It’s not just liberalism’s internal contradictions, the fact that humans are social animals, or that no man is an island. It’s also that equality does not, never has, and never will, exist. It’s also that the socio-economic class that gave birth to liberalism barely exists anymore.

The West’s warrior-aristocrat class was wiped out by the First World War, and the bourgeois middle class was ball and chained by the rise of the managerial class. These credentialed managers emerged to deal with booming populations, rapid technological change, and the growing complexity of mass society. Managerialism is itself illiberal. This process of massification put technical experts, not workers or the bourgeoisie, in control of production.

James Burnham laid this out in The Managerial Revolution (1941). He argued that capitalism, weakened by the Great Depression, gave way to a new managerial order. Executives, bureaucrats, HR, engineers, and other technical experts replaced the bourgeoisie, who had once driven liberalism through their hold on free markets.

This managerial class thrives in mass society, where complexity demands centralization over entrepreneurial freedom. The First World War erased a pre-liberal elite built around honour and duty. Without them, liberalism lost its cultural anchor. Burnham tied this collapse of the old ruling classes to liberalism’s growing instability.

Samuel Francis took this further in Leviathan and Its Enemies (2016). He argued that the managerial class didn’t just sideline the bourgeoisie, it built a system hostile to liberalism’s ideals. Merchants and professionals became shackled by endless regulations and dominated by corporate giants. Francis linked this to the managerial push for homogeneity and control. Massification centralizes power, eroding liberal values like local autonomy and individual initiative.

But the dominance of the managerial class may not last. AI threatens to undermine the foundations of their power. Managers, analysts, and administrators built their authority on specialized knowledge, the knowledge economy, credentialed expertise, and the ability to process complexity. AI now does this faster, cheaper, and often better. Tasks once reserved for highly trained professionals, legal analysis, medical diagnostics, logistics, even policy planning, are increasingly handled by machines. If AI can coordinate systems, manage data, and make decisions without human oversight, the rationale for a bloated managerial class starts to collapse.

Their role as gatekeepers of complexity becomes obsolete. Just as they once displaced the bourgeoisie, they may now be displaced by the tools they helped usher in. And unlike the warrior-aristocrats or the bourgeois middle class, they may leave behind no legacy at all, just a vacuum waiting to be filled, by us.