The Future of Industrial Man

Drucker, Peter F. The Future of Industrial Man. 1942. Several reprints. New York: New American Library, 1970. Milton Park, Didcot, United Kingdom; Abingdon, United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis, 2018.

Non-fiction, cited by Samuelson "On Extrapolation: A Supplementary Bibliography".

An influential analysis of what was once called political economy, with the first edition getting a "Capsule Review" — we assume more behind the paywall — in Foreign Affairs (April 1943), posted on line: "An analysis of the weak points in our existing political and social institutions and an attempt to chart a way out that will avoid both the compulsion of collectivization and the anarchy of old-fashioned laissez-faire."[1] There have been other reviews in influential publications.

According to an anonymous reviewer on the less prestigious "Good Reads," the introduction to one of the reprints — one before 2005, when Drucker died — notes that what the text calls "mercantilism" would "today be called neoconservatism, which, he asserts, denies rather than affirms the reality of industrial and postindustrial society." The reviewer continues in part:

Drucker outlines the major shifts of previous centuries. He describes the move from an agrarian to an industrial economy, illustrates the structure and dynamics of this new industrial order, and warns of the abuses inherent in the system if attempts are made to maintain it under anachronistic social conventions. He emphasizes the fact that the new industrial order must operate under a "legitimate" system of political power supported by social authority. He discusses the particular roles of the owners, the workers, the managers — the corporation itself — as he pinpoints the problem that he considers the most central and the most critical: how to maintain the continuing freedom of the individual in an increasingly intricate, bureaucratized world.[2]

The issue of achieving/maintaining freedom in a complex, bureaucratized, industrial and post-industrial world is in the background of a number of works on the topic of this wiki, including those in which large machines are objective correlatives (to appropriate and somewhat twist a term from T. S. Eliot) for Bureaucracy.

RDE, Completing, 25May19