Right-wing anti-managerialism from the Managerial Revolution to Trumpism

The rise of right-wing populism and far-right politics in the United States has been accompanied by attempts to elaborate an ideological justification for the policies and politics of its adherents. In this article we explore how ideas about management–specifically anti-managerial ideas–became central to this. Using a genealogical approach, we trace how the ideas of the conservative management theorist James Burnham that were first developed in The Managerial Revolution (1941) became integral to the worldview of the white supremacist Samuel T. Francis. In turn Francis was to influence the development of the ‘alt-right’ / ‘post-fascism’ and so called ‘Trumpism’. We demonstrate how these ideas have formed an on-going right-wing critique of managerialism, and how this has been used as a basis for political strategies within the far-right. We also examine how oppositional ideas in relation to ‘managerial society’, ‘managerial elites’, and the ‘administrative state’ continue to circulate and have currency in right-wing intellectual circles. Given existing critiques of managerialism in Management and Organization Studies and Critical Management Studies, the presence of right-wing anti-managerialism has implication for how these fields should consider the topic.