The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening In The World.

BURNHAM, James.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 71237

New York : The John Day Company, 1941.

First edition of Burnham’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Some dampstaining to a few pages, very good in the rare original dust jacket with a chip to the crown of the spine.

Burnham's seminal work, The Managerial Revolution, attempted to theorize about the future of world capitalism based upon observations of its development in the interwar period. Burnham argued three possible futures for capitalism: (1) that capitalism was a permanent form of social and economic organization and that it would be continued for a protracted period of time; (2) that capitalism was a temporary form of organization destined by its nature to collapse and be replaced by socialism; (3) that capitalism was a temporary form of organization currently being transformed into some non-socialist future form of society. Burnham argued that since capitalism had a more or less definite beginning, which he dated to approximately the 14th Century, it could not be regarded as an immutable and permanent form. Moreover, Burnham observed that in the last years of previous forms of economic organization, such as those of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished." The worldwide mass unemployment of the depression era was, for Burnham, indicative that capitalism was itself "not going to continue much longer."