From: jcf@world.std.com (Joseph C Fineman)
Newsgroups: soc.history
Subject: The End of Economic Man, by Peter F. Drucker
Summary: Musings on a book published in early 1939.
Keywords: Fascism, Nazism
Date: 30 Sep 92 19:40:15 GMT
Article-I.D.: world.BvEpB3.Mvv
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA

_The End of Economic Man_ by Peter F. Drucker (Day, 1939)

  I thought it would be amusing to read this book because its author
(a well-known investment banker & management consultant) is
intelligent & wrote a charming autobiography (_Memoirs of a
Bystander_), and because the time of its appearance (early 1939) was
an excellent one for political prognosticators to make fools of
themselves.

  The first half of the book is a bore.  It is written almost entirely
on one high dead level of abstraction, with hardly a quotation or a
statistic anywhere.  ("And what is the use of a book," said Alice...?)
The uniformity is dull in itself, and in addition I have trouble
believing that anything so general can be meaningfully stated about
human behavior:

     Inability to develop the European basic concepts any further in
     the direction in which they had been moving the last few hundred
     years must obviously be the fundamental cause of Fascism.

Finally, the author's thesis -- that the rise of totalitarianism
signaled the end of economic progress as a political motive -- has
turned out to be wrong.  All over the world, governments are now in
trouble for *not* delivering on their promises of economic abundance.
What happened in the '30s was not the end of an era but only a failure
of nerve.

  Drucker does come down nearly to earth at one point (p. 19):

     Beginning with Hitler's frank admission in his book that lying is
     necessary, Nazi leaders have prided themselves publicly on their
     disregard for truth and on the impossibility of their promises --
     foremost among them Dr. Goebbels.  Not once but several times I
     have heard him say in mass meetings when the people cheered a
     particularly choice lie: "Of course, you understand all this is
     just propaganda"; and the masses only cheered louder.

(Did you think *our* standard of political discourse is debased?)  All
the same, he might have actually quoted one or another of the choice
lies, and he might have refrained from dissolving the people in the
crowd into rarefied "masses" the second time around.  Though Drucker
was not a Marxist, that pink abstraction makes its appearance every
page or two.

  The rest of the book is more interesting, altho the author's
concern about the long-term economic problems of Germany's European
empire fortunately turned out to be a waste of time.  There is an
analysis of the role of antisemitism in German politics: the Jews, he
says, are a surrogate for the bourgeoisie as a whole, in which they
have become inextricably entwined.  When he tries to explain why the
bourgeoisie had to be attacked, however, my eyes glaze over.

  And how good was Drucker's crystal ball?  Well, he did predict an
alliance between Germany and the USSR -- but perhaps only in "two,
five, or ten years", and on that time scale his opponents who had been
predicting or wishing for a war between them turned out to be right as
well.  In his autobiography he also gives himself credit for
predicting the mass murder of the Jews, but my reading of the apposite
passage is rather that he thought the Germans would have to _hang
onto_ their Jews in order to have someone to go on blaming.  And he
speaks of the alternative as "mass emigration", not murder.

  It is interesting to note, by the way, that on the evidence of this
book the term "final solution" in this connection was not introduced
as a euphemism for killing, but on the contrary was applied to each
successive advance in persecution, as if to reassure world opinion
that it would be the last one -- in the style of the succession of
"final territorial demands".  However, there is plenty of evidence by
now that many of the leaders had death in mind from the beginning.
There is even, in _Mein Kampf_, a rhetorical reference to the use of
gas.

		Joe Fineman, jcf@world.std.com
Newsgroups: soc.history