“Readers familiar with Polanyi will be surprised to find many of his signal ideas in the work of Peter Drucker. Consider the following passage, from Drucker’s The Future of Industrial Man, published two years before The Great Transformation:
“”Locke’s statement in the closing years of the seventeenth century that a thing becomes a man’s property because he has commingled his labor with it, represented a radically new and revolutionary concept of property as basis of society and as justification of social power. . . .”
“This new concept of property meant that the entire economic sphere had to be subject to the market. Everything had to be capable of becoming property. Hence the insistence of the market system that the basic factors of economic life be regarded and treated as commodities: land, labor, money. The claim that there is a difference in kind between land and other property, or between labor and other property, could not be allowed. It would have caused a need for social integration outside of the market; and such a claim would have been a denial of Economic Man.
“In that remarkable short passage, Drucker introduces the theory of the three fictitious commodities in much the same terms that it later appears in Polanyi’s work. He identifies the commodification of land, labor, and money as a novel fiction that paved the way for the modern market economy. Moreover, he associates it with a particular ideology, one that sees economic motives as fundamental to, and even constitutive of, human behavior. And yet, as Drucker explains later in the book, the idea of an automatic market mechanism based on pure self-interests could never be more than a ‘‘myth.’’5 Recent crises in Western civilization had shown the bankruptcy of ‘‘the belief that man is fundamentally Economic Man, that his basic motives are economic motives, and that his fulfillment lies in economic success and economic rewards.’’6 The passing of market society was in fact Drucker’s great theme in the late 1930s and 1940s, as can be seen from the title of his 1939 book: The End of Economic Man.
“The commonalities between Drucker and Polanyi, although they have yet to be acknowledged in the Polanyi literature, are hardly shocking. After all, the two men knew each other in Vienna, lived together briefly in Ver- mont, were colleagues at Bennington College, acknowledged each other in their major wartime works, and continued to exchange letters until Polanyi’s death in 1964. Drucker even had a hand in preparing The Great Transformation for publication after Polanyi returned to England, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript. In spite of their many connections, though, their legacies have pointed in opposite directions. Polanyi, as de- scribed above, has been most relevant to social scientists and has been politically identified with those seeking to develop non-Marxian responses to neoliberal globalization. Drucker, by contrast, effectively exiled himself from the social sciences when he accepted an invitation from General Motors to carry out a study of that company in 1943.7 He earned his reputation as a founder of management theory, making his living consulting for large corporations and writing books with titles like Managing for Results (1964). The reception of his ideas in the business world has been over-whelming, and it is not an understatement to say that the management practices of most major corporations today can be traced to Drucker’s theories. Politically, Drucker is most often celebrated as the voice of corporate leaders and of the pro-business right. Jack Welch and Bill Gates have cited him as a major influence, Newt Gingrich regards him as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and before his death Drucker received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.8 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. Fittingly, Link- letter was the first to notice similarities between Drucker and Polanyi (she remarks in passing that the conclusion of The Great Transformation is cast in ‘‘language . . . surprisingly similar to Drucker’s’’ but says no more on the subject).”
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