Economic History: Peter F. Drucker and the priesthood of the managerial-technocratic class as the reconcilers of the interests of all stakeholders, the administrators of things, and the coördinators of productive process in the interests of human flourishing:

Daniel Immerwahr: ‘Polanyi’s book ought to be read alongside the early work of management theorist Peter Drucker…. The Great Transformation is… complicated and… confusing…. The free market… requires treating land, labor, and money as if they were marketable commodities. But land, labor, and money are… nature, humans, and social relations, and not one of them can be fully subjected to the demands of the market without being destroyed. Thus, continues Polanyi, humans have always found ways to protect themselves and their environment—to ‘‘embed’’ the market in society…. Drucker’s The Future of Industrial Man, published two years before The Great Transformation…. “Locke’s… concept of property… [led to] the insistence of the market system that the basic factors of economic life be regarded and treated as commodities: land, labor, money…”. It is only recently that academics have begun to take Drucker seriously as a social theorist, though, and it is telling that the two scholars to have done so— Nils Gilman and Karen Linkletter—are both unusual in having experience in the business world as well as doctoral degrees in history…. Drucker pinned his hopes on the institution that he believed played the largest role in subordinating market to society: the corporation. His experience in the business world had taught him that corporations were anything but slaves to the imperatives of supply and demand and he hoped that, as social actors, they could act as responsible leaders in the new industrial age… As before, he advocated full employment, the purposive restriction of the market in some areas, the prevention of monopoly, and the conservation of the human environment as ‘‘pillars on which an economic policy for a free-enterprise society rests.’’ But given such restrictions—and Drucker was willing to allow that they were substantial—he believed that profit-seeking corporations could function as the leading instiutions of a modern society, and that society would be better off for it. Behind Drucker’s change of heart about the market lay his skepticism about the state… <faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-im…>