Peter F. Drucker on Business and Society

PREFACE

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 century’s 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,” today’s ...