ists and operate the industrial system for the benefit of society as a whole.

In one form or another, this encouraging view of the "knowledge class" influenced the progressive movement, the New Deal, and the New Frontier. The early Walter Lippmann, New Dealers like Stuart Chase and Thurman Arnold, and Keynesian liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith argued that capitalism could be transformed from within by a corporate "technostructure," as Galbraith called it, whose interest in economic growth collided with the profit motive. The well-known study by Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), seemed to provide empirical underpinning for the idea of an autonomous category of industrial managers and experts by calling attention to the growing divergence between ownership of the corporation, now dispersed among a multitude of stockholders, and those who actually controlled and operated it. After World War II, the rise of the "multiversity," as Clark Kerr called it, dramatized industry's dependence on scientific and technical knowledge and thus gave further encouragement to speculation about the "knowledge industry."

Socialists as well as liberals often found these ideas attractive. The new left, casting about for a revolutionary "agent" to replace the proletariat, saw the producers of knowledge as a "new working class," in the words of Greg Calvert. When these brain workers came to understand that capitalism prevented them from exercising the full range of their skills, they would side with other dispossessed groups in overthrowing it.

A second, less flattering picture of the new class took shape in the forties and fifties, in the context of angry debates about the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. In opposition to Trotsky's characterization of the Stalinist regime as a "degenerated workers' state," Max Schachtman and his followers argued that the Soviet Union was not a workers' state at all but a form of "bureaucratic collectivism" dominated by party hacks. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), James Burnham took the position that although capitalism was declining, socialism was not taking its place. State ownership of the means of production transferred power from the capitalists not to the workers but to a new ruling class of professional managers, who proceeded to abolish collective bargaining, to replace the market with central planning, and to suppress every trace of political freedom. Dissident intellectuals in eastern Europe elaborated this thesis in their impassioned critique of Stalin

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