Peter F. Drucker - Peter F. Drucker on Business and Society

Do the essays in this volume have anything in common except the author? At first sight they may look like random scatter without underlying theme or unifying thesis. An essay on The New Markets, which treats the financial fads and follies of the 1960s as symptoms of structural change in economy and society, may seem a strange bedfellow for an essay on Kierkegaard, surely the least market-oriented thinker of the modern West. An evocation of Henry Ford as the Last Populist, and simultaneously the fulfillment and the denial of the nineteenth centurys agrarian and Jeffersonian dreams, might seem very far away from the internal stresses of the Japanese economic miracle or the pathos and bathos of This Romantic Generation, todays educated young people.

Yet all these pieces, despite the diversity of their topics, have a common subject matter and a common theme. They are all essays in what I would call political (or social) ecology.

This term is not to be found in any university catalogue. But the only thing that is new about political ecology is the name. As a subject matter and human concern, it can boast ancient lineage, going back all the way to Herodotus and Thucydides. It counts among its practitioners such eminent names as de Tocqueville and Walter Bagehot. Its charter is Aristotles famous definition of man as zoon politikon, that is, social and political animal. As Aristotle knew (though many who quote him do not), this implies that society, polity, and economy, though mans creations, are nature to man, who cannot be understood apart from and outside of them. It also implies that society, polity, and economy are a genuine environment, a genuine whole, a true system, to use the fashionable term, in which everything relates to everything else and in which men, ideas, institutions, and actions must always be seen together in order to be seen at all, let alone to be understood.

Political ecologists are uncomfortable people to have around. Their very trade makes them defy conventional classifications, whether of politics, of the market place, or of academia. Was de Tocqueville, for instance, a liberal or a conservative? What about Bagehot? Political ecologists emphasize that every achievement exacts a price and, to the scandal of good liberals, talk of risks or trade-offs, rather than of progress. But they also know that the man-made environment of society, polity, and economics, like the environment of nature itself, knows no balance except dynamic disequilibrium. Political ecologists therefore emphasize that the way to conserve is purposeful innovationand that hardly appeals to the conservative.

Political ecologists believe that the traditional disciplines define fairly narrow and limited tools rather than meaningful and self-contained areas of knowledge, action, and eventsin the same way in which the ecologists of the natural environment know that the swamp or the desert is the reality and ornithology, botany, and geology only special-purpose tools. Political ecologists therefore rarely stay put. It would be difficult to say, I submit, which of the chapters in this volume are management, which government or political theory, which history or economics. The task determines the tools to be used: but this has never been the approach of academia.

Students of mans various social dimensionsgovernment, society, economy, institutionstraditionally assume their subject matter to be accessible to full rational understanding. Indeed, they aim at finding laws capable of scientific proof. Human action, however, they tend to treat as nonrational, that is, as determined by outside forces, such as their laws. The political ecologist, by contrast, assumes that his subject matter is far too complex ever to be fully understoodjust as his counterpart, the natural ecologist, assumes this in respect to the natural environment. But precisely for this reason the political ecologist will demandlike his counterpart in the natural sciencesresponsible actions from man and accountability of the individual for the consequences, intended or otherwise, of his actions.

An earlier volume of essays of mine, Technology (published in 1970), centered on what used to be called the material civilization: business enterprise, its structure, its management, and its tools; technology and its history, and so on. The present volume is more concerned with economic, political, and social processes: the early diagnosis of fundamental social and economic change; the relationship between thoughteconomic, political, or socialand actions; the things that work and dont work in certain traditions, whether those of America or those of Japan; or the conditions for effective leadership in the complex structures of industrial society and giant government. But in the last analysis, the present essays, and those in the earlier volume, have the same objective. They aim at an understanding of the specific natural environment of man, his political ecology, as a prerequisite to effective and responsible action, as an executive, as a policy-maker, as a teacher, and as a citizen.