For several decades before his death in 2005, Samuel T. Francis was a major voice of Chronicles and paleoconservatism in America. He was widely admired as an outstanding public commentator, winning awards for his incisive and eloquent writing. Unfortunately, he was attacked by neoconservative apparatchiks with hardly a fragment of his learning, perception, and eloquence in the latter part of his career.

Francis began working on his last book, Leviathan & Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America, in the 1990s, although it was not published until 2016 by the efforts of admirers, to little notice.

But its description of the future course of our ruling elite is as accurate as if the author were reacting to today’s news. Few thinkers in our time have proven so prescient, which is why his work and insights merit the renewed interest they’ve enjoyed recently. There is yet much to glean from the mind of this Middle American radical.

Like his muse, the political theorist James Burnham, Francis’s main interest as a historian was power and its real locus, the ruling class—those who give orders but do not obey any superior, those who possess control of society’s wealth and privileges.

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