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".

[5] 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.

[4] 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.

[4] The book explores the transformation of capitalism into a managerial society where the control and administrative decisions are made by a new class of managers, rather than the traditional capitalists or the owners.

Orwell finds the central premise of the book fascinating, but lists a range of criticisms, including problems with the practical war predictions of Burnham.

In June 1941, a hostile review of The Managerial Revolution by Socialist Workers Party loyalist Joseph Hansen in the SWP's theoretical magazine accused Burnham of surreptitiously lifting the central ideas of his book from the Italian Bruno Rizzi's La Bureaucratisation du Monde (1939).

According to Vox, "Virtually all of The Managerial Revolution's major predictions—the coming collapse of capitalism, an Axis victory in World War II, the superior efficiency of state-run enterprises—were proven wrong.