Critique on Peter Drucker Book

Critique on Peter Drucker Book

The New Realities

In the past 150 years, America and the world has experienced a paradigm shift in the study of Public Administration, political realities, the government political processes, economy-ecology and the drastic transformation of our knowledge society. The New Realities book is Dr Drucker field guide to the large-scale paradoxes of our time. Dr Drucker hypothesis are a penetrating examination of the central issues, trends, and developments of the coming decades and the problems and opportunities they present to America and the world. He analyzes the new limits and functions of government, the transnational economy and ecology, the paradoxes of development, the post business society, information-based organizations, management as a social function, and the shifting base of knowledge. Most importantly, Dr Drucker analysis does not focus on what to do tomorrow. He focuses on what to do today in contemplation of tomorrows.

Dr Drucker is an omnivorous writer with a passionate interest in all fields of politics, business management, economics and political realities. He pushes to extremes some familiar ideas about the end of ideology, the burden of arms and the limits of government. He puzzles us by insisting that no one believes anymore in \\\"salvation by society" (Drucker 1989, p 9) while finding great promise in a pluralism of single-purpose organizations.

In the Divide, Drucker identifies two important periods that have drastically changed our dominant political creed. He mentions that the century has begun in 1776 with the 'Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith and that ten years after 1873, the great liberal parties that had marched under the banners of 'progress' and 'enlightenment' all over the west were in retreat and disarray ( Drucker 1989, p 4). He said that the European Continent immediately split into Marxist socialist and anti-Semitic socialist that both were equally anti-capitalist, and hostile to free markets and 'bourgeois democracy' (Drucker 1989, p 5). Drucker says that this paradigm- shift changed our political perspective in the 19 century by letting "Marxist socialist become the single largest party in every major continental European country, in France and Italy, in Germany, Austria, and even though officially suppressed in tsarist Russia"( Drucker 1989, p 6).

In his brilliant analysis, Drucker compares the 1873 period with the end of liberal era in 1973. He says that the 1973 period marked the end of an era in which government was the progressive cause. He points out that it ended an era dominated by the doctrines and politics first formulated in the 1870s, those of liberal democrats or social democrats, of Marxist socialist or national nationalist. He sees all these doctrines rapidly becoming as ineffectual as 'laissez-faire' liberalism became after 1873 (Drucker 1989, p 8).

Drucker also points out eloquently that no one in this modern period except "a mere handful of Stalinist believes any more in salvation by society-the faith which since the eighteenth century enlightenment had been the dominant force engine of politics" ( Drucker 1989, p 3). He argues that the promise of an everlasting society which achieves both social perfection and individual perfection, a society which establishes the earthy paradise was the driving force ideology of Marxist followers. Durcker say that "it was this belief in salvation by society that gave Marxism its tremendus appeal" (Drucker 1989, p 9). Durcker clearly mentions that this ideology is hard if not impossible to achieve. "No one except a small handful of superannuated party hacks were surprised by Gorbachev's ideology of power; everybody else-and especially in the communist countries had much earlier lost all faith in salvation by society" (Drucker 1989, p 9). Drucker truly considers that the believe in 'salvation by society' which is the idea to "create a perfect society or even to bring society closer to such an ideal, and in fundamentally changing the individual to produce the 'the new Adam' is gone and gone for good (Drucker 1989, p 10).

One interesting point that Drucker realizes is how in such a few years our political perspective have changed so much. He cites that just fifty years ago, it was normal and the majority of political thinkers all over the world believed that social action and especially the abolition of private property would fundamentally change the humankind. He said that many thinkers even imagined that socialism was as an alternative to capitalism. Drucker says that "Lyndon Johnson, the last American president perhaps who still believed in salvation by society, became the butt of ridicule for his Great Society idea" ( Ducker 1989, p 11).

Drucker mentions that in the present world that we live, people, do not look upon government as the organ to produce a better, let alone a perfect, society ( Ducker 1989, p 14). "The death of this belief in salvation by society, which for 200 years had been the dynamic force in the politics of the West and increasingly in politics world-wide, creates a void (Drucker 1989, p 14).

Another important central theme that Drucker mentions in 'The End of FDR's America' is the contribution of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the end of the old ideology of salvation by society in America. Drucker points out that "FDR made sure that the labor unions did not, as they had in Europe, become a separate political force, controlling either the legislature or the administration" (Drucker 1989, p 18). He says that while much of FDR's rhetoric was anti-business, his action, from the beginning, aimed at creating the purchasing power to generate consumer demand and with it profits for business; but while under his predecessor farm policy had been protectionist, "FDR's farm policy was - in conscious continuity from Mark Hanna, which invented a new political integration in a way that major economic interest-the economic estates of the realm are held together by their common interest in what we would now call economic development, at making American farming increasingly more productive" ( Drucker 1989, p 18).

Drucker believes that the reason the Liberal Democrats still win every Japanese election is because the "oppositions parties are all ideological believers in salvation by society", which he says, makes them even less attractive (Drucker 1989, p 21). He further suggest that neither 'farmers' nor 'labor workers' have the numerical strength or the political importance to be 'economical estates' any more

...