The story of the last 200 years of human history is the story of the massification of society. The industrial revolution led to mass production, which demanded mass consumption and mass markets to properly utilize the scale at which production could now, and must now, occur. Regional communities, which had once operated with relative independence, needed to become interconnected through transit, finance and communications if the material abundance of industrialization was to be utilized properly. Materials, markets, and labor no longer needed to be located in close proximity due to the vast networks constructed to move man and material from one zone of optimal productivity to another. The managerial class is a product of the corporations and mass states deployed to oversee the coordination of this process.
As the advantages of scale and centralization became overwhelming, mass organizations came to dominate every aspect of life including government, business, media, and education. Even social domains that would normally be more resistant to technocratic management or market forces like religion, romantic relationships, and family formation are now mediated by large bureaucratic institutions. Bertrand de Jouvenel predicted the ever expanding state would dissolve these intermediate social spheres and bring them under its control in the relentless quest for power. In many ways he was right, though he may have underestimated the degree to which the “private” sector of the economy would do the work of the state. The managerial class easily crosses the public/private barrier that has been so effectively constructed in the American psyche. In fact, we will see that the ability of managers to move from formal government public posting to private corporate positions while using the exact same language and skill set is key to the unification of the state and economy that managerialism ultimately requires.
As James Burnham explained in his book The Managerial Revolution, mass organizations are very complex and require a large amount of specific knowledge and technical expertise to operate. The ownership class of capitalists may have had the resources necessary to construct these leviathans, but they lacked the ability to master the specialized functions required to steer each aspect of the bureaucracy. This created demand for a class of workers educated in the art of managerial techniques and trained in their application. As the efficiency and scale of those organizations proved themselves to be overwhelming, the mass bureaucratic organization became the default organizational structure for every social institution. This naturally increased the demand for, and power of, those in the managerial class.
