For a self-described conservative, Lyons is not very good at passing the Chesterton's Fence test. He barely acknowledges either the flaws, evils, and limitations of the pre-1848-ish bourgeois society he idolizes, or the functional advantages that drove the growth of the large-scale managerial institutions he caricatures and desires to destroy.
Leaving aside the culture war stuff, let's just take the economics: the rise of managerial institutions has coincided with an enormous increase in material living standards. Does Lyons think anything close to those standards could be maintained without the powerful large-scale institutions whose existence requires a managerial class? If so, what evidence does he have for this? If not, how does he propose to convince a majority that it is worth drastically impoverishing themselves in order to be rid of managerialism?
This is a fair critique of the ideas in general, although I haven't ready Lyons's piece yet so I can't comment as to whether it is a fair critique of his spin.
It is worth noting, however, that the size of the managerial state, and the subsidiary institutions within it (corporations, departmental bureaucracies etc.) is only in part due to its efficiency. Some institutional growth is due to efficiency of output, and some is due to efficiency in interacting with the managerial state itself. So part of the size is because size is good at solving problems, and part is because we created bureaucratic rules that favor size.
Getting rid of the latter, we should not expect every enterprise to drop to mom and pop sizes, nor should we desire it, but we should expect to see smaller organizations than we do today, getting closer to the efficient size for their roles and capacities.
The problem with the managerial class is that they tend to make things too big, which is every bit as bad as keeping them too small (which was an issue in early 20th century banking law, for instance).
Absolutely agreed. I think Lyons' critique of the way managerialism undermines the individual and local virtues of self-government also has a lot of truth to it, though others like Tanner Greer and Brink Lindsey have done that critique better.
My issue is that Lyons on managerialism sounds like Angela Davis talking about police and prisons, or James C. Scott or David Graeber talking about agriculture. These are all institutions whose downsides have produced immense human misery. They are also institutions for which abolitionism is not a mature or constructive response to those downsides.
That's an excellent point. I think the main problem with managerialism is that it feeds itself too much, rules from on high begetting more managers to deal with the rules who then create more rules, etc. I am not sure how one avoids that, outside of preventing government institutions from getting so involved, picking winners and losers, regulating all over the place, etc. At least with more intense market testing institutions that go too far down the managerial path fall apart eventually; governments, alas only do that in extremis.
At a fundamental level, managerialism is antithetical to democracy. This point is obscured by the managerial class, for obvious reasons. I don't think it's incumbent on an author trying to clarify the above point to list the benefits of the non democratic form of government. For example, should an author making the point that corporatism trends towards fascism be expected to acknowledge the benefits of fascism?
My problem with terms like "managerial elite" is that they sound a bit too conspiratorial and - by implication - too ready to absolve the general population of complicity in this 'managerial' dystopia. In my own country (UK) thanks to the massive over-expansion of tertiary 'education', the value-system of the "managerial elite" has now been adopted by maybe as much as 50% of the entire population! America may be different but to judge by the politics of both eastern and western coastal metropolises.... I think not so much. As I said recently in relation to Chris Rufo's analysis, there is a tendency to shy away from confronting the complicity of large numbers of people in their own dystopian nightmares. "Take another context: it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing followers. " https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
As a crabby old enviro, long accustomed to judging the population for its materialism, especially in this period of high immigration which makes it so on the nose - the sort of '60s conservatism (nature, craft, preservation, minimalism) limned by Christopher Caldwell being dead, dead, dead - I can tell you you don't win any hearers by suggesting the populace are anything but lambs.
You certainly don't....it's the one thing that unites - right across the political spectrum from Left to Right in modern times. From the '60s on the idea became axiomatic that whoever or whatever was to blame for our ills, the general PUBLIC was blameless. And intrinsic to the democratic process, the voter needed to be endlessly FLATTERED. I believe that the consequences of this for the health for Western liberalism have been huge.
But "crabby old enviro"? - I'm intrigued; tell me more.
Why should the author have to address a correlation unless there is strong evidence of a causal relationship? I haven't seen evidence nor a good argument that managerialism is responsible for economic growth. Have you?
In many areas, large organizations requiring a managerial regime do things that would be near impossible for enterprises small enough not to need a managers.
Yeah sure, but I think they make up a small share of the "managerial elite". There's about 9 million people employed by the federal government, a huge NGO workforce, a massive academic bureaucracy. It's not clear that in aggregate the relationship between in size between the ME and economic growth is causal and positive. If anything, I think of ME as rent seekers and a net constraint on economic growth.
100 percent! Even if he is partially correct in the diagnoses of the problem being too much ossification from too much managerialism the solution is not destruction, but creative destruction.
This is also what is depressing about reading Burnham, where this analysis comes from. Burnham's conclusion is basically that "no matter what you do, something like Communism will win." Burnham-heads tend to be terminal pessimists.
Whether that win is pessimism or optimism is a value judgment about which people can and do differ.
But whether that win is simple realism can be tested by comparing observations with the theory. And on this inquiry there is really no question whatsoever as regards the continuing convergence of contemporary approaches to modern state** governance and politics, a historically gradual (and - make no mistake - utterly inexorable***) process which has resulted in an objectively narrow window of variation that keeps shrinking with every passing decade.
The narcissism of small differences in at its most intense and instinctive when the dimension of difference is time and restricting the range of comparison only to what one sees in the present. Any observer from any other historical period would look at the types of state government systems dominant today and conclude that the Burnhamist year zero was already a long time ago.
One simple test for this could be how easy or difficult it is for some worker, specialist, expert, etc. to move from a position in one system to the most similar position in another system and - putting aside minor, arbitrary (or at any rate non-instrumental, non-essential) cultural differences in conventions, language, etiquette, and so forth - once integrated, how quickly they can grasp intuitively how to get their job done, how things tend to work, etc.? As with most modern jobs, and controlling for quality, bureaucrats in any specialty are now increasingly interchangeable pegs that could fit into similar holes almost anywhere absent chauvinist favoritism (see the recent Fiona Scott Morton affair), and are thus in a sense inherently "structurally cosmopolitan".
If you try to define "system of government" in a functional way, you would look at the various missions and tasks it is taking on, and the general hierarchical and internally-connecting modes of coordinating activities and jobs to accomplish those tasks, and in that gigantic multi-dimensional space of possibilities the scatter plot of all the state systems in 2023 would group very tightly and occupy an incredibly tiny area.
*Of course it's not "Communism" as existed in, say, Stalin's Soviet Union. There has never been a good and clear definition of "Communism" to distinguish it from the general category containing varieties of socialism. "Totalitarian and Absolutist Socialism Instituted and Explicitly Perpetuated by Terror" is probably close-enough to the Leninism / proto-Maoist playbook. Also of course these terms are thrown around with intentional inaccuracy for use as epithets. But if one is trying to use "Classical" in the same sense as "Classical Liberalism" to make reference to the actual content of a non-epithet, then the system that won was 1920s style "Classical Fascism" and a cultural gleichschaltung at the status top of all fields and domains of human endeavor is close enough to what Lyons means by "managerial elite" nowadays.
**Corporate governance and quick ubiquitous Darwinian convergence to 'best practices' is not quite the same, but similar. The difference is not between corporations or countries, but only between the size-determined modes that distinguish Sub-Dunbar from Super-Dunbar, Start-Up from Big Corp. Like Tolstoy said about Happy Families, Big Governments, whether state or corporate, are all the same.
***Some will object that the degree of harmonization and uniformization one observes is not 100% spontaneous or technologically-determined but was 'done to us' intentionally by various intentional efforts especially post-war, etc. There is some truth to that, but the convergence would have happened even without that. Some things are simply inevitable unless recognized and fought against relentlessly and perpetually with all one's might,
My problem with Burnham's book is not on the descriptive side, but in how his analysis in the Managerial Revolution resembles Marxist theories of inevitability. His descriptions are generally correct. His 1959 book on Congress was particularly prescient but does not have the same deterministic bent. Quoting from his prediction on the future of American institutions:
"The intermediary institutions are abolished, rendered impotent, or harnessed to Caesar's chariot. Everyone, young and old, black and brown and yellow and white, top dog and bottom mongrel, the lame, the halt, the blind and the feeble-minded votes--and moreover must vote--in elections which are transformed into plebiscites the function of which is to acclaim Caesar." Towards the end of the book, he argues that Congress should be reinvigorated, else liberty will be lost forever (oops, lol, sorry). There is less of the sense of inevitability in that later book, at least in the surface meaning, although there is perhaps a hidden meaning to the text.
In this book, he loses some of the Marxist contours that you see in Managerial Revolution and the people who read it and remaster it for modern audiences. Yes, all the world governments fall closely within that scatter-plot, but to say that the way those dots fell was inevitable does not seem to me to be the case, but has been the result of conscious choices. We see at least some of that deviation occurring now at rapid pace as countries like China, India, Russia, and Israel (with the judicial reform) start banking off in separate directions.
I read and liked Lyon's post. But while reading I keep thinking of two things. First the managerial class is part of Moloch. (See Scott Alexander.) And second that the managerial class is caught in the Moral Mazes of institutions. (See Zvi at "Don't worry about the vase".) It's part of what we get, you can't go back to mom and pop stores. Those were 'eaten' by Walmart and then Amazon. I don't fell like there is much evil intent, it's just people doing what they have to do.
Also, Eric Voegelin’s “The New Science of Politics “ adds insight . . .
Voegelin writes . . . (and my comments)
“Facts’ are not — and can never be — conclusions!”
What dangers?
“Highly respectable scholars have invested an immense erudition into the digestion of historical materials, and their effort has gone largely to waste because their principles of selection and interpretation had no proper theoretical foundation but derived from the Zeitgeist [peer pressure], political preferences, or personal idiosyncrasies.’’
Man, he reveals what shovel finds, treasure or trash!
Voegelin focuses on importance of ontology (what exists) . . .
“For neither classic nor Christian ethics and politics contain “value-judgments” but elaborate, empirically and critically, the problems of order which derive from philosophical anthropology as part of a general ontology.’’
Aristotle and Christendom both believed humans exist as a special, unique, important part of reality. If this rejected . . .
“ . . . when ontology as a science was lost, and when consequently ethics and politics could no longer be understood as sciences of the order in which human nature reaches its maximal actualization, was it possible for this realm of knowledge to become suspect as a field of subjective, uncritical opinion.’’
If humans are just smart animals, mindless atoms, or programmed machines — no special, important goals exist. Every opinion, desire, equally good, or, equally wicked. If, in contrast, human life created in the ‘image of God’, clear, important goals do exist. So ontology is the foundation of theory. If no understanding of what human life is - How to determine what political, social, psychological theories are valid, or even useful?
The importance of ontology, can’t be overestimated.
And your essay on the crisis of epistemology seems connected.
Can mathematical methods, which seem so certain, so effective, replace every other method of understanding?
One fascinating analysis of modernity’s crisis is the work “The education of Henry Adams”.
David Riesman wrote The Lonely Crowd in 1950 about the inner directed man vs the outer directed man. When I read it in high school, 50-54, it was clear that I wanted to be the inner directed sort. The dichotomy mentioned in this blog is similar to the inner-outer dichotomy.
There's something to be said for standardized medical care. And I say this as someone who has a lot of frustration with the system. Standardization provides accountability.
The old time family doctors didn't have malpractice suits, and they frequently abused their position. It wasn't all Anne of Green Gables and James Herriot.
For a self-described conservative, Lyons is not very good at passing the Chesterton's Fence test. He barely acknowledges either the flaws, evils, and limitations of the pre-1848-ish bourgeois society he idolizes, or the functional advantages that drove the growth of the large-scale managerial institutions he caricatures and desires to destroy.
Leaving aside the culture war stuff, let's just take the economics: the rise of managerial institutions has coincided with an enormous increase in material living standards. Does Lyons think anything close to those standards could be maintained without the powerful large-scale institutions whose existence requires a managerial class? If so, what evidence does he have for this? If not, how does he propose to convince a majority that it is worth drastically impoverishing themselves in order to be rid of managerialism?
This is a fair critique of the ideas in general, although I haven't ready Lyons's piece yet so I can't comment as to whether it is a fair critique of his spin.
It is worth noting, however, that the size of the managerial state, and the subsidiary institutions within it (corporations, departmental bureaucracies etc.) is only in part due to its efficiency. Some institutional growth is due to efficiency of output, and some is due to efficiency in interacting with the managerial state itself. So part of the size is because size is good at solving problems, and part is because we created bureaucratic rules that favor size.
Getting rid of the latter, we should not expect every enterprise to drop to mom and pop sizes, nor should we desire it, but we should expect to see smaller organizations than we do today, getting closer to the efficient size for their roles and capacities.
The problem with the managerial class is that they tend to make things too big, which is every bit as bad as keeping them too small (which was an issue in early 20th century banking law, for instance).
Absolutely agreed. I think Lyons' critique of the way managerialism undermines the individual and local virtues of self-government also has a lot of truth to it, though others like Tanner Greer and Brink Lindsey have done that critique better.
My issue is that Lyons on managerialism sounds like Angela Davis talking about police and prisons, or James C. Scott or David Graeber talking about agriculture. These are all institutions whose downsides have produced immense human misery. They are also institutions for which abolitionism is not a mature or constructive response to those downsides.
That's an excellent point. I think the main problem with managerialism is that it feeds itself too much, rules from on high begetting more managers to deal with the rules who then create more rules, etc. I am not sure how one avoids that, outside of preventing government institutions from getting so involved, picking winners and losers, regulating all over the place, etc. At least with more intense market testing institutions that go too far down the managerial path fall apart eventually; governments, alas only do that in extremis.
At a fundamental level, managerialism is antithetical to democracy. This point is obscured by the managerial class, for obvious reasons. I don't think it's incumbent on an author trying to clarify the above point to list the benefits of the non democratic form of government. For example, should an author making the point that corporatism trends towards fascism be expected to acknowledge the benefits of fascism?
Yeah, this sounds like what I felt. Too much negativity, and not enough nuance.
My problem with terms like "managerial elite" is that they sound a bit too conspiratorial and - by implication - too ready to absolve the general population of complicity in this 'managerial' dystopia. In my own country (UK) thanks to the massive over-expansion of tertiary 'education', the value-system of the "managerial elite" has now been adopted by maybe as much as 50% of the entire population! America may be different but to judge by the politics of both eastern and western coastal metropolises.... I think not so much. As I said recently in relation to Chris Rufo's analysis, there is a tendency to shy away from confronting the complicity of large numbers of people in their own dystopian nightmares. "Take another context: it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing followers. " https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
As a crabby old enviro, long accustomed to judging the population for its materialism, especially in this period of high immigration which makes it so on the nose - the sort of '60s conservatism (nature, craft, preservation, minimalism) limned by Christopher Caldwell being dead, dead, dead - I can tell you you don't win any hearers by suggesting the populace are anything but lambs.
You certainly don't....it's the one thing that unites - right across the political spectrum from Left to Right in modern times. From the '60s on the idea became axiomatic that whoever or whatever was to blame for our ills, the general PUBLIC was blameless. And intrinsic to the democratic process, the voter needed to be endlessly FLATTERED. I believe that the consequences of this for the health for Western liberalism have been huge.
But "crabby old enviro"? - I'm intrigued; tell me more.
Why should the author have to address a correlation unless there is strong evidence of a causal relationship? I haven't seen evidence nor a good argument that managerialism is responsible for economic growth. Have you?
In many areas, large organizations requiring a managerial regime do things that would be near impossible for enterprises small enough not to need a managers.
Yeah sure, but I think they make up a small share of the "managerial elite". There's about 9 million people employed by the federal government, a huge NGO workforce, a massive academic bureaucracy. It's not clear that in aggregate the relationship between in size between the ME and economic growth is causal and positive. If anything, I think of ME as rent seekers and a net constraint on economic growth.
I don't know understand, so let's back up. How do you run a large organization without managers?
100 percent! Even if he is partially correct in the diagnoses of the problem being too much ossification from too much managerialism the solution is not destruction, but creative destruction.
This is also what is depressing about reading Burnham, where this analysis comes from. Burnham's conclusion is basically that "no matter what you do, something like Communism will win." Burnham-heads tend to be terminal pessimists.
Something like that* already won. Circumspice.
Whether that win is pessimism or optimism is a value judgment about which people can and do differ.
But whether that win is simple realism can be tested by comparing observations with the theory. And on this inquiry there is really no question whatsoever as regards the continuing convergence of contemporary approaches to modern state** governance and politics, a historically gradual (and - make no mistake - utterly inexorable***) process which has resulted in an objectively narrow window of variation that keeps shrinking with every passing decade.
The narcissism of small differences in at its most intense and instinctive when the dimension of difference is time and restricting the range of comparison only to what one sees in the present. Any observer from any other historical period would look at the types of state government systems dominant today and conclude that the Burnhamist year zero was already a long time ago.
One simple test for this could be how easy or difficult it is for some worker, specialist, expert, etc. to move from a position in one system to the most similar position in another system and - putting aside minor, arbitrary (or at any rate non-instrumental, non-essential) cultural differences in conventions, language, etiquette, and so forth - once integrated, how quickly they can grasp intuitively how to get their job done, how things tend to work, etc.? As with most modern jobs, and controlling for quality, bureaucrats in any specialty are now increasingly interchangeable pegs that could fit into similar holes almost anywhere absent chauvinist favoritism (see the recent Fiona Scott Morton affair), and are thus in a sense inherently "structurally cosmopolitan".
If you try to define "system of government" in a functional way, you would look at the various missions and tasks it is taking on, and the general hierarchical and internally-connecting modes of coordinating activities and jobs to accomplish those tasks, and in that gigantic multi-dimensional space of possibilities the scatter plot of all the state systems in 2023 would group very tightly and occupy an incredibly tiny area.
*Of course it's not "Communism" as existed in, say, Stalin's Soviet Union. There has never been a good and clear definition of "Communism" to distinguish it from the general category containing varieties of socialism. "Totalitarian and Absolutist Socialism Instituted and Explicitly Perpetuated by Terror" is probably close-enough to the Leninism / proto-Maoist playbook. Also of course these terms are thrown around with intentional inaccuracy for use as epithets. But if one is trying to use "Classical" in the same sense as "Classical Liberalism" to make reference to the actual content of a non-epithet, then the system that won was 1920s style "Classical Fascism" and a cultural gleichschaltung at the status top of all fields and domains of human endeavor is close enough to what Lyons means by "managerial elite" nowadays.
**Corporate governance and quick ubiquitous Darwinian convergence to 'best practices' is not quite the same, but similar. The difference is not between corporations or countries, but only between the size-determined modes that distinguish Sub-Dunbar from Super-Dunbar, Start-Up from Big Corp. Like Tolstoy said about Happy Families, Big Governments, whether state or corporate, are all the same.
***Some will object that the degree of harmonization and uniformization one observes is not 100% spontaneous or technologically-determined but was 'done to us' intentionally by various intentional efforts especially post-war, etc. There is some truth to that, but the convergence would have happened even without that. Some things are simply inevitable unless recognized and fought against relentlessly and perpetually with all one's might,
My problem with Burnham's book is not on the descriptive side, but in how his analysis in the Managerial Revolution resembles Marxist theories of inevitability. His descriptions are generally correct. His 1959 book on Congress was particularly prescient but does not have the same deterministic bent. Quoting from his prediction on the future of American institutions:
"The intermediary institutions are abolished, rendered impotent, or harnessed to Caesar's chariot. Everyone, young and old, black and brown and yellow and white, top dog and bottom mongrel, the lame, the halt, the blind and the feeble-minded votes--and moreover must vote--in elections which are transformed into plebiscites the function of which is to acclaim Caesar." Towards the end of the book, he argues that Congress should be reinvigorated, else liberty will be lost forever (oops, lol, sorry). There is less of the sense of inevitability in that later book, at least in the surface meaning, although there is perhaps a hidden meaning to the text.
In this book, he loses some of the Marxist contours that you see in Managerial Revolution and the people who read it and remaster it for modern audiences. Yes, all the world governments fall closely within that scatter-plot, but to say that the way those dots fell was inevitable does not seem to me to be the case, but has been the result of conscious choices. We see at least some of that deviation occurring now at rapid pace as countries like China, India, Russia, and Israel (with the judicial reform) start banking off in separate directions.
I read and liked Lyon's post. But while reading I keep thinking of two things. First the managerial class is part of Moloch. (See Scott Alexander.) And second that the managerial class is caught in the Moral Mazes of institutions. (See Zvi at "Don't worry about the vase".) It's part of what we get, you can't go back to mom and pop stores. Those were 'eaten' by Walmart and then Amazon. I don't fell like there is much evil intent, it's just people doing what they have to do.
Arnold
Read Lyon’s essay on upheaval.
Great!
Also, Eric Voegelin’s “The New Science of Politics “ adds insight . . .
Voegelin writes . . . (and my comments)
“Facts’ are not — and can never be — conclusions!”
What dangers?
“Highly respectable scholars have invested an immense erudition into the digestion of historical materials, and their effort has gone largely to waste because their principles of selection and interpretation had no proper theoretical foundation but derived from the Zeitgeist [peer pressure], political preferences, or personal idiosyncrasies.’’
Man, he reveals what shovel finds, treasure or trash!
Voegelin focuses on importance of ontology (what exists) . . .
“For neither classic nor Christian ethics and politics contain “value-judgments” but elaborate, empirically and critically, the problems of order which derive from philosophical anthropology as part of a general ontology.’’
Aristotle and Christendom both believed humans exist as a special, unique, important part of reality. If this rejected . . .
“ . . . when ontology as a science was lost, and when consequently ethics and politics could no longer be understood as sciences of the order in which human nature reaches its maximal actualization, was it possible for this realm of knowledge to become suspect as a field of subjective, uncritical opinion.’’
If humans are just smart animals, mindless atoms, or programmed machines — no special, important goals exist. Every opinion, desire, equally good, or, equally wicked. If, in contrast, human life created in the ‘image of God’, clear, important goals do exist. So ontology is the foundation of theory. If no understanding of what human life is - How to determine what political, social, psychological theories are valid, or even useful?
The importance of ontology, can’t be overestimated.
And your essay on the crisis of epistemology seems connected.
Can mathematical methods, which seem so certain, so effective, replace every other method of understanding?
One fascinating analysis of modernity’s crisis is the work “The education of Henry Adams”.
He lived from 1840 -1910. Experienced the change.
Keen insights.
Thanks
Clay
tear the false order of managerialism and all its poisonous ideological spawn root and branch from the world forever.
*Let chaos reign*
Count me out on lyonism
David Riesman wrote The Lonely Crowd in 1950 about the inner directed man vs the outer directed man. When I read it in high school, 50-54, it was clear that I wanted to be the inner directed sort. The dichotomy mentioned in this blog is similar to the inner-outer dichotomy.
There's something to be said for standardized medical care. And I say this as someone who has a lot of frustration with the system. Standardization provides accountability.
The old time family doctors didn't have malpractice suits, and they frequently abused their position. It wasn't all Anne of Green Gables and James Herriot.