Lucian, James and Neema to raise your power level beyond authority
If you have read my first article Less than ten Books to get to know IPN you probably remember "The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom" now this shall be your primer on Machiavellian thought. Neema Parvini, god bless him, has written a important compendium towards James Burnhams thought called "The Populist Delusion" both books are must-reads if you want to know how realpolitik works. Practical politics has with these two books proper theory next to the collected video essays of Lucian via the Freedom Alternative Network. Make sure that both of these books are in your library. I read around 800 books on politics. These two stand out, the rest not so much. No other honerable mentions I gonna put forward over stressing how important these two books are. Buy them read them, let the knowledge sit for a while and read them again.
Cheatodes of the two books are available if you approach me in person. Just click here:
doc_2023-12-16_18-04-34.mp4This classic work of political theory and practice offers an account of the modern Machiavellians, a remarkable group who have been influential in Europe and practically unknown in the United States. The book devotes a long section to Machiavelli himself as well as to such modern Machiavellians as Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham contends that the writings of these men hold the key both to the truth about politics and to the preservation of political liberty. The 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump unleashed a wave of populism not seen in America since the Nixon era, which carried him into the presidency. Seen widely as a vindication of the people over elites, his failure to bring about any meaningful change was then seen as an aberration, a departure from a natural state where the people are sovereign and their representatives govern by their consent. This is the populist delusion. This book explodes that delusion. Beginning with the Italian elite school, Parvini shows the top-down and elite driven nature of politics by explicating one thinker per chapter: Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Schmitt, Jouvenel, Burnham, Francis, and Gottfried. The sobering picture that emerges is that the interests of the people have only ever been advanced by a tightly organized minority. Just as fire drives out fire, so an elite is only ever driven out by another elite. The Populist Delusion is the remedy for a self-defeating folk politics that has done the people a great disservice.
And now without further a though here have the noise of my literature notes for the Populist Delusion:
QuoteDisplay MoreAn organised minority always rules over the majority.
In fact, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people’.
Myth of the stateless society: that state and society were or could ever be separate.
Myth of the neutral state: that state and politics were or could ever be separate.
Myth of the free market: that state and economy were or could ever be separate.
Myth of the separation of powers: that competing power centres can realistically endure without converging.
‘Elite’ in this sense could be the elites in currently power or a set of ‘counter-elites’ who seek to supplant them.
In the latter case, however, the efforts of counter-elites will only find success in a revolution.
‘Rebellions happen; revolutions are made’.
The superior and tight organization of the counter-elite group determines largely why it is that group as opposed to any other that will now take the reins of power.
Historical studies on revolutionary figures as diametrically opposed as Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler have noted tight organizational ability and iron discipline as the defining characteristics of their respective vanguards.
...bread-and-butter issues of Economism.’
Likewise, Arthur Bryant described Hitler’s NSDAP as ‘a fighting movement of flawless discipline, and animated by the same unquestioning devotion to its faith and leaders as the old Prussian Guard.’ Bryant goes on, ‘It must place him among the great organisers of mankind that he was able to establish it so quickly.’
...and a total disdain for the polite and respectable ‘bourgeois’ society of the status quo they each sought to supplant.
...the rise of the Bolsheviks nor the rise of the Nazis was a popular uprising but rather the result of the determined organized efforts of counter-elites.
...but the result of the determined organized efforts of the elites currently in power or, if you prefer, the ruling class.
Gaetano Mosca...
Vilfredo Pareto...
Robert Michels...
Carl Schmitt...
Bertrand de Jouvenel...
‘the circulation of elites’—can...
James Burnham...
Samuel T. Francis...
Paul Gottfried...
Many democrats and social radicals have rejected the early elite theorists’ ‘futility thesis’.6 They have sought to demonstrate that particular elites are not those with superior endowments or organizational capacities, but merely persons who are socially advantaged in power competitions. Adherents of this view have argued that the existence of elites can be terminated either by removing the social advantages that some people enjoy or by abolishing the power concentrations that spur competitions among them—remedies that often go hand-in-hand. There are no historical instances, however, where these remedies have been successfully applied in a large population for any significant length of time.7...
James Burnham, who is one of them, dubbed these thinkers ‘the Machiavellians’. This does not mean that they were all disciples of Niccolò Machiavelli, but rather that they conducted their work in his spirit: to see the world as it is and not how it ought to be.
...their watchword was realism.
C. A. Bond points out in his book Nemesis...
Vilfredo Pareto for making a ‘myth’ out of the idea of the man of action...
Mosca favoured juridical defence or separation of powers while Pareto favoured a strong ‘man of action’ or Machiavellian lion.
...personal policy preferences.
...essential ideas...
What matters in each of their cases is whether the core principles of power and its functioning which they outlined are true.
Does reality bear out in practice what they say in theory, now and always? This is the only test of a theory that aspires to realism.
Those who wish to bring about political change cannot hope to do so if they adopt populist methods or have faith that at some point a critical mass of the public will suddenly reach a ‘tipping point’ after which elites will be inevitably toppled. Change always takes concerted organisation and cannot hope to be achieved simply by convincing the greatest number of people of your point of view.
In any case, ‘manufacturing consent’ can only be carried out once a group is de facto in power. A group may achieve de jure power only to find that they cannot execute or manufacture consent because they have not achieved de facto power—and, realistically, de facto power is the only power that counts.
The Ruling Class; Mosca—then...
...most basic conceptual units in our analysis of power and politics.
The Ruling Class: first, the rulers and the ruled; and second, political formulas.
...the two strata of the ruling class and level of civilization and juridical defence.
First, Mosca’s central thesis, for which he is most famous, is the fact that human societies are always governed by minorities.
...two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled.1...
Power does not rest nor will ever rest in ‘the will of the people’, but rather in the organised efforts of the ruling minority.
In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one. Meanwhile it will be easier for the former to act in concert and have a mutual understanding simply because they are a hundred and not a thousand. It follows that the larger the political community, the smaller will the proportion of the governing minority to the governed majority be, and the more difficult will it be for the majority to organize for reaction against the minority.2...
‘the will of the people’
Even in the most charitable interpretation, representative democracy is simply ‘elected oligarchy’.
The elitist argument is a much stronger one. It is that the dominant minority cannot be controlled by the majority wherever democratic mechanisms are used...
‘the assumption that the elected official is the mouthpiece of the majority of his electors is as a rule not consistent with the facts’...
The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters, and, if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected.
First, because it is a permanent aspect of human society, the classical liberal notion that there is an antagonism between the state and society is rendered as utopian nonsense...
From our point of view there can be no antagonism between state and society. The state is to be looked upon merely as that part of society which performs the political function. Considered in this light, all questions touching interference or noninterference by the state come to assume a new aspect. Instead of asking what the limits of state activity ought to be, we try to find out what the best type of political organization is, which type, in other words, enables all the elements that have a political significance in a given society to be best utilized and specialized, best subjected to reciprocal control and to the principle of individual responsibility for the things that are done in the respective domains.5...
Mosca’s ultimate answer to this is a kind of Machiavellian mixed-Republic in which there are competing power centres and in which different social types are part of the process of power.
In this respect, his vision of a balanced system is not that far removed from the original vision of the American Founding Fathers. With that said, he is highly sceptical and critical of written constitutions, and prefers as his model the more organic British system in which the wisdom of the ruling class has facilitated change without violent revolution.
...duty and without a wage.
...any real distinction between military states founded on force and coercion and liberal states founded on voluntary association and trade.
Any political organization is both voluntary and coercive at one and the same time—voluntary because it arises from the very nature of man, as was long ago noted by Aristotle, and coercive because it is a necessary fact, the human being finding himself unable to live otherwise. It is natural, therefore, and at the same time indispensable, that where there are men there should automatically be a society, and that when there is a society there should also be a state—that is to say, a minority that rules and a majority that is ruled by the ruling minority.6...
He was liberal only in the sense that he opposed absolutism and generally supported separation of powers and their distribution across social types.
...why do the majority assent to the rule of the minority? According to Mosca it is because they, at least tacitly, subscribe to the ‘political formula’ of the ruling class. The political formula, or ‘principle of sovereignty’, is defined as the ‘legal and moral basis, or principle, on which the power of the political class rests’.
‘the will of the people’.
However, these myths are not necessarily to be taken as cynical lies told by the rulers to hoodwink the masses but are necessary for the smooth operation of the whole society.
Georges Sorel called them ‘myths’, Karl Manheim, and later the Marxist, Louis Althusser, called them ‘ideologies’.
‘Treason, therefore and, more than treason, the unending suspicion of treason, paralysed all resistance, disorganized the regular army […] and diminished the effectiveness of a spontaneous popular resistance […] which might have triumphed.’
No ruling class can survive without an effective political formula.
Ruling classes may fail to adapt their formula to the changed demands of society; or ruling classes may renew themselves or be renewed. In the first case, failure to renew the formula may signal the end of the ruling class; in the second case, the formula might be retained...
Second, Mosca saw the political formula of the French Revolution—liberty, equality and fraternity—as being entirely destructive because it is impossible to put into practice.
The democratic principle is simply one wrong-headed offshoot of this.
Mosca points out that ‘the will of the people’ and the notion of Divine Right are both, in practice, taken on faith and are beyond reason.
But ‘the will of the people’, unlike Divine Right, is the product of enlightenment rationalism and is demonstrably false.
Mosca argued that democracy was inherently bad...
The cold reality that ‘the people’ are not and can never be sovereign will continually rear its head, so it is quite ineffective as a source of moral unity.
...constant source of class resentment...
Mosca ‘rejected any monistic view of history—that is a theory of history which holds that there is one single cause that accounts for everything that happens in society.’
As soon as there is a shift in the balance of political forces […] then the manner in which the ruling class is constituted changes also. If a new source of wealth develops in a society, if a practical importance of knowledge grows, if an old religion declines or a new one is born, if a new current of ideas spreads, then, simultaneously, far-reaching dislocations occur in the ruling class.17...
He rejected ‘the single-factor fallacy.’19...
No man rules alone...
Below the highest stratum in the ruling class there is always, even in autocratic systems, another that is much more numerous and comprises all the capacities for leadership in the country. Without such a class any sort of social organization would be impossible. The higher stratum would not in itself be sufficient or leading and directing the activities of the masses. In the last analysis, therefore, the stability of any political organism depends on the level of morality, intelligence and activity that this second stratum has attained […] Any intellectual or moral deficiencies in this second stratum, accordingly, represent a graver danger to the political structure, and one that is harder to repair, than the presence of similar deficiencies in the few dozen persons who control the workings of the state machine.21...
‘the governing elite’ and the ‘non-governing elite’.
Antonio Gramsci, was unhappy with the apparent vagueness in defining the ruling class this broadly, since the non-governing elite appears to encompass a broad section of society, if not the entire middle class. He declared that ‘Mosca’s “political class” is nothing but the intellectual section of the ruling group.’
...managerial class...
...priest class.
Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser took this a lot further, and the so-called ‘long march through the institutions’ of the Left is largely a testament to their thinking. In the canon of elite theory, the understanding of the role of intellectuals in the ruling class is greatly expanded by James Burnham and his protégé Samuel T. Francis, whom we will consider in later chapters.
‘level of civilisation’.
Thus, Mosca identifies two key forms of social system: feudal and bureaucratic.
‘the economic, the judicial, the administrative, the military’
‘exercised simultaneously by the same individuals.’
‘level of civilization’...
In a society in which political organization has made great progress, moral discipline is itself unquestionably greater, and the too selfish acts that are inhibited, or obstructed, by the reciprocal surveillance and restraint of the individuals who compose the society are more numerous and more clearly defined.
‘anarcho-tyranny’
...effect, inter-elite competition would keep the central institutions more ‘honest’, which is easier said than done as we shall see when we come to consider later thinkers.
...populist delusion that if conditions get bad enough, if the plebians become too disgruntled with their leaders, then the people will rise up and overthrow them.
...that if people want change even at a time of popular and widespread resentment of the ruling class, they can only hope to achieve that change by becoming a tightly knit and organised minority themselves and, in effect, displacing the old ruling class.
‘Anarcho-Tyranny – Where Multiculturalism Leads’...
Treatise of on General Sociology...
I have relied on the abridged version the Compendium of General Sociology, which Pareto approved.
‘The Circulation of Elites’...
I will first outline Pareto’s concepts of sentiments, residues, and derivations before turning to his notion of the circulation of the elites.
Pareto argued that most human action is ‘non-logical’, that is, not animated by conscious beliefs but rather by instincts which he called ‘sentiments’ manifested as ‘residues’.
‘Sentiments’, then, are the ultimate determinant of human thought and action (X), they manifest in the real world as observable ‘residues’ (A), but since humans also feel a need for logic, they post-hoc rationalise these residues by generating arguments (B) which Pareto called ‘derivations’.
Pareto’s thinking bears some resemblance to Adam Smith’s Theory of Sentiments and David Hume’s famous maxim that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’.
This insight has since been underlined by studies in modern psychology such as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow or Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.
Intuition comes first; reasoning follows as a justification for what one has already felt at a ‘gut level’. At a societal level these justifications manifest as ideologies, theologies, doctrines of all sorts, and these specific manifestations are ‘derivations’.
...which is the sentiment, thus they have the have the general idea of purification...
Pareto lists over 40 residues which correspond to about 20 sentiments. He then groups these residues into six classes.
Class I: Instinct for Combinations Class II: Persistence of Aggregates Class III: Need for Expressing Sentiments by External Acts Class IV: Residues Connected with Sociality Class V: Integrity of the Individual and His Appurtenances Class VI: The Sex Residue.6...
The combinations [Class I] are responsible for bringing about new ideas, new cognitive and moral systems, new technologies, new...
...social and cultural forms, and so forth. They are, in short, the endogenous factors of sociocultural evolution. […] [T]he persistences [Class II] are the judges in the final instance of what shall be programmed into the social order. They may be viewed as the basic selective mechanisms in socio-cultural evolution […] [P]eople strong in persistences [Class II] tend to be patriotic, tradition-loving, religious, familistic, frugal in their economic habits, inclined toward the use of force and confrontation in political matters, adept at deferring gratification. Conversely, persons strong in combinations [Class I] are culture-relativists; they value change as an end itself; they are hedonistic, rationalistic, individualistic, dedicated to spending and entrepreneurship; they are also inclined toward ruse, deception, and diplomacy in political matters.
These two forces, which we might easily recognise today as liberal and conservative, combine to create a ‘social equilibrium’. If Class II predominates, the rate of innovation and change slows; if Class I predominates it speeds up.
This may well have been what Curtis Yarvin had in mind when he said that ‘Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he always swims left’.
‘programming them into the social order’...
...in any case, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are rendered somewhat meaningless by elite theory.
Unlike Mosca, who admitted that historical change was driven by some combination of material changes, technological changes, and the influence of new ideas, Pareto’s system reduces such changes to second-order effects of the primary real cause of change: residues driven by underlying instinctual sentiments.
Historical change has no direction or purpose, it does not repeat, it has no shape, it simply convulses in response to these deeply-felt ‘non-logical’ human needs.
Class I: Assertion, simply maxims constantly repeated to become accepted truths.
Class II: Authority, whether an individual, a group of individuals, a deity, or tradition.
Class III: Accords with Sentiment or Principles, sentiments converted into abstractions and declarations of universal laws, very similar to Mosca’s ‘political formulas’.
Class IV: Verbal Proofs, logical sophistry designed to affirm sentiments with which the speaker and listener already agree.12...
We have already glimpsed in his rejection of theories of history, an almost nihilistic tendency in Pareto to dismiss all ideas as being meaningless second-order effects which have no other effect than to justify what humans already feel.
‘certain theories that are experimentally false’ but which nonetheless have a ‘social utility’.
‘Truth value and social utility do not necessarily coincide.’
...the void will be filled by new ones.
Recent experience has shown us that Christianity gave way to rationalism which gave way to positivism and finally to scientism; feudalism gave way to liberalism which gave way to socialism and notions of ‘social justice’; Divine Right gave way to parliamentarism and democracy, and so on.
All that the various arguments and justifications—for what are always, in the final analysis, non-logical faiths—show is that human beings have ‘an inclination towards rationality, not the fact of being rational.’
Pareto maintains that while this is objectively true, humans will never admit it of themselves.
...the true Machiavellian considers only what is.
...you may not like it, but this is what human beings are when stripped of all ideological baggage: do with that knowledge what you will.’
...many behavioural and evolutionary scholars have accepted the view that ‘intuition comes first, and reasoning follows.’
Such debates are quite beyond my scope here, but the idea that Pareto’s justification of human violence was somehow morally normative and a preference rather than a simple statement of a constant fact of history relies itself on a morally normative view that peace is the norm and constant from which violence diverges, and must be justified.
In other words, that the ideas may have their root in some non-logical aspect of Pareto’s thinking and feeling is not significant. Pareto does not say that all derivations based on residues and sentiments are delusional, he says it is delusional to believe that there might be derivations that are somehow not rooted in residues and sentiments.
Class I residues correspond to Machiavelli’s ‘foxes’, while Class II residues correspond to Machiavelli’s ‘lions’. Foxes are adept at manipulation and manufacturing consent, ‘specialists on persuasion’, while lions are adept at the use of force, ‘specialists on coercion’.
In politics all ruling classes have at all times identified their own interests with the ‘interests of the country.’
‘The character of society, Pareto holds, is above all the character of its elite; its accomplishments are the accomplishments of its elites; its history is properly understood as the history of its elite; successful predictions about the future are based upon evidence drawn from the study of the composition and structure of its elite.’
At any given time, the composition of elites will shift more towards foxes or to lions.
“force is also essential in the exercise of government”.
. Eventually the more forceful counter-elite of lions, willing to use coercion and violence, capture power from the fainthearted foxes and impose order and discipline.
Thus if Class I dominates for too long, and especially if they have become enraptured with doctrines of universal humanitarianism, a counter-elite will form from the non-elite ‘one way or the other’ which includes violent revolution.
However, if foxes manage to create a situation where the elite hoover up all the foxes in a society, the lions will find it difficult to organise. One might argue that this has been the case in the liberal democracies of the USA and Europe since 1945 in which foxes have overwhelmingly predominated in the elite and the non-governing elite has greatly expanded to encompass practically all of the Class 1 type individuals in society.
Myths are not simply ‘beautiful lies’ used to hoodwink the masses, but also extremely powerful motivators of human action, which Pareto reduces ‘to be minor and for the most part indirect’.
...composition—including the exclusivity or inclusivity of that elite—remains of great value to the student of politics and history.
‘The Italian School of Elitism’.
Michels has even been described straightforwardly as ‘Mosca’s pupil’,2 or ‘Mosca’s disciple’.
‘least original among the trio of neo-Machiavellians’.7 In truth, ‘originality’ is not and should not be seen as a criteria by which to judge elite theorists, but rather the degree to which their works describe reality.
Political Parties, Robert Michels...
Hence not only is direct democracy impossible, but also representative democracy is necessarily a fiction.
‘The rank and file are manipulated into accepting policies with which they would not otherwise agree, and which are not in their interests, or at least are primarily in the interests of the leadership group.’10...
Organization implies a tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of any kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly. […] As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed.12...
Thus, one could gain institutional control simply by capturing the directorship of the organization. Change would flow top-down as against the individual wills of the disorganized majority. This is Michels’s famous iron law of oligarchy.
‘In any organization of any size leadership becomes necessary to its success and survival. The nature of organization is such that it gives power and advantages to the group of leaders who cannot then be checked or held accountable by their followers.’
‘Who says organization, says oligarchy’.
‘An organization is a group of human activities ordered by a system of specialization of function; a sub-group of these activities has as its goal the maintenance of this order or of an order very similar to it.’
‘An oligarchy is an organization characterized by the fact that part of the activities of which it consists, viz., the activities having the highest degree of authority (which have been called “leadership” or “executive” activities), are free from control by any of the remainder of the organizational activities. This concept leads to a generalization which might be called “a theory of irresponsible leadership.”’
Incidentally, the iron law of oligarchy explains, at a stroke, why the ‘Long March’ of the Left through the institutions since 1945 in both America and across Europe has been so effective.
They never needed to persuade most people in the populace or even at an organizational level of their view, they simply needed to capture the leadership positions to impose their will.
In every university, therefore, the will of the Student Union Leadership will prevail on campus. If that will is to enforce a quasi-Marxist progressive hegemony, then that will be the case too, on every campus.
And so, we might see how ‘society’ might wake up one day to find that it has sleepwalked into a quasi-Marxist progressive hegemony.
‘circulation of elites’.
Much like Pareto, Michels does not ignore psychology. In fact, he considers both the psychology of the masses and the leaders.
As regards the former, in an analysis which chiefly seems to be derived from Gustave Le Bon,18 he notes ‘the “psychological need” for leadership felt by the masses, their predisposition to hero-worship, and their tendency to excessive gratitude.’
People en masse are subject to waves of emotion which spread like a contagious disease, and they are readily manipulated by leaders skilled in demagogy and knowledgeable in the workings of the collective psyche.’
‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’
The consciousness of power always produces vanity, an undue belief in personal greatness.
Thus, once a leader has attained power in the first place, they are driven by something like a Nietzschean Will to Power, they are intoxicated by it and want more of it. It is significant that it is power that is the motivation and not merely money. All too often, naïve analyses of elites imagine they are motivated by profits: this is almost never the case. The prospect of control is a far greater motivator than greed.
It is, as Samuel T. Francis might put it, a problem of ‘mass and scale’.23...
‘Large, organizationally complex associations, compared with small, simple associations,’24 for mechanical, technical and tactical reasons must succumb to the organisational, and therefore, the oligarchical principle.
From his time seeing the Social Democratic Party of Germany in practice, Michels saw that ‘committees set-up to organise the day-to-day running of the party were systematically unattended.’
Because of this, the democratic principle must give way to the oligarchical principle purely on mechanical grounds.
A political party campaigning for power needs to organize its vote, canvass supporters, supply information for speakers, raise contributions, attend to the party’s financial structure...
...and its legal standing.
...which is tactical: the masses simply will not and cannot organise.
The most striking proof of the organic weakness of the mass is furnished by the way in which, when deprived of the leaders in time of action, they abandon the field of battle in disordered flight; they seem to have no power of instinctive reorganization, and are useless until new captains arise capable of replacing those that have been lost.28...
We therefore see again the two strata of elites identified by Mosca and Pareto...
...we might call the former, the bureaucracy of the party, the “non-governing elite”, and the latter, the actual politicians, the “governing elite”.
Formally, a new election for an office may be held every year or two. But, in practice, the mere fact that an individual has held the office...
...in the past is thought by him and by the members to give him a moral claim on it for the future; or, if not on the same office, then on some other leadership post in the organization. It becomes almost unthinkable that those who have served the organization so well, or even not so well, in the past should be thrown aside. […] If the vagaries of elections by chance turn out wrong, then a niche is found in an embassy or bureau or post-office, or, at the end, in the pension list.30...
‘Power is always conservative.’
‘fail upwards’.
There are three different resources that, according to Michels, ensure the leaders keep control of their party. These are as follows: (a) Officials have superior knowledge, in that they are privy to much information that can be used to secure assent for their programme; (b) they control the formal means of communication, because they dominate the organisation’s press (parties still had their own newspapers at the time), and as full-time salaried officials, they can travel from place to place presenting their case at the organisation’s expense, where their position enables them to command an audience; and (c), they have skill in the art of politics, in that they are far more adept than nonprofessionals in making speeches, writing articles and organising group activities.33...
If organisational ability rather than land or business ownership is the criterion by which leaders are chosen, then it stands to reason that the managers would come to challenge and displace the power of the bourgeoisie, just as the bourgeoisie displaced the old aristocracies.
He also notes that the old leaders will style themselves as the sensible people, the ‘adults in the room’ against ‘extremists’ whom they can paint as naïvely idealist or as demagogues, and in this they can rely on the natural conservatism of the masses in the party membership (who distrust newcomers) to enlist support.
...for example a political party and a corporation—become more rivalrous, it is a sign of feudalisation, which is to say competing power centres.
‘Bureaucracy. Centralizing and Decentralizing Tendencies,’
The bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty.’39 Thus within bureaucratization is a degenerative principle—degenerative in the general quality of the personnel who form the non-governing elite—that could sow the seeds of a move towards decentralization by generating disaffected but more ‘visionary’ types who agitate for change.
We can see in this something of Pareto’s circulation of elites. This also has the seed of an idea that would be dubbed ‘Bioleninism’ by the blogger Spandrell in 2018,40 whereby these key bureaucratic roles are filled based more on loyalty to the party than for their actual skills.
Even if you solved the problem of selfish leaders, you still have the problem of the helpless masses.
The practical factors are even more robust: mechanical, technical, and tactical underlined and maintained by the leaders’ resources of knowledge, communication methods, and political skills.
The mass thus must overcome at least six near-insurmountable hurdles to overturn the ‘iron law’ which is practically impossible. The only method by which it is possible to displace the leadership within a party is to form a new leadership and out-manoeuvre the old one in these six categories—still no easy task since they have every motivation to stop you—but at least possible.
...sovereign is he who decides on the exception’,1 and ‘the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’2...
These are found in his two booklets Political Theology (1922) and The Concept of the Political (1932)...
The Sovereign Collection by Antelope Hill...
‘political theology’.
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.8...
‘throne and altar’ reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre...
...and modern parliamentary systems with their supposed separation of powers.
The answer lies in the fact that Schmitt saw it fit to judge any political system not by its norms but when it was under crisis.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)...
..who decides?’ (quis judicabit?), ‘who interprets?’ (quis interpretabitur?). And hence his famous dictum: ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exception’.
...had sovereignty; second, whoever is sovereign in the United States—which one suspects is neither Joe Biden nor the Supreme Court—did not like Donald Trump very much and sought to make him an exception; third, there is no sovereignty in ‘the people’ whatsoever and the preamble of the US Constitution...
‘We the People’, is an empty slogan.
In fact, the sovereign not only decides the exception but also decides when order and stability are restored. It may surprise some people to learn that the United States has been in a near continuous state of National Emergency since 1917.15...
In theory, there is a legal norm, but in practice, we are nearly constantly in the exception.
As Schmitt put it: ‘All law is “situational law.” The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality.
...sovereignty, which essentially meant decision.
‘The people are good, but the magistrate is corruptible.’
De Maistre asserted the exact opposite, namely, that authority as such is good once it exists: ‘Any government is good once it is established,’ the reason being that a decision is inherent in the mere existence of a governmental authority, and the decision as such is in turn valuable precisely because, as far as the most essential issues are concerned, making a decision is more important than how a decision is made.
‘decisionism’. Note that this thinking is also present in Pareto’s ‘man of action’.
To explain this: ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is the political formula, this can be replaced with ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’, ‘the will of the people’, or any other empty slogan.
Quis interpretabitur? is ‘who interprets’ the slogan? Auctoritas, non veritas! means ‘authority, not truth, makes law’. Postestas directa (non indirecta)! means that direct power (rather than indirect power) has authority—and this is the ‘axis’ on which legitimate sovereignty must turn. The individual, who is at the bottom of the diagram, exchanges his obedience for protection from the sovereign. Schmitt thus showed that all power has this essentially theological and decisionist character.
(1) the illusion of equality under the rule of law.
...that the state itself is nothing but law.
...that the judiciary is neutral and impartial and somehow separate from politics.
...the related notion that the state can ever be ‘secular’, which is to say devoid of a religious doctrine; there must be a political theology: ‘Jesus is the Christ’, ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’, ‘the will of the people’, ‘diversity is our strength’, and so on.
...that no state institutions or institutions which rely on the state for their continued existence can be agnostic to the ‘official faith’.
‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.’ ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’
What did Schmitt overturn? In short, most theories of the state suppose that politics is something that takes place within the state, while Schmitt maintained that politics comes both prior to and separate from the state. Thus, politics has a ‘potential to destabilize the state.’28...
Even the precept ‘love your enemies […]’ (diligite inimicos vestros) (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) clearly refers to the private enemy, inimicus, and not the public one, hostis. Public enmity, according to Schmitt, is not a private matter, but in our epoch exclusively a concern of the political unit, the national sovereign state.29...
...neo-conservatives—many of whom were former Trotskyists—after...
In the political theology of liberalism, it was necessary to tie together communism and fascism—completely effacing their substantive differences—by viewing them as two sides of the same totalitarian (and antisemitic) coin.32...
Later it was necessary even to paint fundamentalist Islam as ‘Islamofascism’ which was retroactively applied as a decades ‘long struggle’.33 One neoconservative writer even attempted to coin the absurd title Liberal Fascism.
34 In the final analysis, within a liberal democracy, it is fascism that becomes the decisive and ultimate enemy rather than ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘communism’. The experiences of Joseph McCarthy and his vilification by liberal history demonstrate that even during the Cold War, the ‘enemy’ was not communism per se, but rather the Soviet Bloc as a counter-hegemon and stand-in Hitler.
From the realist perspective of Schmitt, there is no structural difference between the liberal state, the communist state, and the fascist state—or indeed any other state.
The only difference is the extent to which a regime may obscure the nature of its power or else genuinely buy into myths of neutrality.
Should such leaders rise, the stalwarts of liberal democracy will perceive them as ‘populists’, ‘fascists’, ‘threats to democracy’, and so on.
A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely.
Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.37...
As Edward Bernays would go on to say these ‘are the invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. […] In some department of our daily lives, in which we imagine ourselves as free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power.’38...
The point is that viewed from the outside, liberal democracy looks just as ‘totalitarian’ as any other regime even if it relies more on subtle persuasion, nudge techniques, and other psychological tricks than coercion to obtain its results.
In Pareto’s terms, liberal democracy leads to rule by foxes as opposed to lions. Liberal democracy rules, as Schmitt was later to call it, by a ‘Tyranny of Values’ in which anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-materialist thinking is beyond the pale and banished from polite society.
...when friends are in power and imposing their values, that is good, when enemies are in power and imposing theirs, that is bad.
...all successful states, including liberal democratic ones, function in the same way: sovereign power rests in the person or persons who decide the exception and who interpret the mantras of the official political theology; politics rests on the friend-enemy distinction and the state must itself be political and define its enemies.
There is no need to suppose that the persons chosen to govern are not in general perfectly representative men, exactly resembling their subjects. But when once they have been summoned to exercise of sovereign authority, their wills take on […] a new character and different force.’
While it is not clear if he ever read them, I am confident in asserting that Jouvenel had instinctively absorbed the core tenets of elite theory: Mosca’s Law of the Rulers and the Ruled, Pareto’s Circulation of Elites, and Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy.7...
‘The Power of the people was but a fiction in a regime which was for practical purposes a parliamentary sovereignty. But the fiction justified the blotting out of liberty on a scale never known before in Europe.’
The real people, or rather their leadership, once triumphant in their insurrection, become Rousseau’s Legislator, who surveys clearly the whole panorama, without being swayed by partial interests and passions, and shapes the “young nation” with the help of laws derived from his superior wisdom. He prepares it to will the general will. First comes the elimination of men and influences not of the people and not identified with the general will embodied in the newly established Social Contract of the Revolution; then the re-education of the young nation to will the general will.’11...
At one point, in On Power, for example, he defends the traditional small-business-owning bourgeois against centralising Power and its strategic use of inflation to drain the savings of the middle classes: ‘Tyrannies made their appearance in step with the inflation which destroyed the independence and security of middle-class liberalism.’
...liberty and the limiting of tyrannical power.
...he condemns his generation (including himself) for its simplistic view of man as an individualistic and materialistic consumer, who can be made completely happy by rationalization of the economic system, and the prevention of further wars.’
...corporatocracy and liberalism’s tendency...
Liberalism, in its degenerate and anarchic form involving periodic crises and unemployment as in the U.S.A., implies even greater subjection of the individual to economic forces than does Communism. In addition, Liberalism is no longer efficient in satisfying consumer demands through competition, for out of the struggle to survive have emerged gigantic corporations and trusts, which can effectively distort the market for their own ends. In opposition to the fundamental tenets of Liberalism, enterprises threatened by the periodic depressions have called on the State for assistance, with great success, thereby making the consumer, in his guise as tax-payer, subsidize a system which offers no benefits in return.14...
...very far from being a doctrinaire free-market libertarian, he maintained that the scope for liberty rested in the middle class, people of independent means, who did not have to rely on the state.
However, the situation is somewhat more complicated than this, since he also seems to treat the independent middle class as being separate from the aristocracy with whom it might ally should Power become tyrannical.16 Bond prefers to use the terms: ‘centre’, ‘subsidiary’, and ‘periphery’.17 For this last group, ‘periphery’, Curtis Yarvin prefers ‘clients’: ‘Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.’
I think ‘clients’ is a useful way to visualise the relationship of patronage between the high and the low; however, Bond’s ‘periphery’ captures something of the passive helplessness of the low: ‘without this alliance between a power centre and the periphery, the periphery itself is basically irrelevant.’19...
Power must perceive a cell as a rival. Jouvenel describes Power as having an almost psychotic need to snuff out any challenge to its monopoly of control.
Power has a ‘jealousy of any and every command, however small, which was not its own, Power could not tolerate such independence.’
‘Power is the great leveller that sets out to curtail or eliminate every...
...social authority that mediates between the individual and the state.’22...
...the governing-elite, the non-governing elite and the governed.
Jouvenel shared with Michels, it seems, an absolute distaste for the career bureaucrat. It is important to note, however, that these bureaucrats are not the low or peripheries or clients—they are a key part of Power itself on its march towards ever greater centralisation. Should any of the institutions of these bureaucrats begin to develop power independently from the central Power, then they become aristocrats, feudal nodes, who will in time draw the Eye of Sauron.
In this way new hives are forever being built, in which lie a new sort of energies; these will in time inspire the state of fresh orgies of covetousness.’
This is why Jouvenel described the state as a ‘permanent revolution’ since Power’s ceaseless quest to eliminate its rivals invariably must create new potential rivals in the process.
Jouvenel later considers the same pattern taking place after the industrial revolution. The industrialists had become powerful by the end of the nineteenth century, and thus represented a feudal threat to Power, which had to respond by stripping it of that power either by co-opting it or else outright seizure of assets.
He maintains that this has nothing whatsoever to do with ideology but is a pure function of power...
Will political Power, after beating capitalist feudalism with the help of syndicalist feudalism, now round on its ally? If it does not, it will be the syndicalist feudalisms, and not itself, which will exercise the vast powers committed to it by individuals. And the state then will be the ‘public thing’ of the syndicalist feudalisms.27...
‘Syndicalist feudalisms’ have in many respects not only merged with the state but also usurped it as the central node of authority. The Investment firms Blackrock and Vanguard have over $9 trillion and $7 trillion in assets respectively.
The most well-known corporate brand leaders typically enjoy over 70% market share in their specialist product lines with the second biggest brand taking the bulk of the rest of the pie creating effective duopolies in many markets. These corporate machines in turn fund massive and extremely influential non-government organizations (NGOs) and lobby groups as well as exercising a near-total dominance of the media.
It is quite clear that democratic political leaders are today merely showmen and that effective sovereignty, in Schmitt’s terms, lies in the syndicalist nexus. Since the Power has become unmistakably corporate and globalist, unmoored from any national state, it becomes ravenous in its search for independent rival powers and demands obedience becoming distinctly totalitarian.
From the start of the pandemic to April 2021, Amazon’s profits increased by 220% as many small and medium firms closed and the public experienced record inflation.29 The failure of Power to check syndicalist feudalisms has come to pass and now the tail wags the dog...
...a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state.
In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master—the state.
Historically if Power is seen as rotten to the core, revolution beckons.
He remarks on the fact that most revolutions result in a system with a stronger central power than before...
The moment of truth for any regime will come at the moment in which ideological ‘soft power’ is stripped away and it must use repressive force to crush its opposition. Hesitancy on the part of Power at the hour of decision—whether through a failure of nerve in the leadership or a failure in confidence on the part of their generals—will seal their fate if rival aristocrats exploit popular discontent.
...the public face of the aforementioned syndicalist nexus of finance, corporations, and NGOs—has declared that ‘white supremacists’ constitute the highest terrorist threat to the country; former President George W. Bush even argued they belong in the same breath as ISIS and that, in a statement as Schmittian as any ever uttered, ‘bigotry and white supremacy are “blasphemy” against the American creed.’
The media daily propagandises against ‘white privilege’, explains why white people are ‘the problem’. But why would Power focus so heavily on this group, ‘white people’? It is because it comprises people who are independent of the state, would-be aristocrats, subsidiaries in potential, and even a few truly independent institutions, and therefore represents the largest threat to its hegemony.
Jouvenel as a guide would tell us two things: first, one way or the other, the hour of decision will come; second, whatever order exists after this hour of decision will grant no more ‘liberty’ than what came before—the game stays the same, only the players change.
Burnham was read by and profoundly influenced George Orwell, who was chilled by his amoral scientific view of power.
Burnham’s outline of the managerial state inspired both Animal Farm and 1984; his coldly realist view was said to be the model for the both the character O’Brien and the book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein in the latter.3...
‘Managing the Managers’...
Of all the thinkers we are considering, he was the one who most emphatically and avowedly wore the mantle of ‘Machiavellian’—seeking to write only about what is, not what ought to be. He embodied what Thomas Sowell might call the ‘constrained’ or ‘tragic’ vision of man.
Niccolò Machiavelli once said that ‘human appetites are insatiable’,10 but the thing that they desire most is not wealth but power. Burnham’s fundamental view of human nature was a Hobbesian struggle driven by an almost Nietzschean Will to Power.
‘The nineteenth-century liberals overlooked, and the twentieth-century liberals decline to face, the fact that teaching everyone to read opens minds to propaganda and indoctrination at least as much as to truths.’
No one truly strives for the ‘public good’ but rather to seeks to increase ‘power and prestige for himself and his clique’.12 ‘Burnham thus harboured no illusion that a particular form of society—agrarian, theocratic, or feudal, much less socialist, liberal, or democratic—could adequately restrain the appetite for power.’13...
Where the analysis of power and the ruling class has conventionally rested in the government itself, Burnham saw the managerial class operating across the so-called public-private divide and in every large organisation. In effect, the bureaucrats who emerge in Mosca and Michels, through the iron law of oligarchy, come to control every institution and then come to recognise each other as an identifiable class with common skills, interests, beliefs, and goals.
...habits of thought...
Thus, power seems as if it is decentralising but, in fact, is concentrating and consolidating itself in a more diffuse way across every possible institutional node in society. If we use Jouvenel’s idea of power centres being like castles which central power needs to capture, the managerial class quietly takes over government while capturing every castle to create an extremely broad ‘central’ power base which has the appearance of being made up of disparate and separate spheres of influence.
‘managers-in-industry’ and ‘managers-in-government’...
The great ‘nonprofit foundations’ have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power.
Where Marxists believed that the decisive factor in history and society is ownership of the means of production, Burnham argued that the relationship between ownership and control had been severed due to the rise of limited liability corporations—which...
The divorce of control, or power, from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal ‘owners’ could control its affairs. Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents. But when the enterprise became more vast in scope and, at the same time, the stock certificates became spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers were gradually released from subordination to the nominal owners. De facto control passed, for the most part, to nonowning management.18...
Once the managers consolidate their position within an institution, their objective interests no longer fully correspond to the interests of the other groups involved—voters, owners, members, teachers, students or consumers. A decision on dividends, mergers, labor contracts, prices, curriculum, class size, scope of government operations, armament, strikes, etc., may serve the best interests of the managers without necessarily contributing to the well-being of the other groups.19...
...and other internal problems. […] Self-justifying managerial control tends to keep alive operations which have little social purpose other than to nourish an enclave of managers. This is conspicuously true of governments. Many acute, expensive problems which our society faces—for example, in agriculture, radio-TV, railroads, finance, etc.—are largely manufactured by the managerial agencies founded to solve them.
In addition, the managerial class is anti-democratic in practice though not in rhetoric...
Managerial predominance tends toward regimentation and the suppression of active democracy. The rising power of a managerial group in a given institution is, in fact, usually equivalent to a lessening in whatever form of democracy is relevant. In other words, the power of the stockholder, voter, member, consumer, faculty, taxpayer, etc., decreases as the power of the manager increases. The combination of managerial groups—as when there is collusion between labor and business management—means the decline of democracy in the conjoined fields. In this connection, we must…
Even today, though individual managers in business can lose their jobs, a Napoleonic campaign is needed to get rid of a corporate management group. As for government or educational administrators and trade union officials, a…
Firing one manager will simply result in another one taking his place; he will have the same managerial tastes, interests, ideas,…
There is no mystery in this shift. It can be correlated easily enough with the change in character of the state’s activities. Parliament was the sovereign body of the limited state of capitalism. The bureaus are the…
The differences between capitalism and managerialism manifest themselves in their respective ideologies. Capitalist societies promoted: ‘individualism; opportunity; “natural rights”, especially the rights of property; freedom, especially “freedom of…
These ideas ‘justified profit and interest’, ‘they showed why the owner of the instruments of production was entitled to the full product of those instruments and why the worker had no…
Burnham notes that where these were once progressive slogans, in 1941 they are recognised as reactionary and as the cries of Tories. In contrast, managerialism is orientated away from the private individual and towards the public collective; away from free enterprise and towards planning; away from providing opportunities and towards providing jobs; less about ‘rights’ and more about ‘duties’. One must remember here that Burnham did not only have the United States in mind but also the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as managerial states. The Soviets and Germans were more blatant in their messaging than the Americans who felt the need to pay lip-service to the older ideologies. In a passage that seems shocking to read today—perhaps owing to the eighty years of propaganda between 1941 and now—Burnham notes that the masses in…
He contrasts that with the picture in Germany, where the masses enthusiastically supported Hitler. He argues that it is ‘shallow and absurd’ to imagine that mass support for the German war effort was down to terrorism and skilled…
As Burnham warned in 1960: ‘the directing managers of each nation should preserve a healthy remnant of national individuality from becoming dissolved into the global managerial state that looms, under a variety of labels, as the ideal goal of a total managerial society.’27...
However, it seems that Burnham’s thinking retains a residually Marxist economism, whereby material conditions ultimately create the need for ideologies—or in Marxist jargon, the base creates the superstructure. The process by which capitalist firms ‘become’ managerial is driven initially by economic and practical concerns and only latterly by ideological ones.
The same can be said, and doubly so, for the Ford Foundation. Shortly after Henry Ford’s death, Henry Ford II signed a document stating that the Ford family would exercise no more influence over the foundation than any other board member; he regretted the decision for the rest of his life.
Since then, the Ford Foundation has supported almost exclusively left-wing progressive causes that would make Henry Ford—a well-known social conservative—turn in his grave.
This is typical of how managerialism captures institutions and turns them against their original purposes for managerial ones. Here ‘left-wing progressivism’ and ‘managerialism’ are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter.
The logic of managerialism is to create invisible ‘problems’ which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as ‘unconscious bias training’, ‘net zero carbon’, the ratio of men and women on executive boards, or whatever else.
In both cases, their post and its duties are backed by the full force of the law and the state. The latter is an example of the ‘fused political-economic apparatus’ Burnham describes.
In the end, Franklin D. Roosevelt did not have to nationalise Ford: even if the US government and the Ford Motor Company have the ostensible appearance of being separate entities, in actuality they move as one, espouse the same values, enforce the same compliance policies, and so on as if they were two sub-departments of The Politburo.
Thus, we can see that although, to retain the Marxist lexicon, the ‘economic base’ determines the ‘ideological superstructure’ in Burnham, managerialism also uses the ideological superstructure—which is to say the slogans of ‘social justice’ or ‘climate change’ etc—to expand its economic base and therefore its control.
The role of public relations in general is somewhat taken for granted in Burnham and reduced to ‘propaganda’, even though—as we saw earlier—he was acutely aware of the power of the press to brainwash the public. He was also aware that the United States had come to be dominated by Pareto’s foxes who rely almost exclusively on persuasion to get their way.
The Machiavellians. Burnham had a ‘belief in a pluralist society, in which power restrains power’.
Thus his solution to managerial totalitarianism was essentially to set managers from different spheres against each other as to prevent them from uniting: ‘The only way to manage the managers, in short, is to keep them busy enough managing or counter-vailing each other to guarantee that they won’t unite and spend all their time managing the rest of us.’
...is easier said than done because power’s logic always tends towards centralisation and, it seems to me, that the managers have a vested interest in convergence.
So long as armies are loyal to nations rather than to global governance structures or supra-national organisations, there remains at least the foreseeable chance that a power struggle may emerge between the traditional apparatuses of nation-states and the power centres of globalism.
There is revolutionary change (1) when the élite cannot or will not adjust to the new technological and social forces; (2) when a significant proportion of the élite rejects ruling for cultural and aesthetic activities; (3) when the élite fails to assimilate promising new elements; (4) when a sizeable percentage of the élite questions the legitimacy of its rule; (5) when élite and non-élite reject the mythological basis of order in the society; and finally (6) when the ruling class lacks courage to employ force effectively.35...
The current tactic of simply branding such people as ‘beyond the pale’, ‘insurrectionists’, ‘fascists’ ad nauseum has not worked in any respect since 2015. In fact, four years of such relentless rhetoric from the corporate media resulted in the hated Donald Trump increasing his total votes by over 14 million people—which would have been a resounding victory had he not been against the most popular presidential candidate of all time, Joe Biden.
The elite are also actively turning away ‘promising new elements’ which is simply to say talented people with the wrong political views, skin colour, or gender. Either these people are not hired in the first place because of affirmative action programmes and increasingly absurd diversity quotas, or they are hired but later sacked for transgressing the regime in some way.
In the long run, this will create an entire class of disaffected would-be elites who will put their skills and talents towards their eventual overthrow, especially if they feel locked out of what would have been their career path in a normal and well-run society.
Furthermore, around thirty percent of people have turned decisively against the elites in the past few years, taken together with disaffected would-be elite, these dissidents form a non-elite who increasingly ‘reject the mythological basis of order in the society’ where this basis is some empty managerial slogan of social justice that becomes a precondition to enter the workplace.
Francis had been a firebrand paleoconservative journalist who wrote regular syndicated columns as well as speeches for Pat Buchanan.
He was an early victim of ‘cancel culture’ for his politically incorrect statements about race and was fired by the Washington Times after an attack by the neo-conservative Dinesh D’Souza.
Francis had long been a protégé of James Burnham having written a monograph on him in 1984 that was republished in 1999.4 Leviathan and Its Enemies can largely be read as a 1990s update of The Managerial Revolution. Francis had fully internalised the thought of the elite theorists and of his mentor, and much of the book covers terrain that we have already traversed. Thus, what is of interest to us here is what Francis adds to Burnham or else where he disagrees with him.
The foremost of these came from C. Wright Mills whose book The Power Elite, published in 1956, constituted the main left-wing rebuttal to Burnham.
In other words, whether or not a man of the propertied elite such as William Clay Ford Jr. takes an active or a passive role, his interests are now synonymous with the managerial regime while those of his great-grandfather were in many respects antagonistic to it.
The propertied elite, the grande bourgeoisie, thus does not retain an economic interest in acting as the leader of the bourgeois order and defending its ideologies, values and institutions; its material interests push it toward defending the complex of managerial interests.’
This perfectly explains why virtually none of the so-called grand bourgeoisie have taken a firm stance against what is today called ‘woke capitalism’.8...
Whether they are propertied elites or not, executives who dare take a stance against the official managerial ideology are quickly removed, as was the case with Tripwire Interactive CEO and co-founder, John Gibson, who was forced to step down just 53 hours after tweeting his support for a ban on abortion in Texas.9 Similarly, John Schattner, the founder of the Papa John’s pizza chain—and a billionaire—was forced out of his own company by the board after making racially insensitive comments on a conference call in 2018.10...
The managers have primacy. If an owner does not adhere to managerial ideology—if the company in any way depends on managerial capitalism—they will find themselves removed in short order.
As we have seen, Francis largely deals with this by acknowledging that while entry into the elite is possible its narrow and exclusively managerial character, which emphasises special qualifications and skills, in practice gives it a uniformity that is rare in history—he...
...he points out, citing Mosca, that the old capitalist entrepreneurial regime and even the old feudal system were much more diverse in terms of the makeup of the ruling class.
They each made their fortunes by playing the system of the managerial regime and exploiting the ‘fusion’ of the state and the economy in one way or another. But even if there should spring forth a genuinely innovative and entrepreneurial firm, sooner or later, it becomes co-opted and is transformed into being part of the regime apparatus.
...emphasised the fusion of the state and corporations, as he put it ‘managers-in-government’ and ‘managers-in-industry’...
Francis immediately recognised the importance of a third category of managers involved in opinion formation, which he called ‘mass public relations’ or ‘mass organizations of culture and communication’.
[N]ot only the media of mass communication, one of the most important instruments by which the managerial elite disciplines and controls the mass population, but also all other mass organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas, and values advertising, publishing, journalism, film and broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development.
All the mass cultural organizations, then, function as part of the media of mass communication, and they constitute a necessary element in the power base of the managerial elite.
Francis was keenly aware of the ideological component of the managerial regime and his insights owe much to his deep understanding of the ‘cultural turn’ in Marxist literature after Antonio Gramsci, whom he cites.15...
Sam and I would argue about his skepticism concerning whether elites accept their hegemonic ideas (in other words, whether elites really believe their own ideology). In his understanding of circulating elites, values and ideals were mere instruments for achieving practical goals; they advanced the interests of those seeking positions of authority. Sam would quote with pleasure the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) that those involved in the power game would exploit whatever ideas and visions were most attractive to the masses in a particular culture. But, according to Sam, these elites would approach the myths as nothing more than ladders for their own ascent.
However, all four thinkers would ultimately agree that the ideological function cannot be ignored in any analysis of power. The culture, even down to the everyday beliefs of the masses, must at some level reflect and ‘buy into’ the political formula of the ruling class.
In ‘Equality as a Political Weapon’, we see Francis’s essential cynicism as regards actual belief in the doctrine of equality.
The sentiment that is very inappropriately named equality is fresh, strong, alert, precisely because it is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naïve ‘intellectuals’ still believe; but because it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favour, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favour, this latter being their chief concern.
In the twentieth century, egalitarianism has been used principally as the political formula or ideological rationalization by which one, emerging elite has sought to displace from political, economic, and culture power another elite, and in not only rationalizing but also disguising the dominance of the new elite.20...
‘blank slates’
Egalitarianism played a central role in the progressivist ideological challenge, and the main form it assumed in the early twentieth century was that of ‘environmentalism’—not in the contemporary sense of concern for ecology but in the sense that human beings are perceived as the products of their social and historical environment rather than of their innate mental and physical natures. […] Indeed, the ideological function of progressivism in delegitimizing bourgeois society was accomplished by its identification of the society itself as the ‘environment’ to be altered through social management.21...
Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, also helped develop behaviourist psychological techniques for the managed economy in the science of ‘public relations’, which he helped found. ‘Treating all people as mechanically identical’, writes historian Stuart Ewen, Bernays, ‘called for the implementation of a “mass psychology” by which public opinion might be controlled.’22...
Engineering of Consent’,23 and warns leaders against following public attitude polls explicitly because they might hinder the progressive agenda: Society suffers when polls inhibit leaders from independent thinking, from anticipating change, or from preparing the public for change. […] Polls exert pressure that may play society under what Jefferson called the tyranny of the majority and throttle progressive minority ideas.
Bernays does not see public opinion as something to be followed but something to be managed and, if necessary, transformed—preferably by using his services and expertise.
Bernays’s fellow elitist, Walter Lippmann, was sceptical about the extent to which ‘public opinion’ even exists other than as a fabrication of the media—as a ‘pseudo-environment’25—and wrote a book on this topic called The Phantom Public. It begins with a portrait of ‘The Disenchanted Man’, which is a neat summation of the passive masses...
I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an undesirable ideal. I mean an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer. An ideal should express the true possibilities of its subject. When it does not it perverts the true possibilities. The idea of the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment.27...
In the 2020s, it is perfectly clear that, according to Lippmann’s criteria, the USA is no longer a ‘stable and mature’ society. Lippmann viewed the masses as a ‘bewildered herd’ whose opinions needed to be ‘managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’...
...other words by men like Edward Bernays. However, it strikes me that this narrow vision of democracy as a mere rubber stamp of rule by experts who engage in ‘perception management’ is running towards its death throes. This is primarily because the internet—a...
...destroyed the ability of elites to control narratives, which is causing them to become more desperate, coercive, and brittle. As more people come to see them as unmistakably totalitarian in nature, and as the gap between elite and popular values widens, it is only a matter of time until we see a circulation of elites because the managerial regime is failing precisely at the moment of its apparent victory lap.
The interview was promptly banned by YouTube and Twitter, who suspended any attempts to upload it, and Dr Malone was personally banned from Twitter.34 Defenders of the regime such as Dr Dan Wilson—whose video was pushed to the front of the algorithm by Google’s managers in perception—quickly denounced Dr Malone as having gone ‘full anti-science’.35 Legacy mainstream media outlets quickly set to work to ‘debunk’ Dr Malone, who—despite his obvious credentials—was said to have ‘no academic credibility’ by ‘experts’ and reported breathlessly by twenty-something journalists in well-known and once respected newspapers.
From the standpoint of what we have been discussing as regards managerial elites, this episode is remarkable for at least three reasons. First, it is obvious that Dr Malone and his band of 16,000 doctors and scientists are managerial elites by the classic Burnham definition—technical experts—and they have broken decisively with the regime over its management of the pandemic. Second, Joe Rogan’s podcast has become more watched and listened to than CNN or any other legacy media outlet—to the extent that one might question whether the labels ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ are still appropriate. Third, the managerial masters of persuasion openly complained that their ‘messaging’ is not working and that, in effect, no one is listening to them. If only the White House or CNN could hire Edward Bernays maybe things might be different—but one suspects that even if Bernays himself was managing this, he could do nothing about the loss of monopoly control over information flow that has been caused by the internet.
...revolution from the middle’
Drawing from Mosca, he views the fact that the elite are monolithic and uniform as being a weakness, which is ironic given their famous slogan ‘diversity is our strength’...
However, in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, published in 2002, Paul Gottfried argued that the modern managerial regime had completely inverted this theoretical relationship. Rather than transforming itself to serve the people, the managerial regime seeks to transform people in the service of its system of atomised corporate consumerism.
It ends […] in the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.1...
By now political correctness and its causes are well-worn themes.
Gottfried locates at heart of the issue: ‘the feminization of Christianity […] the fusion of a victim-centred feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption.’3 It is not difficult to see a perverted form of the Calvinist doctrine of Absolute Depravity in contemporary social justice rhetoric. I recall being at an international conference in 2017 at which a world-famous feminist Renaissance scholar at Columbia—undoubtedly a WASP—spoke for almost half an hour in unmistakably religious terms about her ‘shame’ at being white. In truth, I could not bear to witness this act of public penance and left the conference hall after ten minutes.
I would urge Professor Forman to look at the Anti-Defamation League’s 1994 publication, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, as an illustration of how leading American Jewish organizations perceive their ‘self-interest.’
He suggests that since the 1960s, the ‘behaviour modification’ and social engineering programs of the managerial state have relentlessly fought against ‘discrimination’ and promoted ‘diversity’ using the looming image of the Nazis or the ghosts of slavery and the segregationist South as cudgels in a permanent slippery slope argument.
He identifies three tactics that are routinely employed. First, the tendency of media and other opinion-makers to stress that ‘consensus has already been reached, for example, over immigration or multicultural programs’.
9 Such exhibitions have become by now so routine and widespread that they have gained the label ‘virtue signalling’.
However, the third and most insidious method is to treat the unwanted behaviour as a form of sickness, ‘to depict unfashionable thinkers and retrograde views as “pathological”’. Gottfried is rightly perturbed at the implications of treating ‘dissent as a form of mental illness’ which requires psychiatric remedy.
This pathologizing tendency has its overt post-war roots in the work of the Frankfurt School and specifically Theodor W. Adrono’s The Authoritarian Personality Type.12...
Elsewhere, he is at pains to point out that contrary to certain right-wing conspiracy theories which suggest that the injection of Frankfurt School thinking into Western institutions was a Marxist plot hatched from Moscow, that Adorno ‘was sponsored by an emphatically liberal but also anti-Soviet sponsor, the American Jewish Committee.’14 In other words, this is not subversion of liberalism by communist agitators, this is the logic of managerial liberalism played out to its natural...
It is interesting that this analysis of the relationship between the field of mental health and power has a parallel on the left in the work of Michel Foucault.17 Foucault pointed how the ‘medical’ or ‘clinical’ gaze obscures the functioning of power because of the morally neutral language of science.
Christopher Lasch explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the managerial elite won moral acceptance. Despite the fact that its claims to be providing ‘mental health’ were always self-serving and highly subjective, the therapeutic class offered ethical leadership in the absence of shared principles. By defining emotional well-being as both a social good and the overcoming of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists have been able to impose their absolutes upon a culturally fluid society. In The True and Only Heaven Lasch explores the implications for postwar politics of the Authoritarian Personality.
A chief contributor to this anthology, Theodor Adorno, abandoned his earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent of governmentally imposed social therapy. According to Lasch, Adorno condemns undesirable political attitudes as ‘prejudice,’ and ‘by defining prejudice as a “social disease” substituted a medical for a political idiom.’ In the end, Adorno and his colleagues ‘relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic—to scientific study as opposed to philosophical and political debate.’18...
As per Carl Schmitt, there are no neutral institutions including medical or psychiatric institutions. If the managerial state makes anti-discrimination the moral centre of its political formula, then discriminatory views are diagnosed as mentally abnormal. In such a regime, ‘unconscious bias training’ is mandated at most workplaces and for employees of the state despite empirical proof that it does not even achieve the behaviour modification at which it aims, by admission of the British Government.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: ‘The Civil Service will therefore integrate principles for inclusion and diversity into mainstream core training and leadership modules in a manner which facilitates positive behaviour change.’
It is important for us to grasp here the salient feature of Gottfried’s analysis, which is not merely to say that the managerial state has developed and adopted this ideology and these tools of mass manipulation to justify its own power, but also that it has developed them as a political weapon...
Every moral revolution expands the realm of managerial control: ‘The government now in place […] searches out radical forces in order to break down “noninclusive” behavioural patterns and to subjugate citizens. Those who favour such a course, for individual or collective reasons, will empower the state to pursue it.’
He claimed that the regime faces a ‘paradigm crisis’ in which ‘the gap between its democratic and liberal self-descriptions and its imposed social policies’ would become too obvious to escape notice and therefore ‘the efforts to justify these policies with archaic terminology or human rights rhetoric no longer elicit widespread belief.’
At the time of writing, a recent study by the University of Chicago has found that 47 million Americans are said to believe that the 2020 Election was stolen; 21 million believe that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president, ‘63% of people agree with the statement that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites”—a belief sometimes called “the Great Replacement”’, and ‘54% agree that “A secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government,”
Where Francis took his cues chiefly from Burnham and Pareto, Gottfried’s chief influence was Carl Schmitt and in particular the ‘primacy of the political’. The idea that we could ever reach ‘the end of history’ has been shown to be nonsense. But Gottfried stresses that a peculiar feature of therapeutic managerialism is its need to maintain the fiction of consensus—previous ruling classes had no such requirement and had more actual diversity of opinion within their ranks. However, to function properly, the therapeutic state requires ‘the downplaying of genuine political differences.’28...
‘power of capitalism’...
Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led? […] We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients. […] Divesting from entire sectors—or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets—will not get the world to net zero. […] When we harness the power of both the public and private sectors, we can achieve truly incredible things. This is what we must do to get to net zero.30...
Simply put, this is not capitalism, this is agenda setting whereby one of the most powerful executives in the world announces five-year and ten-year plans for ‘what the future will look like’ in an almost entirely top-down managed economy. This language of consensus conceals the truly political character of what Fink is saying.
In theory ‘the market’ decides, but in practice, men like Larry Fink decide. A company can now be sunk regardless of its actual success with consumers simply through investor activism.
Likewise, products that have little to no market demand such as Beyond Meat can be thrust onto the shelves despite continually failing to sell;32 appalling sales figures have not stopped massive corporations such as McDonalds and KFC pushing Beyond Meat ‘plant burgers’ to the front and centre of their menus using the full might of their advertising budgets.
These are all markers of ideological impurity which serve to dehumanise: ‘ideologically conscripted armies tended more and more to demonize their targets. Those who resisted the ideal embodied by one’s nation were no longer viewed as human in thinking or in fact.’
The question remains whether societies can function while around 30% of the productive population are demonised and dehumanized in this way. This has never been achieved in history...
Stalin and other such dictators simply opted to eliminate their enemies through brute force: they were willing to do so to consolidate power and control. Managerial elites seem unwilling to use such force and instead must rely on increasingly transparent games of perception management.
‘The Great Narrative...
At Davos a few years ago, the Edelman survey showed us that the good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more, so we can come together and design and do beautiful things together. The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted that elite less.34...
While Gottfried in 2002 was unwilling to predict their ultimate demise, it seems to me that unless the current ruling class is prepared to become openly coercive and use force, it will be overthrown once counter-elites become organised enough to do so in every region and locality.
The thesis of this book has been that democracy is and always has been an illusion, in which the true functioning of power where an organised minority elite rule over a disorganised mass is obscured through a lie that ‘the people is sovereign’. I have called this ‘the populist delusion’ because of the number of other lies that this central lie conceals, chiefly the myth of bottom-up power or ‘people power’ and the entirely inaccurate view of history this lie creates.
There is never a substitute for the tightly organised minority.
The myth of social change being a ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon pervades our culture and thinking. It is the essential fiction of 1960s counterculture…
Myth of the stateless society: that state and society were or could…
Myth of the neutral state: that state and politics were or could…
Myth of the free market: that state and economy were or could…
Myth of the separation of powers: that competing power centres can realistically…
Mosca and Michels demonstrate that this is fundamentally wrongheaded because minority organisation always prevails from the level of a tribe to the level of global government. Humans are, simply put, the political animal and what is called ‘the state’ is simply…
The second myth that the state is separate from its laws and institutions is shown to be false by Carl Schmitt who demonstrates that, despite liberal pipedreams, there is no escape from the political. Even though the cloak of neutral or scientific language can be used to mask the ideological content, every institution will bear the…
If the political formula is ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’, there can be no official bodies or laws…
T. Francis shows that managerial elites will not stop their social transformations until all relics and vestiges of the old and despised bourgeois regime are replaced by the new religion at every level of culture down to your local museum. Paul Gottfried shows that this is even taken to the domain of science and medicine to the…
The third myth that the state and the economy could ever be separated—the myth of the free market—is the central…
Bertrand de Jouvenel shows that since the political comes prior to any economy, the economy itself can never and will never escape politics. James Burnham shows that laissez-faire was simply the political formula of the capitalists who gained power in the nineteenth century but this, because of the practicalities of mass and…
We have seen how even the economy in the managerial state is a top-down process: the consumer is not sovereign; despite the slogans, the managerial class use the roles of executives at large corporations and financial institutions to set directives and mission statements for the foreseeable time horizon. The reason organizations such as the UN and the…
The fourth myth is that there is a ‘separation of powers’ in a liberal democracy, which is to say that there are ‘checks and balances’ between the various branches of government. This is largely collapsed by the incisive analysis of Schmitt and the process of power’s…
While it appears that populism largely failed—not because it was not supported by the masses but because of political naïvety—that does not mean a…
De facto…
The need to for more explicit coercion and the…
A ‘high-low middle mechanism’ whereby national governments become ‘the middle’ while supra-national globalist governance structures become the…
Bioleninism, or in other words, degradation of the elites and exclusion of people of superior skills and talents, causes the ruling class…
Eclipse by foreign…
At the time of writing, we are seeing all five of these things in their nascent state. The political pressure from the public on elected leaders—due to the sheer unpopularity of the policies enacted—may eventually cause them to break decisively with globalist elites. This remains likely so long as nations maintain standing armies.
European populations may have a stated preference to achieve ‘net zero carbon’ by 2030, but in practice it is extremely unlikely that elites will be able to push ahead with their utopian visions without violent protest.
...until power is taken from them by a better organised elite...