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The "managerial state" is a concept used in critiquing modern procedural democracy.[ ambiguous ] The concept is used largely, though not exclusively, in paleolibertarian, paleoconservative, and anarcho-capitalist critiques of late modern state power in Western democracies. [1] [ additional citation(s) needed ] Theorists Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried, developing ideas inspired by the analytical framework of James Burnham, [2] say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power, regardless of what political party holds a majority.[ citation needed ]
Variations on the concept include the therapeutic managerial state, welfare–warfare state, [3] administrative state, [4] and polite or soft totalitarianism. [5] There is significant overlap between the concepts of the managerial state and the deep state, with theorists of the managerial state additionally drawing from theories of political religion and the secularization of Christian concepts, namely Puritanism, [6] [ additional citation(s) needed ] which they contend demand an overweening concern with government intervention in favor of social justice, unaccountable regulation of citizens' private lives, and both informally and formally enforced political correctness. [7] [ need quotation to verify ][ additional citation(s) needed ]
Theorists of the managerial state claim this constellation of factors tends towards the efflux of totalitarianism, which they call soft totalitarianism [8] and engage in criticism of administrative law and rulemaking. [9]
Samuel T. Francis, following James Burnham, said that under this historical process, “law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism is replaced by executive autocracy, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state.” [10] It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as freedom, equality, brotherhood or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of taxation and wealth redistribution to keep itself in power.
Paul Gottfried, in After Liberalism, defines this worldview as a "series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals." [11] He calls it a new theocratic religion. In this view, when the managerial regime cannot get democratic support for its policies, it resorts to sanctimony and social engineering, via programs, court decisions and regulations.
In a more general way, Joseph Sobran argues that technology and false notions of progress give people a false sense of autonomy:
C.S. Lewis remarked that every increase in man's power over nature can turn out to mean an increase in the power of some men over others, with nature as its instrument. Given technological progress, we need to fight hard to retain our clarity about the nature and rights of human beings, or we face what Lewis called "the abolition of man." Abortion and totalitarianism both represent new possibilities of some men's power over others, and both are defended by certain ideologies of "progress." We hear of human "autonomy" and of man's "control of his own destiny." But the autonomy is enjoyed by a select (or self-selected) few, and the control is exercised by a shrinking elite; those who are powerless, whether unborn children or the subjects of a totalist dictatorship, simply don't count. [12]
Thomas Fleming argues that the managerial problem extends to issues of war, peace and international order:
I prefer the old Adam of strife and carnage to the new Prometheus of peace and human rights. Better a world torn apart by Husseins and Qaddafis, better a war to the knife between the PLO and the Likud Party, between Zulus and Afrikaaners, than a world run by George Balls and Dag Hammarskjölds, because a world made safe for democracy is a world in which no one dares to raise his voice for fear that mommy will put you away some place where you can be reeducated." [13]
Samuel Francis argued that the problems of managerial state extend to issues of crime and justice. In 1992, he introduced the word “anarcho-tyranny” into the paleoconservative vocabulary. [14] Francis argued that this situation extends across the U.S. and Europe but especially the UK. While the government functions normally, violent crime remains a constant, creating a climate of fear (anarchy) and the UK has a history of this and it continues to this day. He says that “laws that are supposed to protect ordinary citizens against ordinary criminals” routinely go unenforced, even though the state is “perfectly capable” of doing so. While this problem rages on, government elites concentrate their interests on law-abiding citizens. In fact, Middle America winds up on the receiving end of both anarchy and tyranny. [14]
Other paleos have expanded upon Francis’ original idea. Paleolibertarian Lew Rockwell extended it to foreign policy, saying that the U.S. military unleashed this condition on the Iraqis. [15] Fleming argues that the breakdown of the American system leaves a "country with a civilized elite class sitting on top of a powder-keg of anarchic welfare-dependents who can defy the government." This gives "encouragement to our own domestic rabble," endangering Middle America:
Does anyone remember the Rodney King riots? Watts? What happens every time a big city wins or loses a Superbowl [sic] or NBA championship? The next time you are in a large crowd – at a downtown pop concert or metro station – look around and imagine how many people on the street, if the lights went out and the cops disappeared, would be pulling the gold fillings out of the teeth in your dead body. [16]
Jerry Pournelle provides his own variation on this theme:
We do not live by rule of law, because no one can possibly go a day without breaking one or another of the goofy laws that have been imposed on us over the years. No one even knows all the laws that apply to almost anything we do now. We live in a time of selective enforcement of law. [17]
Francis argues that anarcho-tyranny is built into the managerial system and cannot be solved simply by fighting corruption or voting out incumbents. In fact, he says that the system generates a false “conservatism” that encourages people to act passively in the face of perpetual revolution. He concludes that only by devolving power back toward law-abiding citizens can sanity be restored. [14]
In addition, Thomas Fleming describes anarcho-tyranny as "law without order: a constant busybodying about behavior that does not at all derive from a shared moral consensus." [18] He suggests stoicism as a survival skill. He wrote,
the only response to this regime is to follow the boxing referee's advice: protect yourself at all times… The only freedom we have is the moral freedom that even ancient slaves enjoyed. Read Epictetus. [18]
This section may contain information not important or relevant to the article's subject.(December 2022) |
Gottfried says paleoconservatives show contempt for the modern state, "not as an energizing force but as a leveling and homogenizing instrument." [19] Conversely, he says mainstream conservatives no longer challenge the managerial system, except at the extremes. For example, decades of activism rolled back neither the New Deal nor the Great Society. He argues that classical conservatives wanted "traditional hierarchical society and a state that assumed the existing social arrangements," both of which today’s center-right rejects and condemns, while reinforcing “Western self-hate and self-indulgence.” [20] [21] He writes:
A political and cultural war has been fought and largely won by the social left against gender stereotyping and the nuclear family. Gay/lesbian and abortion rights, together with a powerful centralized administration enforcing them, are taken for granted by most members of Congress. Opposition to quotas and to the media's bashing of white males increasingly has become restricted to the political fringe. Only extremists now call for a debate on further immigration, which Beltway conservatives avoid bringing up lest they seem insensitive. [22]
Gottfried also argues that the democratic center-right, such as the GOP, is not a restraining force against the managerial state. He says that such political leaders espouse a dubious moderation and accommodate the Left, while treating traditional conservative positions as political liabilities.
The center-right has gradually embraced most of the Left’s historical positions but has merely restated them with apparent moderation, for example, by rallying to the original, less radicalized form of feminism, by advocating an extensive welfare state with lower marginal tax rates, and by praising Martin Luther King while lying about his endorsement of racial quotas.... Equally important, if the "conservative movement" were as concerned about small-government as it is about waging global democratic wars, it might be influencing public opinion accordingly. Movement conservative leaders and the Republican Party have opted for big government and leftist missionary wars but not because of public demand. Rather they have worked long and hard to manufacture a demand for their interests. [23]
In addition, Samuel Francis argued that since the center-right and center-left refuse to deal with major civilizational issues, they reduce domestic political debates to narrow economic issues. This preoccupation views human beings as “resources” and treats them like inanimate objects. [24] Using a phrase from Peter Drucker, he says this
reflects the myth of Economic Man – that human beings are mainly or entirely economic in their motivations and that therefore the business of America is business, even if it takes the federal leviathan to conduct it or regulate it. [25]
In his essay Second Thoughts on James Burnham, George Orwell summarises Burnham's ideas in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians and highlights inconsistencies. Orwell concludes that Burnham may be right in identifying a general drift towards oligarchy with the concentration of industrial and financial power, and the development of the managerial/technical class. However Orwell concludes that Burnham's major error is in seeing this trend as continuing. In doing so, Burham makes two erroneous assumptions; that "Politics is essentially the same in all ages" and "Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour." Orwell refutes these assumptions and notes that just as Nazism had smashed itself to pieces, so the Russian regime will destroy itself. "The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure." Furthermore, Orwell identifies Burnham's critique of managerial state to unveil a sort of 'power-worship', stating that "it is not surprising that Burnham's world view should often be noticeably close to that of the American imperialists on the one side, or to that of the isolationists on the other. It is a 'tough' or 'realistic' world-view which fits in with the American form of wish-thinking." [26]
According to Christopher Hitchens, "Orwell was one of the very few commentators to see the sinister influence of [Burnham's] preachings, and subject these to a critique which greatly nettled Burnham himself." [27]
Anarcho-capitalism is an anti-statist, libertarian political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies, based on concepts such as the non-aggression principle, free markets and self-ownership. In the absence of statute, anarcho-capitalists hold that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through participation in the free market, which they describe as a voluntary society involving the voluntary exchange of goods and services. In a theoretical anarcho-capitalist society a system of private property would still exist, and would be enforced by private defense agencies and/or insurance companies that were selected by property owners, whose ownership rights or claims would be enforced by private defence agencies and/or insurance companies. These agencies or companies would operate competitively in a market and fulfill the roles of courts and the police. Some anarcho-capitalist authors have argued that voluntary slavery is compatible with anarcho-capitalist ideals.
Paleoconservatism is a political philosophy and a paternalistic strain of conservatism in the United States stressing American nationalism, Christian ethics, regionalism, traditionalist conservatism, and non-interventionism. Paleoconservatism's concerns overlap with those of the Old Right that opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s as well as with paleolibertarianism. By the start of the 21st century, the movement had begun to focus more on issues of race.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, or Mises Institute, is a nonprofit think tank headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, that is a center for Austrian economics, right-wing libertarian thought and the paleolibertarian and anarcho-capitalist movements in the United States. It is named after the economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and promotes the Misesian version of heterodox Austrian economics.
Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. A year before he wrote the book, he rejected Marxism and became an influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His most famous book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), speculated on the future of an increasingly proceduralist hence sclerotic society. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics. He rejected containment of the Soviet Union and called for the rollback of communism worldwide.
Samuel Todd Francis, known as Sam Francis, was an American white supremacist writer. He was a columnist and editor for the conservative Washington Times until he was dismissed after making racist remarks at the 1995 American Renaissance conference. Francis would later become a "dominant force" on the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Francis was chief editor of the council's newsletter, Citizens Informer, until his death in 2005. White supremacist Jared Taylor called Francis "the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time."
Paleolibertarianism is a right-libertarian political activism strategy aimed at uniting libertarians and paleoconservatives. It was developed by American anarcho-capitalist theorists Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the American political context after the end of the Cold War. From 1989 to 1995, they sought to communicate libertarian notions of opposition to government intervention by using messages accessible to the working class and middle class people of the time. They combined libertarian free market views with the cultural conservatism of paleoconservatism, while also opposing protectionism. The strategy also embraced the paleoconservative reverence for tradition and religion. This approach, usually identified as right-wing populism, was intended to radicalize citizens against the state. The name they chose for this style of activism evoked the roots of modern libertarianism, hence the prefix paleo. That founding movement was American classical liberalism, which shared the anti-war and anti-New Deal sentiments of the Old Right in the first half of the 20th century. Paleolibertarianism is generally seen as a right-wing ideology.
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.
The Road to Serfdom is a book by the Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. In the book, Hayek "[warns] of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning." He further argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual. Hayek challenged the view, popular among British Marxists, that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism, Nazism, and state-socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual.
Michael Joseph Sobran Jr., also known as M. J. Sobran, was an American paleoconservative journalist and syndicated columnist. He wrote for the National Review magazine from 1972 to 1993.
Libertarian perspectives on political alliances vary greatly, with controversies among libertarians as to which alliances are acceptable or useful to the movement.
Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism, or right-wing libertarianism, is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a variant of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an anti-authoritarian approach to property and income. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights, the non-aggression principle, and a significant transformation of the modern welfare state. Practitioners of right-libertarianism usually do not self-describe by that term and often object to it.
Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism are two major branches of the American conservative political movement. Representatives of each faction often argue that the other does not represent true conservatism. Disputed issues include immigration, trade, the United States Constitution, taxation, budget, business, the Federal Reserve, drug policy, foreign aid and the foreign policy of the United States.
Libertarian conservatism, also referred to as conservative libertarianism and, more rarely, conservatarianism, is a political and social philosophy that combines conservatism and libertarianism, representing the libertarian wing of conservatism and vice versa.
Articles in social and political philosophy include:
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights, liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.
Inverted totalitarianism is a system where economic powers like corporations exert subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Over time, this theory predicts a sense of powerlessness and political apathy, continuing a slide away from political egalitarianism.
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" is an essay, first published in May 1946 in Polemic, by the English author George Orwell. The essay discusses works written by James Burnham, an American political theorist.
The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World is a book written by James Burnham in 1941. It discusses the rise of managers and technocrats in modern industrial societies, arguing that they would replace the traditional capitalist class as the rulers of the economic system, though mechanisms such as economic planning.