James Burnham

American political theorist who wrote The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians, and The Suicide of the West — beginning as a Trotskyist intellectual and ending as a founding figure of National Review conservatism — whose managerial revolution thesis (that a new class of managers, not capitalists or workers, would come to control modern society) anticipated the professional-managerial class analysis.

Predicted the rise of the managerial class as the dominant social group of advanced industrial society — Burnham's insight that control of organizations, not ownership of capital, would determine power created the conceptual framework for understanding corporate bureaucracy, government agencies, and the professional class.