4 ideas
Burnham argues that ownership of the means of production is passing not to workers but to a new class of managers, technicians, and administrators who actually control production and the state. Both capitalism and socialism are yielding to managerial society.
Drawing on Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, Burnham holds that all societies, whatever their ideals, are run by a small governing elite. Politics is the study of how elites gain, hold, and lose power, not of stated principles.
Burnham insists on reading political language for the actual distribution of power it conceals rather than its professed meaning. The Machiavellian analyst asks who rules and how, behind the slogans.
Burnham diagnoses modern liberalism as an ideology that rationalizes Western contraction and loss of will. He treats it as a syndrome that reconciles a civilization to its own retreat.