Comments on: Outsourcing Life To The Expert Class: The Menace Of The Managerial Class https://barelyablog.com/outsourcing-life-to-the-expert-class-the-menace-of-the-managerial-class/ by ilana mercer Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:29:09 +0000 hourly 1 By: Ilana Mercer https://barelyablog.com/outsourcing-life-to-the-expert-class-the-menace-of-the-managerial-class/comment-page-1/#comment-25302 Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:20:43 +0000 http://barelyablog.com/?p=49946#comment-25302 Thank you, MP, for contributing. Now we must get the old guard to rejoin.

]]> By: Musil Protege https://barelyablog.com/outsourcing-life-to-the-expert-class-the-menace-of-the-managerial-class/comment-page-1/#comment-25300 Thu, 10 Sep 2020 16:19:28 +0000 http://barelyablog.com/?p=49946#comment-25300 El Dragon, nice going. You beat me to the punch. I was going to say Ilana’s initial thoughtful blog post contained several insights into the managerial state (“…medicalizing problems of living,” vg). Any reason to talk more about Burnham’s work, his precursors and those who followed him, is by definition a great topic.

I bought the massive Leviathan and Its Enemies when it was published four years ago (I believe by Richard Spencer’s old press, just before RS became notorious), and read it avidly. Why Francis abandoned it 5 or 10 years before he died, I’ll never know. It’s pretty lucid and comprehensive. You can draw a straight line from the book back to Burnham’s two masterpieces The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, and from there to Machiavelli’s Discourse on Livy; and from there back to Livy’s History of the Roman Republic. I’ve read the Francis/Burnham books, but only dabbled in the latter two (so much to read, so little time!!), and wish I had a solid year to devote to all five books. I think anyone who does and reflects on them enough to know what the authors were really getting at, will have a pretty complete understanding of how the world works and how it wasn’t an accident that we find ourselves in this predicament at this time. Please, oh wise one, keep giving us more reason to turn back and reflect.

This blog is ALL RIGHT!!

]]> By: El Dragon https://barelyablog.com/outsourcing-life-to-the-expert-class-the-menace-of-the-managerial-class/comment-page-1/#comment-25294 Wed, 09 Sep 2020 13:28:43 +0000 http://barelyablog.com/?p=49946#comment-25294 “Samuel Francis wrote Leviathan in the early 1990s, when he believed America was entering the terminal stage of a protracted period of social transformation. Leviathan details the steady expansion in scale, complexity, and reach of various sectors of American life. Government, business, education, unions, churches, media, and entertainment were all transformed by a new social pattern. Organizations once rooted in local relationships, family ties, and regional cultures became larger, more impersonal, and more standardized.
The revolution required a new elite to advance it. Its distinguishing trait, suited to the institutions it controlled, was the possession of special forms of expertise. The managerial class knew how to run bureaucracies, develop the technologies on which they depended, and communicate their benefits to the masses. Leviathan follows Burnham’s pioneering work on this new class and describes the self-reinforcing process by which growing populations made social reorganization necessary, while new technologies and sciences of management made it possible. But Francis possessed a sharper eye for political conflict than did Burnham, and he examined more closely the shifting distribution of social power. Leviathan proposes that the managerial revolution can explain the major inflection points in postwar American politics. For Francis, the sharp ideological debates of recent decades—over the Cold War, civil rights, the New Left, Nixon, the religious right, and globalism—masked conflicts between ascending and declining elites.”

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/the-outsider

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