"The basic error of this school of thought is its contempt for the common man."

First published in Tribune, 14 January 1944

In today’s extract, first published in 1944, Orwell turns to another apparently modest subject: the now-vanished habit of binding magazines into books. Yet, as so often, we end up somewhere else entirely; in Orwell’s criticism of James Burnham’s theory of “managerial revolution”, we see him beginning to formulate the ideas behind Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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The old custom of binding up magazines and periodicals in book form seems to have gone out almost entirely, which is a pity, for a year’s issue of even a very stupid magazine is more readable after a lapse of time than the majority of books. I do not believe I ever had a better bargain than the dozen volumes of the Quarterly Review, starting in 1809, which I once picked up for two shillings at a farmhouse auction; but a good sixpennyworth was a year’s issue of the Cornhill when either Trollope or Thackeray, I forget which, was editing it, and another good buy was some odd volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine of the mid-sixties, at threepence each. I have also had some happy half-hours with Chambers’s Papers for the People, which flourished in the fifties, the Boy’s Own Paper in the days of the Boer War, the Strand in its great Sherlock Holmes days, and—a book I unfortunately only saw and didn’t buy—a bound volume of the Atheneum in the early twenties, when Middleton Murry was editing it, and T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and various others were making their first impact on the big public. I do not know why no one bothers to do this nowadays, for to get a year’s issue of a magazine bound costs less than buying a novel, and you can even do the job yourself if you have a spare evening and the right materials.

The great fascination of these old magazines is the completeness with which they ‘date’. Absorbed in the affairs of the moment, they tell one about political fashions and tendencies which are hardly mentioned in the more general history books. It is interesting, for instance, to study in contemporary magazines the war scare of the early sixties, when it was assumed on all sides that Britain was about to be invaded, the Volunteers were formed, amateur strategists published maps showing the routes by which the French armies would converge on London, and peaceful citizens cowered in ditches while the bullets of the Rifle Clubs (the then equivalent of the Home Guard) ricocheted in all directions.

The mistake that nearly all British observers made at that time was not to notice that Germany was dangerous. The sole danger was supposed to come from France, which had shot its bolt as a military power and had in any case no reason for quarrelling with Britain. And I believe that casual readers in the future, dipping into our newspapers and magazines, will note a similar aberration in the turning-away from democracy and frank admiration for totalitarianism which overtook the British intelligentsia about 1940.

Recently, turning up back numbers of Horizon, I came upon a long article on James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, in which Burnham’s main thesis was accepted almost without examination. It represented, many people would have claimed, the most intelligent forecast of our time. And yet—founded as it really was on a belief in the invincibility of the German army—events have already blown it to pieces.

Shortly, Burnham’s thesis is this. Laissez-faire capitalism is finished and Socialism, at any rate in the present period of history, is impossible. What is now happening is the appearance of a new ruling class, named by Burnham the “managers.” These are represented in Germany and the U.S.S.R. by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, and in the U.S.A. by the business executives. This new ruling class expropriates the capitalists, crushes the working-class movements and sets up a totalitarian society governed by the concept of efficiency. Britain is decadent and bound to be rapidly conquered by Germany. After the conquest of Britain will come the attack on the U.S.S.R., and Russia’s “military weakness” will cause her to “fall apart to east and west.” You are then left with three great super-States, Germany, Japan and the U.S.A., which divide the world between them, make ceaseless war upon one another, and keep the working class in permanent subjection.

Now, there is a great deal in what Burnham says. The fact that collectivism is not inherently democratic, that you do not do away with class rule by formally abolishing private property, is becoming clearer all the time. The tendency of the world to split up into several great power blocks is also clear enough, and the fact that each of these would probably be invincible has sinister possibilities. But the test of a political theory is its power to foretell the future, and Burnham’s predictions were falsified almost as soon as made. Britain was not conquered, Russia turned out not to be militarily weak, and—a much more fundamental error—Germany did attack Russia while the war against Britain was still in progress. Burnham had declared this to be impossible, on the grounds that the German and the Russian régimes were essentially the same and would not quarrel until the struggle against old-style capitalism was finished.

Obviously these mistakes were partly due to wish-thinking. Hating both Britain and the U.S.S.R., Burnham (and many American intellectuals of similar outlook) wanted to see both these countries conquered, and was also unable to admit that there was an essential difference between Russia and Germany. But the basic error of this school of thought is its contempt for the common man. A totalitarian society, it is felt, must be stronger than a democratic one: the expert’s opinion must be worth more than the ordinary man’s. The German army had won the first battles: therefore it must win the last one. The great strength of democracy, its power of criticism, was ignored.

It would be absurd to claim that either Britain or the U.S.A. are true democracies, but in both countries public opinion can influence policy, and while making many minor mistakes it probably avoids the bigger ones. If the German common people had had any say in the conduct of the war it is very unlikely, for instance, that they would have attacked Russia while Britain was still in the field, and still more unlikely that they would have wantonly declared war on America six months later. It takes an expert to make mistakes as big as that. When one sees how the Nazi régime has succeeded in smashing itself to pieces within a dozen years it is difficult to believe in the survival value of totalitarianism. But I would not deny that the “managerial” class might get control of our society, and that if they did they would lead us into some hellish places before they destroyed themselves. Where Burnham and his fellow-thinkers are wrong is in trying to spread the idea that totalitarianism is unavoidable, and that we must therefore do nothing to oppose it.

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