Leviathan and Its Enemies; Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America by Samuel Francis

Author:Samuel Francis [Francis, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Summit Publishers
Published: 2016-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE MANAGERIAL REGIME

Democratic and Aristocratic Tendencies of Elites

By the end of World War II, managerial groups in the United States had succeeded in establishing mass organizations by which they could displace the bourgeois elite and dominate mass society. In the economy, managerially controlled mass corporations and unions replaced individually owned and operated firms as the dominant structures. In the state, the election of 1932 returned to power an administration that sought to convert the bourgeois government into a bureaucratic-managerial state, and the onset of World War II encouraged the development of the mass state by increasing its size, budget, personnel, and range of functions and by securing the moral and emotional allegiance of the mass population to it. The managerial state was increasingly fused with the structures of managerial capitalism, was controlled by a bureaucratic elite led by a Caesarist political figure in alliance with the mass population and in an adversarial relationship to the bourgeois elite and its social and political institutions, and was animated and rationalized by a teleocratic and melioristic ideology that expressed the interests of the managerial elite as a whole. In the media of communication, mass organizations in the form of mass universities, periodicals and newspapers, and broadcasting and film provided structures by which the intellectual and verbalist class obtained rewards from and provided vital educational and ideological services to the managerial elite in the state and economy, and similar structures developed in the churches and other mass organizations of culture and communication. The Second World War , with its far-reaching coordination of diverse sectors of social, political, economic, and intellectual life, served to integrate or fuse the managerial elites of state, economy, and culture, to increase the need for their functions and services, and to establish them as a unified and dominant group in American society.

The bourgeois elite, of course, did not disappear. It retained considerable wealth through the persistence of smaller but often highly lucrative entrepreneurial firms under bourgeois control. It also retained considerable political power at state and local levels and in the Congress, though it was unable to coordinate its diversified and localized power bases effectively to acquire national power or to control the presidency and the executive bureaucracy. Hence, its political power was largely negative; it was able to resist or modify the implementation of the managerial agenda, but it was not able to initiate or implement its own agenda. Culturally and intellectually, the bourgeois elite increasingly lost control of the larger universities, foundations, churches, and newspapers and periodicals, and the intelligentsia within them, and its ideology of entrepreneurial capitalism, a neutralist and constitutionalist state, and a bourgeois ethic of socially rooted individualism was increasingly criticized, discarded, and ridiculed by the exponents of managerial liberalism. Nevertheless, in smaller colleges, newspapers, and churches, bourgeois ideology often persisted and provided for some parts of the mass population a credible and coherent perspective by which managerial initiatives could be resisted and bourgeois resentments against the new elite and its regime could be expressed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.