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>It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, al
by voldacar 3y ago
>It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.
This is an interesting insight. It seems to apply to Klaus Schwab / the NGO-academic-media complex pretty accurately.
- tptacek 3y agoBut his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalisation of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in. And, of course, a theme of this essay is that these predictions did not in fact come true when Burnham predicted them, and did not generally prove out over the next 20-30 years. We could debate what happened in the 80s, but the context is so different that Burnham might not have much to say about it.
- voldacar 3y agoIt seems that many of the predictions are at least somewhat true, or are becoming truer with time, though some of them are too vague to assign a truth value. Whether they happen faster or more slowly than he predicted is not really relevant to me.