Second Thoughts on James Burnham

"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" ("James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution", when published as a pamphlet) is an essay, first published in May 1946 in Polemic, by the English author George Orwell. The essay discusses works written by James Burnham, an American political theorist.

In the essay Orwell accepts that the general drift has 'almost certainly been towards oligarchy' and 'an increasing concentration of industrial and financial power' but criticises the tendency of Burnham's 'power-worship' and comments upon the failures in analysis that arise from it. Orwell biographer Michael Shelden; – "Orwell was always at his best when he was on the attack, and his Polemic essay on Burnham is a brilliant criticism of the whole concept of power worship."

Burnham (1905–1987) was a former Trotskyist and professor of philosophy, who rejected dialectical materialism in favour of logical empiricism in 1940. In 1941 he published The Managerial Revolution. In the work, he offered theories about the new form of society which was emerging to replace capitalism, based upon his observations of capitalism's development in the interwar period. He saw much in common between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his "New Deal". He perceived that a new society had emerged in which a ruling class of "managers" had assumed all power and privilege. In a later book, The Machiavellians, he developed his theory, arguing that the emerging new élite will have to retain some democratic trappings — political opposition, a free press, and a controlled "circulation of the élites".

Orwell's article appeared as "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" in Polemic No 3 in May 1946 and in various essay collections, as "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution" in a pamphlet printed by the Socialist Book Centre in Summer 1946 and as "James Burnham" in the summer 1947 issue of University Observer of Chicago.

Orwell discussed Burnham's work again in a further essay "Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle" published in 1947.

Orwell summarises Burnham's ideas in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians and highlights inconsistencies. He believed Burnham was fascinated by power and was sympathetic to Nazi Germany while they appeared to be winning, but by 1944 had transferred his sympathy to the USSR. He noted, however, that the theme of a new (and probably servile) society – neither capitalist nor socialist – was predicted in many works such as Belloc's The Servile State, and dystopian novels such as Wells' The Sleeper Awakes, Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World.

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