Abstract

"The New Conservatism: Peter Drucker Discovers Entrepreneurship"

Erik Baker, Harvard University (ebaker@g.harvard.edu)

Few individuals have done more to popularize the notion of “entrepreneurship” in the United States than Peter Drucker. An explicit emphasis on entrepreneurship, however, arose relatively late in Drucker’s thinking. The central focus of Drucker’s first publications was the promotion of social cohesion and what he called the “plant community.” I show here that Drucker turned to the figure of the “innovative” entrepreneur starting in the 1950s, in response to two streams of critique of the "industrial society" of the postwar years. First, critics contended that the advance of automation technology was ushering in a new "post-industrial" society that would force a choice between massive technological unemployment, on the one hand, and systematic reduction of working time and redistribution of profits for workers' use in their leisure time, on the other. Other critics argued that the "affluent society" was, to some extent, a facade, concealing enduringly elevated poverty and limited access to public goods such as health care and education. The idea of entrepreneurship anchored Drucker's response to these critiques, a response that was at once conservative and optimistic. Drucker insisted that innovative entrepreneurs would be able to create new "knowledge work" for anyone whose job was automated at the same time that they solved the problems of the affluent society, by taking over the provision of public goods from the state and overseeing the creation of new global supply chains that would supposedly bring economic development to impoverished regions. According to Drucker, knowledge work itself was an important site of entrepreneurship: in its reliance on continuous learning and personal initiative, it would remain immune to the threat of automation.