Reflections of a Social Ecologist – Introduction

Peter F. Drucker

“Born to See, Meant to Look”

Introduction

When asked what I do, I say: “I write.” Technically this is correct. Since I was twenty, writing has been the foundation of everything else I have been doing, such as teaching and consulting. And among my twenty-five books there are two novels and one quasi-autobiographical volume of stories. Yet I certainly am not a “literary person” and have never been mistaken for one.

But when people then ask: “What are you writing about?”, I become evasive. I have written quite a bit about economics but surely am not an economist. I have written quite a bit about history but surely am not a historian. I have written quite a bit about government and politics; but though I started out as a political scientist I long ago moved out of the field. And I am also not a sociologist as the term is now defined. I myself, however, know very well—and have known for many years—what I am trying to do.

I consider myself a “social ecologist” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment.

Even my two novels, while pure fiction, are social ecology. The central character in one is European society before the First World War; the central character in the other is an American Catholic university around the year 1980.

Written for this essay volume in 1992.

The term “social ecology” is of my own coinage. But the discipline itself—and I consider it a discipline—boasts old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I count among its leading practitioners another Frenchman, Bertrand de Jouvenel, two Germans, Ferdinand Toennies and Georg Simmel, and three Americans, Henry Adams, John R. Commons (whose “Institutional Economics” was not too different from what I call Social Ecology) and, above all, Thorstein Veblen.

But none of these is as close me in temperament, concepts, and approach as a mid-Victorian Englishman: Walter Bagehot. Living, (as I have lived) in an age of great social change—he died, aged fifty-one, in 1877—Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government as the cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy. Similarly I was the first, a hundred years later, to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations, and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource and of knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but post-socialist and, increasingly, post-capitalist.

Like Bagehot I see

as central to society and to civilization the tension between the need for continuity

(Bagehot called it “the cake of custom,” I call it civilization)

and the need for innovation and change.

Thus, I know what Bagehot meant when he said that he saw himself sometimes as a liberal Conservative and sometimes as a conservative Liberal but never as a “conservative Conservative” or a “liberal Liberal.”