The Ecological Vision

Reflections on the American Condition

Peter Drucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351294546
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Periods of great social change reveal a tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation. The twentieth century has witnessed both radical alteration and tenacious durability in social organization, politics, economics, and art. To comprehend these changes as history and as guideposts to the future, Peter F. Drucker has, over a lifetime, pursued a discipline that he terms social ecology. The writings brought together in The Ecological Vision define the discipline as a sustained inquiry into the man-made environment and an active effort at maintaining equilibrium between change and conservation.

The chapters in this volume range over a wide array of disciplines and subject matter. They are linked by a common concern with the interaction of the individual and society, and a common perspective that views economics, technology, politics, and art as dimensions of social experience and expressions of social value. Included here are profiles of such figures as Henry Ford, John C. Calhoun, Soren Kierkegaard, and Thomas Watson; analyses of the economics of Keynes and Schumpeter;and explorations of the social functions of business, management, information, and technology. Drucker's chapters on Japan examine the dynamics of cultural and economic change and afford striking comparisons with similar processes in the West.

In the concluding chapter, "Reflections of a Social Ecologist," Drucker traces the development of his discipline through such intellectual antecedents as Alexis de Tocqueville, Walter Bagehot, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He illustrates the ecological vision, an active, practical, and moral approach to social questions. Peter Drucker summarizes a lifetime of work and exemplifies the communicative clarity that are requisites of all intellectual enterprises. His book will be of interest to economists, business people, foreign affairs specialists, and intellectual historians.

Part One
American Experiences

introduction
Introduction to Part One

The first three essays in this section: "The American Genius is Political," "Calhoun's Pluralism," and "Henry Ford: The Last Populist," are the only chapters I actually finished for a planned book tentatively entitled, "American Experiences," one of many planned books I never wrote or finished. The book was going to have some twenty chapters. Each, except the first one, "The American Genius is Political," was going to be built around a representative person such as Calhoun or Henry Ford. And each chapter was going to represent and discuss a uniquely American trait, value, or concept which, though often held unconsciously, shapes the way Americans see society, economy, government, and politics. The second chapter, for instance, was going to discuss Jonathan Edwards, the last of the great Puritan divines of Colonial America and America's greatest metaphysician— but also the father of the uniquely American concept of the relationship between State and Church. Whereas Edwards' contemporaries in eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe worked to separate State and Church in order to protect the State from a power-hungry, bigoted Church, Edwards argued for a separation of the two in order to protect religion from government and politics. This explains why there has been no anticlericalism in America and why, alone among developed countries, America, the most laical of states is the most religious society. And the concluding chapter of the book was tentatively entitled "Lincoln: What We Believe In," and was to discuss the meaning and import of the fact that America, alone of all countries, has a politician for its great public saint.

The book was never finished; it fell victim to my growing interest in, and concern with, the new social organization of the increasingly pluralist society of organizations—first, of course, with the business enterprise—and with the new social function of this society, the management of institutions. But I never lost my interest in the subject. The two concluding essays in this section, though written many years later, also deal with American Experiences, that is, with the sociology of American society and American politics.

1
The American Genius Is Political

1

The genius of the American people is political. The one truly saintly figure this country has produced, the one name that symbolizes the "fulfilled life" to most Americans, the one man whose very life was dedicated toward directing human activity onto a higher goal, was a politician: Abraham Lincoln.

The phrase which since early days expresses the essence of their own society to Americans is a political promise: the "equal chance of every American boy to become President." One has only to translate the slogan—for instance, into a promise of "equal opportunity for every boy to become Prime Minister"—to see by contrast that it is uniquely American, and this not because the promise of equal opportunities in itself would be absurd, but because the political sphere is the meaningful sphere of social values only in this country.

The American nation itself has been formed out of a multitude of diverse national traditions not by imposing on the newcomer a uniform religion, uniform customs, a new culture—not even by imposing on him the American language. It has been formed by imposing on him a common political creed. What makes the immigrant into an American is an affirmation of abstract political principles, the oath of citizenship in which he promises to uphold "the republican form of government."

Above all, the meaning of this country—what it stands for for Americans themselves as well as for the world—is a political meaning. It is a form of government, a social order, and an economic system that are equally in people's minds when they praise America and when they condemn her. And when Americans sing of their own country, they sing of her—in the words of our most popular anthem—as the "sweet land of liberty," which would hardly occur as a definition of one's country and as an avowal of one's identification with it even to the most ardent of European liberals.

We have to go back all the way to the Rome of Augustus with its concept of "Latinitas" to find a society that so completely understands itself in political terms as does the United States. Yet Latinitas was wishful thinking and never became reality, whereas the political meaning of the United States furnishes its essence: its ideal personality, its promises, its power of integration and assimilation. That the American genius is political is therefore the major key to the understanding of America, of its history, and of its meaning.

2

In the political sphere lie the American ideas and institutions which are peculiar to this country and which give it its distinction.

There is, first, the peculiarly American symbiosis of secular state and religious society which is the cornerstone of the American commonwealth. The United States today is both the oldest and the most thoroughgoing secular state. It is also at the same time the only society in the West in which belief in a supernatural God is taken for granted and in which the traditional religious bodies, the churches, continue to discharge, unchallenged, many important community functions. And this coincidence of secular state and religious society is not simply accidental. In the American mind the two serve as each other's main support, if not as each other's precondition. Everywhere else the secular state arose out of a revolt against religion. In this country the secular state owes its existence largely to the demand of the leaders of dominant, indeed of established, religious creeds that civil power and religious society be strictly separated for the greater good of religion and church.

In the political sphere also lies the concept of "constitutionalism" which is the chief organizing principle of American society. Constitutionalism is much more than respect for law; that is something, indeed, for which the American is not renowned. Rather, constitutionalism is a view of the nature and function of abstract principles and of their relationship to social action. It is a belief that power, to be beneficial, must be subjected to general and unchangeable rules. It is an assertion that ends and means cannot be meaningfully separated or considered apart from each other. It is a belief that the validity of actions can be determined by rational criteria. It is, in other words, a political ethics. The Constitution of the Republic is only one application of this fundamental belief. Constitutionalism has been the organizing force in every one of our major institutions. Today, for instance, we see it at work in the industrial sphere fashioning a "common law" in labor-management relations and reinforcing such principles as "federalism" and "legitimate succession" for management inside business enterprise.

Peculiarly American also is the political view of education. This is shown in the insistence of Americans that education, on all levels, be equally accessible to all, if not, indeed, obligatory on all. It is shown in the naive but general belief that the level of general schooling is a fairly reliable index of civic competence and that any increase in it is a step toward a better and fuller citizenship. Most characteristically, the political view of education is expressed in the definition of the educational goal—the feature that makes understanding the American school system so difficult for the foreigner. American education rejects alike the traditionally European concept of the "educated individual" and the "trained robot" of modern totalitarianism. To both it opposes the demand that the school has to educate responsible self-governing citizens who, in Lincoln's words, "do not want to be masters because they do not want to be slaves." And because the American school is both free from control by the central government and a central political institution, it is bound to be the subject of violent political dispute whenever this country examines the premises on which its society and government rest, as, for instance, during the early days of the New Deal and again today.

Finally, there is the American political party—which has but the name in common with parties in the rest of the Western world. The major purpose of the American party is not to express principles, but to provide at all times a functioning and a legitimate government. It does not express a political philosophy to the realization of which governmental power is to be directed. It expresses the need of the body politic for a strong, a national, and a unifying government. For these reasons no American party has survived unless it succeeded in appealing to all classes and conditions, that is, unless it succeeded in being truly nationwide—which explains why both parties always are moderate in their actions. No party has survived unless it could appeal at once to men on the extreme right and to men on the extreme left. This, in turn, explains why both parties always appeal to the extremists in their campaign oratory. And no party has survived unless it succeeded in sinking differences of interests and principles in the unifying appeal of a common American creed.

3

The real achievement of American history in the first half of this century also lay in the political sphere. It is an achievement so great, so recent, and still so much in a state of becoming as to be almost beyond our vision: the creation of a new industrial society with new institutions—and of an industrial society that promises to be a stable, a free, and a moral society.

We ourselves in this country are prone to discuss our industrial achievements in economic, if not in purely technical, terms. But every single "productivity team" which came to this country from Europe in the forties and fifties to study the causes of American productivity soon saw that economic and technological factors explain less than nothing about the American economy. The key to an understanding lies in the social beliefs and the new social and political institutions that we have developed since the turn of the century. The clue is to be found in our development of the corporation as an organization of joint human efforts to a common goal, or in our new social organ, management, the function of which must be defined in sociopolitical terms, that is, as the organization and leadership of people.

More important even than any single one of these new institutions— more important even than such new ideas as productivity considered as a social responsibility of business, or the concept of the market as something that management through its own actions creates and expands—is the new American theorem as to the relationship between business and society—a theorem as opposed to nineteenth-century laissez-faire thinking as it is to nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. Business activity is no longer seen, as it was in laissez-faire theory, as something separate and distinct, without direct relationship to social and political goals. But it is also not seen, as in all socialist creeds, as something which, if it is to be in the public interest, must be controlled and perhaps suppressed by the government. Business activity is seen as a necessarily private activity which, for its own good and its own justification, has to strive for the common good and the stated ends of society. Business enterprise is thus seen as local and autonomous self-government which, by serving the ends of society, serves its own self-interests and guarantees its own survival. This, the most decisive contribution America has been making to the Western world these last fifty years, is unquestionably a theorem of political science.

4

In the political sphere, once more, lies that peculiarly American form of behavior: voluntary group action. Perhaps nothing sets this country as much apart from the rest of the Western world as its almost instinctive reliance on voluntary, and often spontaneous, group action for the most important social purposes.

We hear a great deal of "American individualism" these days. And there is certainly a fundamental belief in the individual, his strength, his integrity and self-reliance, his worth in the American tradition. But this "individualism" is much less peculiar to this country—and much less general—than its (usually overlooked) "collectivism." Only it is not the collectivism of organized governmental action from above. It is a collectivism of voluntary group action from below.

This shows itself in the way in which people in this country tackle their social and community problems. If the teenagers in a small town get out of control, the local service club, Rotary or Lions, will build a clubhouse for them and get them off the streets. If the hospital needs a new wing, the Woman's Club will get the money for it. American schools are run as much by a voluntary group organization—the Parent-Teacher Association—as they are by the Superintendent of Schools. And when we suddenly have to draft millions of Americans into uniform, we dump the social and community problems that this creates into the lap of voluntary committees and organizations. Even the drafting of young men into the armed forces is left to ordinary citizens who volunteer to serve without compensation on the draft boards of their communities.

Alone among Western countries, the United States knows no "Ministry of Education." But, then, no other country has anything to compare with the power and influence that private groups—e.g., the great foundations—wield over higher education. And yet we take this completely as a matter of course. Every American knows instinctively that this country is actually ruled by thousands of purely voluntary, purely private, mostly local groups. He takes it for granted that it is the easiest thing in the world to get such a group going to meet any local needs whatsoever and that despite its private character it will be responsive to public opinion.

It is not "competition" that characterizes American life, as some social scientists want us to believe. It is the symbiosis between competition and cooperation organized in and through voluntary, private groups. And while the roots of this behavior reach deep into the past— in the brotherhoods of the members of the small religious sects and in their interdependence, as well as in the neighborliness of the frontier— it is just as much at work in our newest institutions. No other feature of our business system is so much remarked upon by visiting management and labor delegates from abroad as the close, highly organized cooperation on policy matters, on technology, on business problems, and so forth that obtains between the most bitter business rivals; or the close, constant cooperation on day-to-day problems that obtains between managers and union officials in a given plant.

5

Americans themselves tend to take it for granted that American genius is political. If they ask at all what explains this, their answer is likely to be: the frontier. Certainly the human explosion which carried settlement and civilization in less than one century from the Atlantic across a wild, hostile, and uncharted continent to the shores of the Pacific is the greatest achievement of the American people and their deepest experience. And yet the frontier and the course of settlement were themselves already results of the American political genius rather than its origins. It was the ability to organize spontaneously for group action, it was the idea of "constitutionalism," that made orderly commonwealths out of the immigrant trains moving over the plains or mountains; it was the ability to adapt, as if instinctively, inherited patterns of social, political, and economic organization to the new and unexpected conditions of the frontier that alone made settlement of the country possible. Above all, the rapid settlement of the continent rested on the country's ability to make, so to speak overnight, Americans out of millions of immigrants from all over Europe. This presupposed the absorption of the alien into American citizenship and his integration into American political institutions.

The formative influence on America's political spirit is something deeper than climate, geography, or even the experiences of our history. It consists in our fundamental beliefs regarding the nature of man and the nature of the universe. To say that the genius of this country is political is to say that America, from earliest colonial times, has refused to split the world of ideas from the world of matter, the world of reason from the world of the senses. It is to say that she has alike refused to grant more than a temporary visitor's visa to the philosophies of Descartes, Hume, or the German Idealists as well as that of Marx—indeed, to the entire body of post-Cartesian philosophy on which modern European thought is founded. For every one of these philosophies denies meaning, if not existential reality, to the sphere of politics.

To the politician, matter can never be unreal, can never be an illusion, can never be base. His task is to use matter for constructive purposes. Nor can he ever consider ideas illusory or unreal. Without them he would have neither direction nor the ability to move toward his goal. The politician must always oppose to the "either-or" of the monistic philosopher—whether idealist or materialist, realist or nominalist, rationalist or intuitionist—the philosophical dualism of "both." He can neither, with the European humanist, divorce "sordid" politics from "pure" intellectual and artistic culture, nor can he, with the European materialist, see in politics simply a rationalization of material conditions or an automatic product of material forces. He can be neither "starry-eyed idealist" and "uplifter" nor the "money-mad chaser of the almighty dollar." He must always combine elements of both extremes in the attempt to find balance and harmony. For to the politician ideas and matter are the two poles of a single world, opposed to each other but at the same time inseparable, mutually interdependent, and each other's complement.

America has insisted—at least since Jonathan Edwards first started philosophizing on these shores two hundred and fifty years ago—that ideas and matter, reason and experience, logic and intuition, must always be held equally real and equally valid. And it is this philosophical world view that alone explains the central position of the political sphere in the American tradition.

In this view politics becomes at once a responsibility of man; it becomes the chief moral duty in human life. Politics becomes a respectable, in fact a creative, sphere of action—creative in the aesthetic meaning of the word—"the endless adventure," as one eighteenth-century politician called it; and creative in the spiritual meaning of the word, as partaking of charity through which man is moved from the pursuit of his own, empty self toward his real mission of making the creation glorify the creator. Politics as the creative, the meaningful, the moral, the responsible, the charitable sphere—that lie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Transaction Books by Peter F. Drucker
• Introduction
• Part One American Experiences
• Part Two Economics as a Social Dimension
• Part Three The Social Function of Management
• Part Four Business as a Social Institution
• Part Five Work, Tools, and Society
• Part Six The Information-Based Society
• Part Seven Japan as Society and Civilization
• Part Eight Why Society Is Not Enough
• Afterword Reflections of a Social Ecologist
• Index