Word: drucker
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...Author Drucker's main concern is the survival of freedom. "We have," he says, "a magnificent technical machine for industrial production. . . . We have a considerably weaker but still very impressive economic machine for the distribution of industrial goods. Politically and socially, however, we have no industrial civilization, no industrial community life. ... It is this absence of a functioning industrial society, able to integrate our industrial reality, which underlies the crisis of our times...
...distinction is fundamental to the Drucker analysis: society and government are not the same-a distinction which goes back to St. Augustine and of which America's founders were clearly aware when they established a limited government for a free society. Good government is always (relatively speaking) little government, or, as Jefferson thought, the less government, the better. In the present period the political freedom implied in limited government is menaced by the need for economic security implied in planning. In its present catchword sense "planning," says Drucker, "is not a preparation for future events and contingencies...
...Problem, therefore, is to create a functioning industrial society which will at the same time leave the individual man free. It is at this point that Author Drucker's analysis goes deeper and seems to get a step farther than the usual liberty-v.-security argument...
...Freedom . . ." Drucker asserts, "is inconceivable outside and before the Christian era. . . . The roots of freedom are in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Epistles of St. Paul. . . . Freedom is responsible choice. . . ." It is never a release and always a responsibility. Alongside this axiom of freedom he sets another: Freedom implies an admission that man is imperfect. Perfect men who know all the answers would have the right and duty to rule absolutely. The men who believe they know all the answers in this age are the "rational liberals." Their sense of their absolute right to put these answers...
...startling account of the genesis of totalitarianism in Rousseau, the French Revolution and Karl Marx, Drucker makes clear why the old "Anglo-American liberals" could never have become totalitarians. They believed in Christianity and in man's imperfection. Hence the only kind of government that made sense to them was a government of checks and balances. All modern governments, except the American and British, have indulged in the totalitarian fallacy to a dangerous and often fatal degree. And even the British and Americans have recently given in to it under the pressure of discordant social forces...