Drucker’s Crisis of Meaning
It is disquieting to compare the Peter Drucker of The End of Economic Man and the Peter Drucker of “A View of Japan through Japanese Art.” In the former, Drucker wrote resoundingly:
If the economic, social, and military consequences are serious, the metaphysical and ideological weakness of a system that bases itself on organization as a substitute for order and creed is fatal. Organization cannot be accepted as an end in itself. It cannot satisfy the masses; and it does not satisfy them in the totalitarian countries. They are always demanding more – a new substance of society. But the only thing which they can be given is more organization. Every six months a new social order, every six months a new social order, every one “final,” is announced with great pomp and circumstance; a new labor front, a new peasants’ corporation, a new ministry, a new final church settlement. Every time this new social order turns out to be nothing but a new organization, serving nobody but itself, organizing nothing but itself.
The disquiet arises from one’s recognizing that the Japanese art lauded by Drucker was produced by a society every bit as highly organized and totalitarian in action as the Nazi society against which Drucker so passionately railed. If Drucker is looking forward in The End of Economic Man at the makings of manmade catastrophe, in “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” he is looking backwards at the same makings and seeing only the makings. That the two cases never converge in the mind of Drucker is disturbing and bizarre to me.
This disconnect demonstrates a perceptual and conceptual flaw that pervades Drucker’s efforts to design society through management of organizations. It is fine to celebrate the relics of Japanese culture and claim to enjoy or appreciate them sui generis. It is fine to seek to understand the culture by undertaking a dimensional survey of its various components and calling the conclusions one draws social ecology. To fail to examine either in the cultural topology – in Japan’s case, the topology that will manifest as the monster that Japan would become in the Second World War – when the seminal work of one’s career is derived from just such an assessment is manifestly a crisis of meaning.
