Peter F. Drucker - The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism

To Doris

But for a long time during the nineteen-sixtiesand indeed, well into the nineteen-seventiesthe book was pointedly ignored by the scholarly community. One reason: it was not "politically correct" to use current jargon. It fitted neither of the two politically acceptable theses of the postwar period: the thesis that Nazism was a "German" phenomen to be explained by German history, German character, German specifics of one kind or another or the Marxist thesis of Nazism as the "last gasp of dying capitalism." This book, instead, treated Nazismand totalitarianism altogetheras a European disease, with Nazi Germany the most extreme, most pathological manifestation and with Stalinism being neither much different nor much better. Anti-Semitism, for instance, appeared first as persecution and popular demagoguery in France, rather than in Germany, in the Dreyfus Affair of the eighteen-nineties. And it was the failure of Marxismrather than that of capitalismas a creed and as a savior, The End of Economic Man as serted, that led to the "despair of the masses" and made them easy prey to totalitarian demagoguery and demonology.

But there was a second reason why the book did not fit into the scholarly climate of the postwar period. It is the more important one, simply because the climate still persists. This book treats a major social phenomenon as a social phenomenon. This is still largely considered heresy (except by such fellow-heretics as the publishers of Transaction books and Society magazine). Major social phenomena are treated either as political and economic history, that is, in terms of battles, armies, treaties, politicians, elections, national-income statistics, and so on. (A good example for Germany and Nazism are the excellent books of the Stanford historian Gordon Craig, for example, his 1978 book Germany: 1866 1945.) Such developments are also explained in terms of "isms," that is, in terms of all-embracing philosophies. The prototype and exemplar of this approach for our theme is the 1951 book by Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism which blames Hitler and Nazism on the systematic German philosophers of the early nineteenth century: Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel.

No matter how valid either approach, they are not adequate by themselves. The stool needs a third leg. Social phenomena need social analysis, an analysis of the strains, stresses, trends, shifts, and upheavals in society. This, I would maintain, is what sociology was meant to do, was indeed invented for in the early years of the last century. It is what the great men of sociology, a Max Weber (1864-1920) or a Vilfredo Pareto (18641923), did. It is what Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) did when he identified the "innovator" as the social force that turns economies upside down; the innovator does not behave economically, does not try to optimize, is not motivated by economic rationalehe is a social phenomenon. It is what this book tries to do.

"Society" is vague and impossible to define, argue my historian friends, my economist friends, my philosopher friends. They are absolutely right. But equally resistant to definition are history, economics, philosophy, nation, science, and poetryindeed everything worthwhile thinking, talking, and writing about.

Yet all of us know what to do with these terms "plus or minus 80%" as the statisticians would say that is, adequate for operational purposes (despite everything the linguistic logicians say to the contrary). The End of Economic Man treats society as the environment of that very peculiar critter, the human being. History treats what happens on the surface, so to speak. "Isms" that is philosophical systemsmay be called the atmosphere. But society is the "ecology."

This book does not attempt to define "society." It tries to understand it. Whether it succeeds in this attempt readers must decide for themselves. But this book was the first attempt to understand the major social phenomenon of the first half of this century, that is, the rise of totalitarianism as a social event. It is still, half a century later, the only such attempt. This alone, I hope, makes it worthwhile reading.