THE WISCONSIN IDEA MEETS THE AMERICAN REALITY

Scott Walker, or "Harley," as he would have liked to have been called, would seem to be a pretty traditionally Wisconsin guy. His political rise though, was actually only made possible by the decline of traditional Wisconsin.

by Ryan Andrews

The official center of Downtown Madison is a pedestrian-only, shopping/dining district called, fittingly, "State Street." It runs for about a mile, and at one end is the State Capitol, while at the other end is UW-Madison, Wisconsin’s flagship university. Locals probably associate the area more with raucous Halloween parties and homeless people than anything else, but State Street is obviously designed to be the symbolic cultural center of the state, physically linking the two great institutional expressions of its people.

It is a nice touch, I think, and it has long been much more than symbolic. Many readers, I am sure, are at least somewhat familiar with "the Wisconsin Idea"—the idea that "the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state." This means that the university is to expand the benefits of its knowledge to every citizen of the state.

THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION BY JAMES BURNHAM

The Managerial Revolution
by James Burnham
Buy at Amazon.com

Reviewed by Matt Forney

Assuming you even know who James Burnham is at all, he probably occupies a footnote at best in your mind. A notable political theorist and activist during the mid-20th century, he began his public life as a Marxist and Trotskyist but later transitioned to conservatism, spending the latter decades of his life as a columnist for National Review. Shortly after the fall of France in World War II, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, a radical tract that deserves to be more widely read.

Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.