Man, Ideas and Politics
Will, George F.
T HE BEST FEATURES of twentieth century American conservatism come from Austrian liberals. American conservatism is bound up with a defense of the political economy of capitalism. It owes less...
...But in Drucker's competent hands these subjects become topics in his seemingly endless seminar on the nature and fecundity of freedom in a modern industrial society...
...Hayek is in Heidelberg...
...His writings are wonderful medicine for those who, despairing of life in a complex society, decide that liberty can only be preserved by scratching about in beanpatches at New Mexico comIilldIl~S...
...A career, he says, is not the same thing as a job...
...But after a season, the Prussian schoolmaster's work was routed from the center of attention, presumably forever forgotten...
...Socialism belongs not to the Marxist parties but to Prussia...
...His field is what used to be called political economy...
...American conservatives generally have no quarrel with the "'negative" or classic liberal definition of liberty as the absence of restraints imposed by others...
...Drucker tirelessly argues that a free economy is a complex political achievement...
...It is English and tied up with propertyholdings...
...Eliot, the Syllabus of Errors or the defense of bull fighting, Drucker is a cultural rarity, and a relative stranger to the readers of what pass for conservative journals in the United States...
...Drucker is also at home in the company of great men, as he demonstrates in his essays on Ford ("the last Populist and perhaps the greatest one"), Keynes (his "policies are magic -- spells, formulae, and incantations, to make the admittedly irrational behave rationally") and Calhoun ("it is not that Calhoun was repudiated by the Civil War which is the key to the understanding of American politics, but that he has become triumphant since...
...American conservatives cheerfully accept the truth of what European conservatives say about (and against) capitalism: it is a powerful cause of open-ended change...
...He,understands that .economics and politics must be studied together, and that the correct relationship between them is a matter of philosophic seriousness...
...Today it is fashionable to believe that freedom is a chimera in a developed industrial society...
...Schumpeter is dead...
...Consequently, "Democracy in England means the possibility of attaining to every existing rank...
...Drucker does not agree...
...He selects his topics freely, not at random...
...As a conservative who is more interested in political economy than in T.S...
...His essays on these subjects have not aged well...
...F IFTY YEARS AGO Oswald Spengler's DeCline of the West made a lightning-swift conquest of the republic of letters...
...He believes that freedom is alive and expanding in such societies...
...As an American Bagehot, he is an affectionate student of our institutions public and private...
...They believe the political and economic liberties are indivisible and inherently good...
...Ideologies are but semblances of the life phases through which every cultural organism must pass...
...This is what makes him a valuable conservative of a distinctly American stripe...
...Currently he describes himself as a "political ecologist," a disagreeable (and uncharacteristic) piece of jargon by which he emphasizes his belief that "'society, polity, and economy are a genuine environment, a genuine whole, a true 'system...
...During the last half century, however, students here and there have found in Spengler their true educator...
...The political ideals of our Western or Faustian culture are derived from phases of the life-histories of three nations...
...As usual, Drucker is no respecter of the borders which divide academic disciplines...
...Marx, according to Spengler, is meaningless after World War I, in which laissez-faire lost its spiritual resources, because his political economy, with its two-class system, applies only to an England of the past, the pre-war England of Manchester...
...Spain presented the West with the ideal of militant Catholicism, realized George F. Will in the conquest of the New World and reaching its climacteric in the defeat of the Spanish Armada...
...He is weakest in dealing with subjects that often bring even strong men to grief, like political prophecy and ferment among the young...
...The first essay on "the new markets and the new entrepreneurs" is a masterful survey of the tumultuous developments in the American economy in the 1960s...
...As people begin to seek the former rather than the latter, the economy will change as rapidly as the society it reflects...
...Here, as in essays on the Japanese economy, his analysis of "business" is really social analysis carried on by special, and effective means...
...He has now launched his eighth decade with his twelfth book, Man, Ideas and Politics, a collection of essays, some very recent, some written more than two decades ago...
...A glance at this book might cause one to wonder what offshore investment trusts, Calhoun, Henry Ford, Kierkegaard and "deconglomeration" have in common...
...Marxism, which is simply the negation of Manchester, is not true socialism, fo...
...Drucker's special skill and delight is explaining that they are also productive...
...The ideal of service, of the value of work whether it be hand-work or brain-work, is the motive force of true socialism, and Frederick the Great first articulated this ideal with his avowal that "I am the first servant of my state...
...Puritanism helped produce a philosophy of work which comported with Marx's Old Testament heritage...
...It is for this self-selected company that Professor Donald O. White's translation of Spengler's political writings has a special importance...
...Drucker was born in Vienna seventy years ago...
...Laissez-faire capitalism attained its height in nineteenth-century England, a nation founded on the individualistic robber-ethic of the Vikings...
...zocialism is above all a means The A l t e r n a t i v e ; March, 1972 13...
...Academicians damned the book as a monstrous creation, misbegotten by a method which, although impudently magisterial, was unscholarly...
...He is not just a nongreener, he is an anti-greener...
...Selected Essays brings into English the book-length essay Preussentum und Sozialismus...
...But Peter Drucker, who came to the United States in 1937 (after newspaper and banking work in London), is still publishing lucid, exciting books that rescue the good name of conservatism from the hamhanded grip of those who more aggressively claim to represent it...
...It owes less to Edmund Burke than to Adam Smith, and more to three Austrians -- Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek and Peter Drucker -- than to either British thinker...
...But Drucker has aged well, and this book is a worthy addition to what one hopes will be an expanding shelf of his intelligent books...
...The Prussian counterpart to class is a natural order or rank...
...Before that he taught philosophy and politics...
...Written two years after the Decline, it applies to twentieth century politics the Goethean maxim which inspired that great work: Altes Vergengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis...
...The reading public, usually neglecting to survey the full spaciousness of this "morphology of world his~ry," accepted the reviewers' scornful talk about "pessimism" and "prophecies of imminent doom...
...He analyzes the merger wave involving "growth companies," and relates to two new mass markets in investment and careers...
...He is everything that Charles Reich (of The Greening of America) is not...
...Class is not a universal concept belonging to a universal political economy...
...He has been professor of management at New York University's Graduate School of Business since 1950...
...In this England, work is a misfortune, a product of man's fall from grace, a burden to be borne by the unfortunate and underprivileged...
Vol. 5 • March 1972 • No. 6
