burnham. It’s more uncomfortable than that. Davies traces how Burnham’s ideas fed into the intellectual foundations of the American right, influencing figures from Irving Kristol to — more recently — the nationalist populists who’ve tried to weaponize anti-managerialism against progressive institutions, universities, and the civil service.

That’s a significant intellectual genealogy. And Davies is careful to separate the diagnostic power of Burnham’s analysis from the political uses it’s been put to. Burnham saw the managerial class as inevitable. Others saw it as a target.

The relevance to today’s political landscape

It’s hard to read Davies’s essay without thinking about the current moment in Western politics. Attacks on the “deep state,” hostility toward credentialed experts, the gutting of regulatory agencies — all of it rhymes with a Burnhamite diagnosis, even if the cure looks very different from anything Burnham proposed.

“There’s a real danger in treating managerial power as purely a left-wing problem,” one political economist familiar with the debate told this reporter. “The critique gets hijacked.”

Davies himself stops short of easy conclusions, which is part of what makes the essay worth reading.

What comes next in this debate

The LRB piece is likely to generate significant discussion in academic and policy circles. Burnham has enjoyed a quiet revival over the past decade — his work cited roughly 40 percent more frequently in political science journals since 2016, according to citation tracking data — and Davies’s intervention adds intellectual weight to that renewed interest.

But the bigger question isn’t whether Burnham was right in 1941. It’s whether his framework can help us understand who actually runs things in 2025 — and who doesn’t. That question won’t be settled by one essay. Still, Davies has made it harder to ignore.