Adventures of a Bystander
Drucker, Peter F.
ADVENTURES OF A BYSTANDER Peter F. Drucker / Harper & Row / $12.95 John Lukacs Peter F. Drucker's autobiography is extraordinary. It is less an autobiography than what I prefer to call an...
...It is in this respect that the title Adventures of a Bystander is not sufficiently telling...
...John Lukacs is professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia...
...What Drucker does not know about the intricacies of American industrial management may or may not be worth knowing...
...One of the more extraordinary things in this book is Drucker's exasperation with Viennese High Culture...
...I wish that our colleges and universities would require Drucker's writings instead of the volumes of the economists-of all the economists, from Left to Right, from economoguls to econometricians, from Galbraith to Friedman...
...He has no nostalgia for the good old times in good old Vienna and in this respect he differs from that sensitive and thoughtful recollection, The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig...
...It is less an autobiography than what I prefer to call an auto-history: a descriptive account of certain important or amusing or instructive people and events, written in the first person singular even though the writer is not the main subject of the book...
...As Pascal said, we always understand more than we know...
...The characters are so well drawn that they seem to speak for themselves...
...it is personal and historical at the same time...
...I write "desirable alien" because Drucker's influence on American thinking-unlike that of many other emigres of his provenance and period -has been salutary and considerable...
...Because Drucker is not altogether a detached narrator, the perspective is neither objective nor subjective...
...A facile reviewer in the New York Times Book Review said that the first portion of the book is coffeehouse talk...
...Early in his life Drucker came to the conclusion that the Central European world, complete with its intellectual constructions, was sinking fast...
...A more proper title would be: A Participant Observer An Account of Certain Odd People and Developments in the Old World as well the New, Described by a Desirable Alien...
...but what he does not understand about the meaning of industrial and post-industrial society is probably not worth understanding...
...The American portion of his auto-history may be a trifle less entertaining than the European, but it is no less interesting, and perhaps it is even more instructive...
...This is a vain wish-as vain as the wishes of those of us who know the simple solution to the gasoline shortage, which is to raise the minimum driving age...
...He got out, not merely to save his skin but to save his mind...
...Drucker's vision of American industriousness reminds me of Bemelmans' rich and pleasant landscape of vignettes, and not at all of the Bes-sarabian surrealism visited upon us by Saul Steinberg...
...The book consists of two parts, Vienna/Berlin and the United States, with a sliver of English ham in between...
...The chapters on Drucker's early life in Vienna and Germany are often funny, and, more important, they correct certain accepted ideas and myths...
...It may be redolent of coffeehouse talk but it is not coffeehouse talk...
...He was wrong...
...Drucker fecit...
...Thereafter Drucker became a cultural journalist, a commentator on economics, an adviser to industrial management, and a public philosopher of a high order, recognizing some of the unusual features of industrial and post-industrial society...
...It is a book of solidity and wit, not one of sarcastic scratches-a picture of a certain Vienna seen from America, not of a Viennese coffeehouse seen from a coffeehouse in New York...
...This book ought to have been illustrated by him...
...Forty years ago Drucker composed an important book, The End of Economic Man, the thesis of which ran against most of the accepted ideas of that time (and still runs against those of our time...
...What a pity that Ludwig Bemelmans is gone...
...What we call genius," Ortega y Gasset once wrote, "is the ability to invent one's own occupation...
Vol. 12 • September 1979 • No. 9
