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PETER DRUCKER'S PROTESTANT ETHIC: BETWEEN EUROPEAN HUMANISM AND AMERICAN MANAGEMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

IAN F. MCNEELY
IAN F. MCNEELY*
Affiliation:
Departments of History and German/Scandinavian, University of Oregon E-mail: imcneely@uoregon.edu
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Abstract

Peter Drucker (1909–2005) is celebrated as perhaps the greatest management guru, and one of the greatest futurists, of the twentieth century, but he has rarely been taken seriously as an intellectual. Raised in Vienna among a cohort of émigré academics that included Schumpeter, Hayek, and von Mises, among others, Drucker was both deeply learned and incredibly prolific. This essay seeks to rehabilitate Drucker as a humanistic social thinker, reinterpreting his earliest writings in German, his two major treatises on totalitarianism and the crisis of capitalism published after he emigrated to the US, his debate with Polanyi and engagement with Kierkegaard, and his early postwar writings on management theory and the knowledge society. It identifies in Drucker's Protestant faith a deep and abiding set of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual commitments helping him to navigate a path out of Nazi Germany and assume a position of enormous influence in American business life.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 1069 - 1097
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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References

1 Drucker theorized about the “knowledge worker,” the “knowledge society,” and even the “post-modern world” as early as Landmarks of Tomorrow (New York, 1957) and The Age of Discontinuity (New York, 1969), anticipating themes that sociologist Daniel Bell would later take up in his influential The Coming of Post-industrial Society (New York, 1973)—which in turn was echoed two decades later by Drucker's Post-capitalist Society (New York, 1993).

2 Starbuck, Peter, Peter F. Drucker: The Landmarks of His Ideas (self-published MS, 2012), 10Google Scholar.

3 In 2010, Drucker was the subject of a best-selling Japanese novel, What If the Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker's “Management”?, later adapted into an anime televisiuon series and a live-action film.

4 Gray, Hanna Holborn, An Academic Life: A Memoir (Princeton, 2018)Google Scholar, has up-to-date endnotes on Central European émigré intellectuals.

5 Drucker, Peter F., Adventures of a Bystander (New Brunswick, 1994), 53, 83–4Google Scholar.

6 Drucker, Peter F., A Functioning Society: Community, Society, and Polity in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, 2011; first published 2003), vii–viiiGoogle Scholar.

7 While the literature on Drucker is vast, two scholarly treatments stand out: Gilman, Nils, “The Prophet of Post-Fordism: Peter Drucker and the Legitimation of the Corporation,” in Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2006), 109–31, 317–23Google Scholar; and Immerwahr, Daniel, “Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70/3 (July 2009), 445–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Toubiana, Madeline and Yair, Gad, “The Salvation of Meaning in Peter Drucker's Oeuvre,” Journal of Management History 18/2 (2012), 178–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes some fascinating but scattershot connections among theology, German social thought, and management. See also Beatty, Jack, The World According to Peter Drucker (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; and Flaherty, John E., Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind (San Francisco, 1999)Google Scholar, for two solid popular biographies; and for a book-length exploration of Drucker's debts to humanistic and social-scientific thought, Maciariello, Joseph and Linkletter, Karen, Drucker's Lost Art of Management: Peter Drucker's Timeless Vision for Building Effective Organizations (New York, 2011)Google Scholar, written in large part to educate practicing managers.

8 “Peter F. Drucker's memoir,” 22 Dec. 2004, Box 109, Folder 2, 8, the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University (hereafter Drucker Institute), at http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/dac/id/6087/rec/3. (It is not clear whether von Mises actually dined with the Druckers.)

9 [Winston Churchill], “Heroic Man versus Economic Man: A New Analysis of Fascism,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 1939, 306.

10 Peter Steinfels, “A Man's Spiritual Journey from Kierkegaard to General Motors,” New York Times, 19 Nov. 2005, B5; Rich Karlgaard, “Peter Drucker and Me,” Forbes, 14 April 2014, 38, available online with a photograph showing Drucker at prayer at www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2014/03/26/peter-drucker-and-me.

11 Hacohen, Malachi Haim, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2002), 24, 31Google Scholar. Popper's parents likewise converted from Judaism to Lutheranism.

12 Drucker, Peter F., The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition (New Brunswick, 2011; first published 1993), 425–6Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 443–9.

14 Drucker, Peter, Friedrich Julius Stahl: Konservative Staatslehre und geschichtliche Entwicklung (Tübingen, 1933), [3] (quotation), 29 (on Radowitz)Google Scholar.

15 Letter of 4 April 1933 from Peter Drucker to Dr O. Siebeck, Drucker Institute, at http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/dac/id/1219/rec/1.

16 Drucker, Stahl, 23, cf. 10–11 on Hegel.

17 Ibid., 5, 12, 31–2.

18 Ibid., 24–5, both quotations.

19 Ibid., 32, both quotations.

20 Drucker, Peter, Die Judenfrage in Deutschland (Vienna, 1936), 2–3Google Scholar (counting the first page after the title page as page 1 in this unnumbered pamphlet).

21 Ibid., 1. Drucker never acquired German citizenship, but became a naturalized American in 1943.

22 Ibid., 4–5, 9.

23 Ibid., 11, 14–17, quotations at 11 and 17.

24 Ibid., 19, 20, 23, 24, for all quotations.

25 Drucker, Peter F., The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (New Brunswick, 1995; first published 1939), 6Google Scholar.

26 Maciariello and Linkletter, Drucker's Lost Art, 119. Surprisingly, Drucker seems never to have engaged with Niebuhr in print. A search of the extensive online archives of the Drucker Institute (at http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/dac) returns no hits for Niebuhr.

27 Greif, Mark, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, 2015), 28–9, 34–7Google Scholar on Niebuhr (credited as founding the genre), and 45–55 on émigrés, with a brief mention of Drucker at 51. For context see also Jacobs, Alan, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (New York, 2018)Google Scholar.

28 Drucker, End of Economic Man, 23 (first three quotations), original emphasis, 51–5, cf. 129–89, 219–23 for an expansion of this argument, and 204–14, where he inserted large portions of “The Jewish Question” in order to portray the Nazi “miracle” as little more than a scapegoating “mirage.”

29 Ibid., 85–97, quotations at 93, 96.

30 Ibid., 98.

31 Ibid., 102–3.

32 Ibid., 240–42.

33 Drucker, Peter F., The Future of Industrial Man (New Brunswick, 1995; first published 1942), 47–9, 60–66, 73–7Google Scholar, quotation at 75; on the influence of Berle and Means see Brick, Howard, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, 2006), 73–82Google Scholar.

34 Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution (New York, 1941), 71–111Google Scholar; cf. Drucker, Future of Industrial Man, 94–5.

35 Ibid., 85–107, 17 on totalitarianism.

36 Hacohen, Karl Popper, 120 n. 87.

37 Heath, Joseph, “Methodological Individualism,” in Zalta, Edward N., ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 edn)Google Scholar, at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/methodological-individualism.

38 Drucker, Future of Industrial Man, 109–11.

39 Ibid.,112, cf. 122.

40 Ibid., 113, 123.

41 Ibid., 121.

42 Ibid., 117.

43 Ibid., 124, 132, 134, 192–3.

44 Ibid., 137–42, 149, quotation at 138.

45 Ibid., 179.

46 Ibid., 197–202.

47 Ibid., 205–7.

48 Drucker, Peter F., The New Society (New York, 1949), 281–8, 299–307, esp. 283–4Google Scholar.

49 See Moyn, Samuel, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2015), 17–20, 95–8, 117–20Google Scholar, for suggestive remarks comparing Protestant and Catholic contributions to human rights discourses at mid-century, noting that transatlantic Protestantism is relatively “underresearched.”

50 Drucker, Adventures, 258–60.

51 Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom (New York, 1941), 40–103, 207–39Google Scholar, and esp. 240–41, on the concept of the “authoritarian character.”

52 Drucker, Adventures, 123–40.

53 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944)Google Scholar, esp. the concluding chapter, “Freedom in a Complex Society,” quotation at 256. Also see Immerwahr, “Polanyi in the United States”; and Dale, Gareth, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi (London, 2016), 111–16Google Scholar.

54 Karl Polanyi, “Jean Jacques Rousseau, Or Is a Free Society Possible?”, 27 April 1943, at http://hdl.handle.net/10694/674, quotations at 2, 4–5.

55 Peter F. Drucker, “Soren Kierkegaard: Or, How Is Human Existence Possible?,” 20 May 1943, Drucker Institute, at http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm/search/collection/dac/searchterm/dac01266.pdf, and published as Drucker, “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” Sewanee Review 57/4 (1949), 587–602. Citations below are to the published article, since it was modified only slightly from the original lecture, principally in the opening paragraphs.

56 Ibid., 589–92.

57 Ibid., 593–7, quotations at 593, 597.

58 Ibid., 597–600, quotations at 597, 599–600, 600.

59 Drucker, Ecological Vision, 425–6, original emphasis.

60 Gilman, “Prophet of Post-Fordism,” 111–18, quotations at 111, 117–18.

61 Drucker, Peter F., Concept of the Corporation (New Brunswick, 1993; first published 1946), 130–33Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., 136–40.

63 Ibid., 140–41.

64 Ibid., 141–2.

65 Ibid., 242–3.

66 See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977).

67 Drucker, Peter F., “Organized Religion and the American Creed,” Review of Politics 18/3 (1956), 296–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Ibid., 304.

69 Drucker, Peter F., Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post-modern” World (New Brunswick, 1957), ix, 257–70Google Scholar, quotation at 265–6, emphasis added.

70 “Myths of the Modern Megachurch,” transcript of 23 May 2005 from the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, at www.pewforum.org/2005/05/23/myths-of-the-modern-megachurch.

71 Quoted in Steinfels, “A Man's Spiritual Journey.”

72 Drucker, Peter F., “The New Models,” Next: From Leadership Network 1/2 (1995), 1–3, at 1Google Scholar, remarks from the 1991 New Realities conference in Denver, CO, Drucker Institute, at http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/dac/id/6432/rec/3.

73 Drucker, Peter F., The New Realities (New York, 2011; first published 1989), 213–24, at 223Google Scholar; see also Drucker, “The Educated Person,” in Drucker, Post-capitalist Society, 191–9.