ABSTRACT
James Burnham was a right-wing philosopher who devoted most of his career to warning of the dangers of totalitarian control. In his most famous work, The Managerial Revolution (1941) he argued that two trends, the increasing professionalisation of management and the separation of ownership and control, were creating a situation in which a professional managerial 'class' was threatening to dominate society. Fears of a 'dictatorship of the managers' proved groundless, but Burnham's work has important implications not only for the role of management in society but also for the balance of power with responsibility in the management of very large organisations. The collapse of the giant energy corporation Enron in late 2001 has brought into sharp relief many of the issues on which Burnham wrote.
