The Ninth Annual Ernest May Memorial Lecture
The Idealism of What Works
Philip Zelikow
Professor
University of Virginia
Editor’s Note: Philip Zelikow presented the annual Ernest R. May Memorial Lecture at the Aspen Strategy Group’s August 2017 Summer Workshop in Aspen, Colorado. The following are his remarks delivered at the meeting. The Ernest May Memorial Lecture is named for Ernest May, an international relations historian and Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government professor, who passed away in 2009. ASG developed the lecture series to honor Professor May’s celebrated lectures.
I start with a Tale of Two Prophets. This tale comes from that terrible and glorious decade, the 1940s. The two prophets predicted the future of freedom.
My first prophet was a man named James Burnham. In 1941 Burnham was thirty-five years old. From a wealthy family—railroad money—he was a star student at Princeton, then on to Balliol College, Oxford. Burnham was an avowed communist. He joined with Trotsky during the 1930s.
By 1941 Burnham had moved on as he published his first great book of prophecy, calledThe Managerial Revolution. The book made him a celebrity. It was widely discussed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Burnham’s vision of the future is one where the old ideologies, like socialism, have been left behind. The rulers are really beyond all that. They are the managerial elite, the technocrats, the scientists, and the bureaucrats who manage the all-powerful enterprises and agencies.
You know this vision. You have seen it so often at the movies. It is the vision in all those science fiction dystopias.
