Only the hopelessly naïve can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine that might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.
Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth, and the coming world, after all, will be the youth's world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment in Britain and this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for "indifference," "unwillingness to sacrifice," "lack of ideals." How right these reproaches are! And how little effect they have!--James Burnham (1941) The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, pp. 35-36 (New York John Day).
Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, alerted me to the significance of Burnham as "a central figure in the history of American Conservatism" (118). And since Alex Aragona, who is no conservative at all, recently mentioned The Managerial Revolution in favorable terms to me, I decided it was time to read Burnham's three major works, The Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964), The Machiavellians: the Defenders of Freedom (1943), and The Managerial Revolution, in reverse order. Unfortunately, while The Suicide of the West is the most accessible of the three, and of continued interest because it develops major political tropes that still structure political debate, it's also a work that defends civilizational (and racial) hierarchy and its racism (and homophobia, etc.) is intrinsic to the argument. (The racism is not 'scientific,' but primarily cultural in character.) The Machiavellians, by contrast, reads Machiavelli as republican defender of freedom and builds on it a concise, but important introduction to the Italian Elite school (recall). While the claims about civilizational hierarchy are undoubtedly lurking in the background, The Machiavellians deserves a place in the small cannon of twentieth century conservative and realist political theory; it offers a sensible alternative to liberalism without ending up in Schmitt's camp (no small feat). And I expect to return to it.
The passage I quoted above introduces a subsidiary theme that runs through the Managerial Revolution. Before I get to that let me offer a superfical summary of this book, which made Burnham -- then an ex-Trotskyite philosopher at NYU -- famous. The book is primarily diagnostic in character. And in light of his later works we can see that it diagnoses a major trend in order to warn the public against it. While Burnham is scathing of liberals like Hayek and Lippmann, in many ways his diagnosis (and the genre) is very similar: what they call "collectivism" is unfolding in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the New Deal America and this will empower what he calls 'managers' everywhere. Socialism and Capitalism are both doomed, and instead there will be mega-states in which those (managerial) technocrats, whose major role is to coordinate production (and distribution), will become the dominant class.
Okay, now back to the quoted text. This is meant to illustrate Burnham's idea that by the end of the crisis of the 1930s, the young have given up on liberal democracy in the face of mass unemployment, negative growth, and terror by Fascists and Soviets alike. And importantly, Burnham claims that this was not just the case in Nazi Germany (where social democrats and communists basically folded in 1933), but also in the more established liberal democracies in which he also notably includes various attempts at popular fronts (e.g., France and Spain). On his view, by the end of the 1930s, true socialism had been tried in the first few years after the 1917 October revolution and had been transformed into managerialism by the time of Lenin's death. And in "a large number countries-Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France-the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce socialism or make any genuine step toward socialism." (54)
One reason why managerialism is the way of the future, on this account, is that "we know, without waiting for the future, that managerial economy
can do away with mass unemployment or reduce it to a negligible minimum. This was done, by managerial methods, in Russia and Germany at the same time that England, France, and the United States proved incapable of doing it by capitalist methods." (133) He also clearly thinks managerialism will develop better "fighting machines" too (134). And while Burnham is careful not to endorse the violent methods of really existing managerialism, it is pretty clear he treats those (and the world wars) as transitional phenomena and as birth-pains of a new world order (akin to the wars that gave rise to bourgeois-capitalist civilization at the end of feudalism). As he puts it, "as has happened in the other comparable historical transitions, managerial society does away with the representative political institution of the old society, not merely because a new type of institution is technically better for the new society, but precisely because the old institution represents the old society; it becomes despised and hated, and the resentment of the masses is turned against it (look at France in the early summer of 1940); psychologically, ideologically, it is not suited for the new rule." (149; see also: "The masses in France could not be stirred to enthusiasm for a war for "democracy" (that is, capitalism). They rejoiced at Munich. They were passive when the war started, and all through the war. They did not have the will to fight....It is incredible that the defeat should have been so swift unless we admit, what is undeniably true, that the masses in France did not want to fight the war. They did not want to because the capitalist slogans no longer could move them." (189-190))
My present interest here is neither to defend or criticize Burnham's main thesis, but to call attention to his treatment of the significance of the collapse of France in the 1940s, which as my citations show, runs through the book (despite, compared to the elaborate analysis of developments in Russia and Germany, general lack of interest in offering a careful treatment of the French situation). For as it happens the French collapse also imperils the future of the British empire and prefigures European federation:
From the war of 1939 are coming at least two more of the major political leaps toward managerial society : first, the political consolidation of the European Continent, which involves also the smashing of England's hold on the Continent ; and, second, the breakup of the British Empire, chief political representative of capitalist world society. Though it is not yet understood in this country, both of these steps were assured when France surrendered in June, 1940. The dominant position of capitalist England has always depended upon its acting as middleman between the European Continent and the rest of the world, including most prominently its own great Empire. From this dependence followed the "balance of power" policy which England has been compelled to uphold during the entire capitalist era. This policy demands that no single nation shall dominate the European Continent; or, rather, that England shall dominate the Continent through balancing Continental nations against each other. England's domination can be achieved in no other way, since its comparatively meager national resources and its small population make impossible direct domination through its own force. But the balance of power on the Continent is possible only when the Continent is divided up into a number of genuinely sovereign and powerful states. Such a division ended, for all time, when France surrendered. Consequently, whatever happens during the remainder of the present war, whether or not Hitler's regime is overthrown, whether or not new revolts take place, the old system is finished, and England can never again be dominant in Europe or the controlling political center of a vast world empire. (177-178)
In a famous (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham." George Orwell had a lot of fun showing that many of Burnham's predictions turned out to be falsified. (The essay is the preface to my paperback edition of The Managerial Revolution.) And, in fact, Orwell makes fun of the passage that I quoted at the top of the post (and some of the other passages I have mentioned). But Orwell grudgingly admires Burnham's attempt to "plot the course of the ‘managerial revolution’ accurately on a world scale" and this clearly influenced, as is well known, his treatment of the inner party and the global competition of three world states portrayed in 1984.
But in 1946, in victory, Orwell refuses to acknowledge what Burnham got right: that with the collapse of the European balance of power, the British approach to a concert of Europe -- which, with a nod to Foucault (recall), goes back to Hume's era and writings -- is finished. As an aside, in June 1940, with French resistance to Germany collapsing (and after the Dunkirk withdrawal), there was briefly a window for a "Franco-British Union" offered by the British cabinet (Wikipedia has a brief overview of the story). And so while Burnham's analysis may be thought fanciful, it's not unlikely that Churchill saw matters in the same way.
For Burnham, capitalist liberal democracy, the balance of power in Europe, and the success of British imperialism are all inter-related. And so with the first in retreat and the second collapsed, the third has no future. While it certainly had dawned on the British governing class by 1941 that they were going to be overshadowed by the Americans, as subsequent history proved, it took them at least to the (1956) Suez fiasco to fully realize that their imperial days were over.*
However, what it means for the "old system" to be finished means in Europe, is that Europe will be an integrated industrial economy (under German leadership):
This phase, the consolidation of the European base, was completed with France's surrender. It is completed irreversibly and can no longer be undone whatever the outcome of the succeeding phases of the war, which are really other wars. This consolidation, fundamental to the world politics of managerial society, is not going to be dissolved, not even if the present German regime is utterly defeated. In fact, no one expects it to be, not even the English statesmen. The day of a Europe carved into a score of sovereign states is over; if the states remain, they will be little more than administrative units in a larger collectivity. Any attempt to re-divide Europe would collapse, not in the twenty years it took the Versailles system to collapse, but in twenty months. (246; emphases added.)
That is to say, that for Burnham it's obvious that the days of independent European states, who had ruled the world for a few centuries, are over. Given the new political and economic realities, Europe would have to develop into a continental wide integrated, industrial area (akin to the United States of America) in what he calls a "European super-state". (247) From his perspective Nazi-Germany was merely accelerating that which had become inevitable. What Burnham ends up missing is that this would occur eventually much slower under American guidance with European states reduced to satellites (in the manner of Canada, in his account). I leave it for another time to evaluate how the partial vitality of capitalist liberal democracy was so underestimated.
Even so, we might say that on Burnham's account that the (real possibility of a) technocratic European Union was born with French surrender in 1940.* One might be have to be a Kojève to see in this the cunning of history.
*In fact, Burnham argues that Hitler offered Great Britain peace terms precisely in order to forestall the collapse of the empire, which he did not want to fall in American and Asian hands (246-247), but be part of a European sphere. On some accounts a similar motive was behind the Treaty of Rome (which then still included non-trivial African possessions).
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