James Burnham

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James Burnham (born November 22, 1905 in Chicago , † July 28, 1987 in Kent, Connecticut ) was an American philosopher, sociologist and political theorist. In the 1930s he influenced the labor movement in the United States as a Trotskyist intellectual ; later he became a pioneer of the conservative movement .

Life and political career

James Burnham was a member of the Trotskyist, anti- Stalinist Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s .

His 1941 published book The Managerial Revolution (dt. The regime of the Manager ) influenced many intellectuals; for example, it inspired George Orwell to write his 1984 bestseller .

Stalin's attack on Finland in 1939 made him a staunch opponent of the Soviet Union, an attitude that intensified after World War II when Burnham began working for the CIA . As one of the leading figures of the American Conservatives, he shaped the political debate during the Cold War like hardly anyone else . In 1950 he was one of the co-authors of the manifesto of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin. 1964 appeared Suicide of the West (dt. The suicide of the West ), in which he represented the conservatives widely held view that the West would weaken liberalism. Although he had become an avowed conservative, he turned against Joseph McCarthy's policy of expelling communists from public office and persecuting them.

Ronald Reagan awarded him in 1983 the Medal of Freedom ( Presidential Medal of Freedom ), the highest award, which has awarded to a US president.

The manager revolution

Burnham became famous with his book Das Regime der Managers , which was initially rejected by ten publishers. He sees the present (1940; the book was then published in 1941) as a social revolutionary epoch, the transition from one type of society to another, which he calls the “managerial revolution”. Burnham takes a positivistic approach and just wants to develop a descriptive theory that refrains from any value judgment. Managers are "administrators, experts, senior engineers, production managers, propaganda specialists and technocrats". Your field of activity is planning, monitoring and putting together social processes.

He predicts that capitalist societies as well as communist or fascist-led societies will all be superseded by a social formation in which the managers represent the new elite who will bring the rest of society under their rule. This is evidenced by the increasing trend towards mechanization and scientification of society. He assumed a leading role for the USA in the future.

In a review of the book, C. Wright Mills criticized Burnhams' short circuit of changes in the internal power structure of organizations to concurrent changes in the power structure of a society as a whole and its class structure. The main flaw in Burnham's diagnosis is that Burnham lumps together the management positions of the most varied of organizations in the “manager” category, from corporations to state administrations and mass organizations, so that recently he has shown nothing more than an increasing trend towards bureaucratization, which has already happened before him Max Weber had pointed out. The separation of the role of owner and manager does not change anything in the fundamental power and class structure of capitalism. In particular, German National Socialism should not be understood as a seizure of power by the managers or the middle class, but rather as capitalism that was only modified by the war economy and imperialism.

Works

  • Is the West Committing Suicide? An attempt on the meaning and future of liberalism ("Suicide of the West", 1964). Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1965.
  • The regime of managers ("The managerical revolution", 1941). Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1951.
  • The Cold War strategy ("The comind defeat of communism", 1950). Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1950.
  • The Machiavellians. Defenders of Freedom ("The Machiavellians. Defenders of Freedom", 1943). Pan-Verlag, Zurich 1949.
  • The Struggle for the World . John Day Company, New York 1947.
  • Containment or Liberation? An inquiry into the aims of United States foreign policy . John Day Company, New York 1952.
  • The Web of Subversion. Underground Networks in the US Government . John Day Company, New York 1954.
  • Congress and the American Tradition . Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1959.
  • The War We Are In. The Last Decade and the Next . Arlington House, New York 1967.

literature

  • Yannick Kalff, Burnham, James (1941): The Managerial Revolution , in: Stefan Kühl (Hg), key works in organizational research . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2015, 148–151.
  • George Orwell , James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution , in: George Orwell, In Front Of Your Nose , ed. v. Sonja Orwell, Ian Angus, Vol. 4. Penguin, London 1970, 192-215.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. 1000dokumente.de
  2. ^ Francis P. Sempa: The First Cold Warrior
  3. ^ A Marx for the Manager. In: Irving Louis Horowitz : Power, Politics and People. The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press: London Oxford New York
  4. Burnham had cited The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Berle and Means as evidence .