Abstract

Most Americans know Peter Drucker as a pioneer of management theory. He is not a figure viewed in terms of his historical background, cultural contexts, or philosophical influences. Such a description leaves out the essence of his lifelong project: the human community, the nature of humankind, and the role of Good and Evil. ;My objective in this dissertation is to begin to redress these contextual voids by analyzing Drucker's writings in terms of how they reflect his unique vision of American society, and how they are informed by his own European background. Specifically, I argue that Drucker's work is significantly influenced by three figures: Friedrich Julius Stahl, a nineteenth-century Prussian legal theorist and philosopher; the Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard; and the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Drawing on the ideas of these three thinkers, Drucker engages in a career-long search for a philosophical system that will allow individuals to find both spiritual meaning and community status within an industrialized society of organizations. Underlying this search is the strong belief that the solution lies in a center position between two dangerous poles: one, complete loss of individual identity and freedom and the other, complete loss of social meaning and responsibility . Affected by his own experience in Europe during the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as his impressions of American society during the later years of the Depression, Drucker looked to the United States as the laboratory for his search for a middle ground between individuality and community, and freedom and responsibility. ;Read without an understanding of these larger philosophical influences, Drucker's writing is often misinterpreted as strictly guidance to managers or organizations. Drucker himself partly contributes to such a reading of his work by fashioning his own identity as a bystander, a Tocquevillian outside observer of American society and culture. The bystander persona allows him to negotiate the status of the Emigre, raised in one culture while living in another, but also positions Drucker as one who merely critiques rather than elucidates a blueprint for a workable, moral industrial society