Jules J.S. Gaspard
James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution is not, at first glance, a foundational text of war studies. Written in 1941 amid the cataclysm of the Second World War, it is most often treated as a work of political theory and historical prognostication. And yet, buried within its pages is a theory of war’s evolving function within society—one that has profound implications for the study of war itself.
For Burnham, war was not a mere eruption of violence or a failure of diplomacy; it was a mechanism of revolutionary transformation. It served as the crucible through which one form of social organisation—the feudal, the capitalist—was broken and replaced by another. In Burnham’s account, the First World War marked the death knell of capitalist hegemony. The Second World War heralded the rise of a new ruling class: the managers. The age of aristocratic warriors and capitalist entrepreneurs gave way to an era in which technical experts, bureaucrats and policy planners would not merely run the machinery of government and war—they would become its rationale.
By ‘managerialism’, Burnham meant something precise.[1] It was not simply administration or expertise, but a whole mode of social organisation in which control is exercised less through ownership or charisma than through the command of specialised knowledge, procedures and institutions. The managerial class is defined by its capacity to administer systems—economic, military, political—through technical expertise, credentialed authority and bureaucratic process. Its social domination lies not in direct command or traditional property rights but in planning, optimising, coordinating and regulating. It rules by managing.
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