All the theories of “managerial” society descending from Burnham share a conceptual muddle
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The basic conceit is that “management” is this crazy new thing invented at Harvard Business School by ppl with test tubes and beakers
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But almost all of the full-time occupations of ruling elites since antiquity can be described as “management”
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The biz-school lemma suggests that those earlier managers were confidence men who contributed nothing, just overseers, modern managers are promethean engineers
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Well, there’s just no way to dice it up that will make that stick Look at what a Sumerian scribe was doing. Or a Vedic astronomer. Or Machiavelli, or his banker neighbors
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The combination of communication, decision-making, leadership, and emergency trigonometry is very stable
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Burnham should have known this; latter-day champions of the same theory tend to take a much dimmer view of manager-theocracy to begin with, so the flaw should be obvious
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But there is a difference between the managerial class of today and that of 400 years ago, I'm not quite sure what it is but the difference is important
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Replying to @ad_captandum2 @QuasLacrimas
It's not that the class didn't exist in the past and as you say they probably ran everything. But they didn't have a grand theory justifying their permanent sovereign status
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