I have been pleasantly surprised to see the right begin to understand the managerial revolution, thanks to the work of Auron MacIntyre popularizing the work of James Burnham and Sam Francis. In the midst of this I’ve been drawn back to something I heard some time ago, what one could almost call a prophecy.
My friend Christopher Sandbatch and I were discussing the Anglo Americans, who after conquering the world seem to have fallen on hard times, comparatively. He said something to my doom and gloom that went something like,
The Anglos are just waiting for the next social technology to come along and rocket us past everyone else again
It struck me at the time as implausible, but the more I’ve turned the thought over in my head the more plausible it becomes. Social Technology is an incredibly powerful thing and is only dimly understood in our scene. Anyone familiar with Marshal McLuhan’s work will recognize the phrase he is credited with popularizing — the medium is the message.
The medium of the managerial state is leftist — that is what Burnham and MacIntyre are telling us — but what that means for us is contained in this prophecy Sandbatch threw at me. The American Revolution, and Anglo Colonization generally, would not have occurred without the social technology which was the coffee house, the secret society, and the gentlemen’s club. I regret to say that the image conjured by all those things in our mind now is rather distasteful, but once upon a time, these things were unbelievably powerful. Without the Committees of Correspondance, essentially a club of local citizens monitoring local crises, the American Revolution would never have gotten off the ground.
But a century and a half before, an even more revolutionary social technology had been unleashed. The creation of the company served as a massive boon that unleashed the strength and quality of our forefathers on the world. Massachusetts Bay would never have come about, without the social technology of the company, deftly used by John Winthrop to make his Puritan Commonwealth. The Royal Charter for their company, it was assumed, would meet in London like all the other colonial companies. But Winthrop and the Puritans knew what they had, and bringing their charter with them enabled them to build a Calvinist Maritime Republic far beyond the imaginations of those who granted the charter.1 It was the ultimate triumph long in coming, of a people who had been under siege for well over a century. In the words of Brooks Adams,
“Revolt against the pressure of this unrestricted economic competition took the form of Puritanism, of resistance to the religious organization controlled by capital, and even in Cranmer’s time, the attitude of the descendants of the men who formed the line at Poitiers and Crécy was so ominous that Anglican bishops took alarm.”2
What Adams was speaking of was the destruction of the old medieval order in favor of a new system of economic vassalage. Against this the East Anglicans particularly revolted, where yeomanry still ruled over despotism, in the vehicle of Puritanism, insular Anglo Calvinism determined to establish meritocratic self-rule. In England, save a brief attempt under Cromwell, this was an impossibility. But using the social technology of the Company, Winthrop and the Puritans were able to do it in New England. Puritanism, and the Company, favored the Yeoman Anglo Calvinists by their very nature.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly what we’re missing, and what we need. We need a new social technology that plays to our strengths, and we win simply by showing up. We are not going to out-manage the managerial state, rather, we need something new which is made in our image. We need something that ties religion, capital, and society back together, that reracinates rather than deracinates.
To discover this is our sacred trust.
Peterson, Mark. The City State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. p. 2
Adams, Brooks. The Law of Civilization and Decay