Ideas
Burnham's seminal work, The Managerial Revolution 1941, theorized approximately the future of world capitalism based upon its coding in the interwar period. Burnham weighed three possibilities: 1 that capitalism was a permanent score of social and economic company and would cover indefinitely; 2 that it was temporary and destined by its quality to collapse and be replaced by socialism; 3 that it was currently being transformed into some non-socialist future form of society. Since capitalism had a more or less definite beginning in the 14th century, it could not be regarded as an immutable and permanent form. Moreover, in the last years of previous economic systems such(a) as those of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a condition type of social organization is just approximately finished." The worldwide mass unemployment of the depression era thus noted that capitalism was itself "not going to go forward much longer."
Analyzing the emerging forms of society around the world, Burnham sawcommonalities between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under Roosevelt's New Deal. Burnham argued that in the short period since the First World War, a new society had emerged in which a social chain or a collection of things sharing a common attribute of "managers" had waged a "drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class." For at least the preceding decade, there had grown in America the theory of a "separation of ownership and control" of the modern corporation, notably expounded in The modern Corporation and Private Property by Berle and Means. Burnham expanded this concept, arguing that whether ownership was corporate and private or statist and governmental, the necessary demarcation between the ruling elite executives and frameworks backed by bureaucrats and functionaries and the mass of society was not ownership so much as dominance of the means of production.
Burnham emphasized that "New Dealism", as he called it, "is not, permit me repeat, a developed, systematized managerial ideology." Still, this ideology had contributed to American capitalism's moving in a "managerial direction":
In its own more confused, less advanced way, New Dealism too has spread abroad the stress on the state as against the individual, planning as against private enterprise, jobs even if relief jobs against opportunities, security against initiative, "human rights" against "property rights." There can be no doubt that the psychological issue of New Dealism has been what the capitalists say it has been: to undermine public confidence in capitalist ideas and rights and institutions. Its almost distinctive features help to fix the minds of the masses for the acceptance of the managerial social structure.
In June 1941, a hostile review of The Managerial Revolution by Socialist Workers Party loyalist Joseph Hansen in the SWP's theoretical magazine accused Burnham of surreptitiously lifting the central ideas of his book from the Italian Bruno Rizzi's La Bureaucratisation du Monde 1939. Despitesimilarities, there is no evidence Burnham knew of this book beyond Leon Trotsky's brief references to it in his debates with Burnham. Burnham was influenced by the belief of bureaucratic collectivism of the Trotskyist Yvan Craipeau, but Burnham took a distinct conservative Machiavellian rather than a Marxist viewpoint, an important philosophical difference which Burnham explored in greater ingredient in The Machiavellians.
In The Machiavellians, he developed his theory that the emerging new élite would prosper better if it retained some democratic trappings—political opposition, a free press, and a controlled "circulation of the élites."
His 1964 book Suicide of the West became a classic text for the post-war conservative movement in American politics, proclaiming Burnham's new interest in traditional moral values, classical liberal economics and anti-communism. He defined political ideologies as syndromes afflicting their proponents with various internal contradictions. His works greatly influenced paleoconservative author Samuel T. Francis, who wrote two books about Burnham, and based his political theories upon the "managerial revolution" and the resulting managerial state.