Totalitarianism

Extract from

Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz )

(Translation by the author)

 „Unschön ragt der Mensch aus dem Erdenrund“

(Man stands out unsightly from the earth) Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, Göttingen, um 1800

The social ecologist Peter Drucker, as he called himself academically, was one of the first and most astute critics of totalitarianism. In 1933, at the age of twenty-three, he published a treatise on the rule of law and an analysis of Friedrich Julius Stahl's (1802-1862) theory of the state with the publishing house J.C.B. Mohr in Tübingen. He was interested in social structures and developments and sought a balance between social continuity and preservation on the one hand and change and innovation on the other in order to strengthen democracy. Even at a young age, Drucker surprised people with his foresight and ability to work out and recognize that the National Socialists would destroy the democracy of the Weimar Republic. Societies can only find a balance, according to Drucker, if they are based on what Stahl called a "living conservatism" and politics "overcomes the opposition of revolution and restoration" (Drucker 1933). The task that Stahl had to solve, and the task that was also central to Drucker in the Weimar Republic, was "to find the form in which all the living forces of the time unite for common construction, instead of fighting each other in barren opposition - destroying themselves and the world." (ibid., p. 5)

Drucker's essay Friedrich Julius Stahl was publicly burned shortly after its publication in May 1933. Drucker sees parallels between the National Socialist movement and German history after 1815. On the basis of Stahl's analyses of legal philosophy, he comes to the conclusion that we are

"perhaps only now, when Germany has once again, as after 1815, plunged from the highest national effort into the deepest foreign policy impotence, should we take a look at the mood in those years, [...] the 'Vormärz', in which the explosives that exploded in 1848 accumulated", this period and its political mastermind Stahl. Stahl's work attempts, again in more detail, "to overcome the unfruitfully rigid opposition between restoration and revolution in a lively conservatism and thus avoid catastrophe." (ibid., p. 4), and further,

"The conservative doctrine of the state must affirm it [the state] because and insofar as it is a bond. But it must also prevent it from becoming the only formation, the 'total state'; for it is an order of this world, an entity arising from the dissolution of a supreme, timeless order, a realm of human purpose and human meaning. And this meaning and this goal, the power, is evil and demoralizing, destructive without a bond in a superhuman, unchanging order, without a bond in the divine world plan." (ibid., p. 32)

Peter Drucker's early work can be interpreted as an analysis of the totalitarian crises of modernity. His later work can be described as an attempt to strengthen organizations and their management, which can make a significant contribution to opposing totalitarian developments in liberal democracy. In a society of organizations, the joint construction of a "bearable society" can only succeed with a management that is aware of this responsibility. Only those who understand the reasons that led to the collapse of liberal democracy "can strengthen the will to freedom against the totalitarian temptation" (Drucker 1939). After the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Drucker argued for democratic control of the economic uncontrolled growth, as the economy no longer embodied the basis and purpose of the people and they had succumbed to totalitarian temptations. He saw the Weimar crisis in the inadequate balance between freedom and economic equality. Neither classical capitalism nor communism offered solutions. He called for the lessons of history to be kept alive when, as in Germany at the time, a hunger for meaning led to mass delusion (cf. Papcke 1993) and ended in a flight from freedom.

Drucker's book "The End of Economic Man", which is still relevant today and which he wrote in exile, first in Britain and then in America, and published in spring 1939 (the later German translation is entitled Ursprünge (origins) des Totalitarismus, 2010), is one of the first research works on the totalitarian challenge in Europe. From 1927 to 1933, Drucker had experienced the advance and eventual seizure of power by the National Socialists at close quarters in Germany as an apprentice, journalist, student and law doctoral candidate. Central to Drucker's argument is that the masses' demand for meaning in life was not satisfied during the crises and contradictions of industrial development in the first half of the twentieth century (ibid., p. 54 f). The substitute solutions of fascism were thus given the opportunity to sweep aside the old values and gain popularity with their negation of all civilizational rules, "negation [is] its main platform" (ibid., p. 26). No positive ideology is offered in the totalitarian model; all the value foundations of the previous society are negated.

The starting point of fascism is the concept of the enemy and the world as a struggle, the rational economic man (with the hope of equality) was replaced by the model of a "heroic man" who became receptive to the irrationalities and promises of salvation of the National Socialists. Drucker illustrates this with an example he experienced himself: "The agitator I heard proclaim the following in a farmers' meeting a few years ago came closer to the declaration of fascism than anyone I have heard since: 'We don't want lower bread prices, we don't want higher bread prices, we don't want unchanged bread prices, we want National Socialist bread prices' " (ibid., p. 67). In the promise of salvation, the impossible is made possible.

"The old order has collapsed and no new order can be brought about on the old foundations. The alternative is chaos and in their hopelessness the masses turn to the magician who promises to make the impossible possible. [...] Not in spite of, but because of its contradictions and impossibilities, the masses turn to fascism. 'Credo, quia absurdum' - 'I believe because it is absurd'. - This exclamation by a master who had experienced the bitterness of the deepest and blackest hopelessness is being heard again for the first time in many centuries." (ibid., p. 35f)

A longing for order

For Drucker, the fact that the National Socialists came to power in Germany had nothing to do with the fact that they offered a convincing ideology for the masses. Dirk Baecker interprets Drucker's book "The End of Economic Man" in this way,

"Drucker says people don't believe in what the Nazis tell them, the only thing people believe is that the Nazis will manage to produce an organized and orderly society themselves - he gives an explicit warning about this totalitarian path - but the poignancy of Drucker's diagnosis lives in the fact that he can understand very, very well both the Nazi response and the search for that response by the German people, and then spend the rest of his life doing so. I would say, like many others of his generation (this applies in Germany to Jürgen Habermas or Niklas Luhmann, for example), to fight this terrible short circuit between a longing for order on the one hand and an overall social offer on the other and to say, 'give the people their order, let them organize themselves', but always at the level of individual authorities, individual hospitals, individual companies and never, so to speak, as an overall company". (Baecker 2023)

Drucker's insight here lies particularly in the fact that he speaks of a society of organizations (emphasis on the plural). "The best prevention of totalitarianism is then the majority of organizations, although each individual organization is a small, totalitarian mechanism" (ibid.). Or in Drucker's words, after the "abracadabra of fascism" there will "eventually be a new order based on a reformulation of the old fundamental values of the European tradition: Freedom and Equality". (Drucker 1939, p. 36)

The book "The End of Economic Man" ends with Drucker's prediction that a confrontation between the West and totalitarian regimes was unavoidable and that a coalition of despots was likely. Drucker even predicted that there would be a pact between Hitler and Stalin, which came to pass shortly afterwards.

In this context, it is interesting to note that Drucker's perspective on analyzing "Economic Man" was not that of a national economy approach. "I am not a national economist, for one very simple reason. ... I can't accept the fundamental assumption that the economy is an autonomous dimension and if you don't accept that you are not an economist." (see Brem 2023)

As mentioned above, Drucker later described himself as a social ecologist, referring to the fact that society consists of social systems that can only be explained through their interaction. In relation to the economy and the decentralized decisions made there, he spoke of a society of organizations (Drucker 1992). From his first texts on the role of the constitutional state in the Weimar Republic, in which he clearly positioned himself against the National Socialist movement, to his British exile to the US, and soon as an American citizen, Drucker's social science positions became sharper. His research and consultancy project with General Motors (1942-1944), which culminated in his book Concept of the Corporation (1946), then created an entirely new field of academic theory and teaching for Drucker. Drucker's paradigm shift began with the question at General Motors, the largest industrial company in the world at the time: What is management? The science of management, conceived by Drucker as a liberal art, was not only intended to readjust the theory and practice of organizing companies as social systems and incorporate their social legitimacy, but also to work out their significance as an important bastion against totalitarianism. As the world's first Chair of Management at New York University from 1950, his academic career was to take him into sociological and organizational theories that were still completely unknown at the time.

Finally, in "Managing in the Next Society" (2002), Drucker elaborated on the social legitimacy and exemplary role for the political culture of the democratic constitutional state as the central task of the managerial profession in what he called the next society:

„In the next society, the biggest challenge for the large company especially for the multinational may be its social legitimacy.” […] “Managers will increasingly have to learn that in turbulent times they have to be leaders and integrators in a pluralist society. The manager in other words will have to learn to create the ‘issues’ to identify both the social concern and the solution to it.” (Drucker 2003)

The "fascination with authoritarianism" (Frank-Walter Steinmeier) can lead to liberal models being replaced by authoritarian models of society. These aim to centralize power, suppress opposition, synchronize the media and establish a surveillance state. In the third decade of the 21st century, liberal modernity is once again faced with the challenge of uniting all "living forces", i.e. bourgeois parties, companies, executives, civil society and the media, with the aim of defending the separation of powers and the rule of law. The longing for order in companies and organizations is legitimate. These social systems survive best when they maintain a balance between continuity/routine and change/innovation. This can happen in companies in many different ways, depending on the organizational culture with steep, flat hierarchies or as a pecking order, with a lot or little scope for self-organization by its members and with a high or low focus on the common good. The longing for simplifying order at the political and social level is latent among its citizens even in the complex liberal modern age, which will always remain a dynamic society with changing crises. However, when parts of the relevant "living forces" lose interest in building a "bearable society" (Drucker 1993) and become entangled in power-strategic struggles linked to individual interests, especially in crises, the leaders of liberal modernity are called upon to activate their potential, to defend themselves and to take a stand.