A year before he wrote the book, he rejected Marxism and became an influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement.

[1] Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics.

[6] He graduated at the top of his class at Princeton University before attending Balliol College, Oxford, where his professors included J. R. R. Tolkien and Martin D'Arcy.

Writing for Partisan Review, Burnham was also an important influence on writers including Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv.

In this text he responds to Trotsky's request to draw his attention to "those works which should supplant the system of dialectic materialism for the proletariat" by referring to Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead and "the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science".

The general Marxian theory of "universal history", to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.

[16] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other During World War II, Burnham took a leave from NYU to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Recommended by George F. Kennan, Burnham was invited to lead the semi-autonomous "Political and Psychological Warfare" division of the Office of Policy Coordination.

A contributor to The Freeman in the early 1950s, he considered the magazine too focused on economic issues, though it presented a wide range of opinion on the Soviet threat.

In this imperial federation, the United States, with a monopoly of atomic weapons, would hold a preponderance of decisive material power over all the rest of the world.

[17]In 1955, he helped William F. Buckley Jr. found National Review magazine, which from the start took positions in foreign policy consistent with Burnham's own.

[18] Burnham became a lifelong contributor to the journal, and Buckley referred to him as "the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.

[23] Burnham's seminal work, The Managerial Revolution (1941), theorized about the future of world capitalism based upon its development in the interwar period.

Burnham begins by saying that "It is a historical law, with no apparent exceptions so far known, that all social and economic groups of any size strive to improve their relative position with respect to power and privilege in society".

[26] Moreover, in the last years of previous economic systems such as those of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, mass unemployment was "a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished.

Due to the complexity and large scale of modern economies, Burnham argues that this form of state ownership would prove more efficient than rule by individual capitalists.

[25] Analyzing the emerging forms of society around the world, Burnham saw certain commonalities between the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and America under Roosevelt's New Deal.

[32] The superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in the novel are partly influenced by Burnham's assessment of Roosevelt's America, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as being managerial states.

The new 'managerial' societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America.