Likely the first separate American printing of this essay, which was first published in the May 1946 issue of Polemic. In this critical discussion, Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-50) acknowledges that the general drift has "almost certainly been towards oligarchy" and "an increasing concentration of industrial and financial power" but criticizes the tendency of Burnham's "power-worship" and comments upon the failures in analysis that arise from it. As biographer Michael Shelden observed, "Orwell was always at his best when he was on the attack, and his Polemic essay on Burnham is a brilliant criticism of the whole concept of power worship." Preceded by publisher's remarks by James Robertson of the Berkeley Young Socialist League, the influential leftist campus group.