Surprising literary ventures | 26 November 2005

James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
by George Orwell

Managerial revolution? What next? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Polem- icists? Luckily, no. This is the cover of a rare pamphlet by Orwell on the American political theorist James Burnham, who in 1940 wrote The Managerial Revolution, in which he speculated that the heirs to the world’s great capitalist, communist and fascist power-blocs would be a new breed of political ‘managers’ — unelected oligarchs whose only raison d’