A LUTHERAN JEW FROM CATHOLIC VIENNA

Drucker was a lifelong churchgoer and by many accounts personally devout.Footnote ¹⁰ He had been raised Lutheran in a city whose intellectual and cultural life was utterly dominated, and famously so, by Catholics and Jews. Reflecting on his youth, he noted that the “Lutheran Protestantism of my childhood was so ‘liberal’ that it consisted of little more than a tree at Christmas and Bach cantatas at Easter”—a fairly common pattern among upwardly mobile Jewish converts in Vienna.Footnote ¹¹ Only after encountering Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling as a nineteen-year-old clerk in Hamburg did Drucker's religious convictions take firm hold.Footnote ¹² From this point forward, a serious spiritual and intellectual concern with Protestantism became a central theme in his writings, starting with his first independent scholarly foray into political theory and his prescient analysis of Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s. During this earliest phase, Drucker wrote little of any lasting value about capitalism or economics, let alone management. Focusing instead on the problems of political instability attending the rise of Bolshevism and Nazism, he used his first published writings to lay down a marker: to record his political sympathies and link them to his religious convictions.

Drucker's 1933 pamphlet on the conservative Prussian statesman Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861) was the only completed part of a planned triptych that was originally to include Wilhelm von Humboldt and Joseph von Radowitz as well. All three were nineteenth-century “conservative liberals,” in Drucker's phrasing, who sought to reconcile continuity and change. It is telling that he only ever got around to writing about Stahl—a Jew who, like the Druckers, had converted to Lutheranism (Drucker saw him as a German Disraeli)—and not Humboldt, an avowed agnostic, or Radowitz, a leading Catholic social reformer in Prussia.Footnote ¹³ He conceded that Radowitz, like many Catholics, did a better job of addressing the social dislocations wrought by nineteenth-century capitalism. As for Humboldt, who at the time had been retrospectively crowned as the designer of the modern research university and of the Prussian educational system, Drucker would only later come to see him as a kind of spiritual grandfather to the knowledge society. Among the three, Stahl alone contended with the underlying issue that gripped Drucker in his younger incarnation: the relation between Christian faith and political order. Stahl was worth studying because, in Drucker's trademark hyperbole, he created “the only conservative system within Protestantism.”Footnote ¹⁴

Shopping the manuscript to his publisher less than two weeks after Hitler's Enabling Act, Drucker explained that the “confusing succession of short-lived ‘conservatisms’” in recent years made rehabilitating Stahl “extremely timely at just this moment.”Footnote ¹⁵ Hastened into print, the Stahl essay was a rookie effort by an author still in his early twenties. Drucker failed to properly introduce his subject's ideas. Unhelpfully, he then contrasted them with Hegel's—seldom a royal road to clarity. After tussling a bit with Stahl's ostensible contradictions, he proclaimed, in good German fashion, that “Stahl's doctrines cannot withstand immanent critique.”Footnote ¹⁶

The essay reveals more about Drucker's conservative religious impulses than it does about Stahl. He admired Stahl's bid to gather “all the living forces of the age” in a “higher immutable order” with an “eternal purpose and meaning” that would prevent the “fruitless opposition” of uncoordinated social elements from devolving into a “dead machine.” Specifically, Drucker held that Stahl embraced a liberal, modern state guaranteeing individual freedoms and the rule of law—the Rechtsstaat—but strove at every turn to reconcile it with a powerful traditional monarchy anchored in the established church. The conservative Christian state would rest on “voluntary submission” by “freely obedient beings who are thereby spiritually unified.” Drucker faulted Stahl for failing to justify why the personal rule of a king or prince should be the only legitimate form for such a state. But he endorsed the basic conservative convictions that “the imperfection of man demands justification in faith” and that “human sinfulness requires firm authority [and] bonds to state and church” as well as to family, nation, and religion (Ökumene). Absent the obligations of faith and community, anarchy would ensue, calling forth despotism and dictatorship as remedies. Casting an eye on current events, Drucker suggested that the “loosening” of traditional obligations under modern life threatened “a despiritualization of the social world to a ‘kingdom of this world,’ to an adoration of materialism and one's own reason.”Footnote ¹⁷ But he notably stopped short of calling for a return to premodern values and institutions.

Drucker's attempt to rehabilitate a little-known Prussian monarchist as a bulwark against rising totalitarianism was wishful thinking, to say the least. He was on firmer ground in pinpointing the problem courted by any Protestant political theorist, the one first faced by Luther himself: a need to arrest the corrosive effects of a rebellious individual conscience on established political and social institutions. “Protestantism has always sought additional bonds in order to establish an order,” bonds which must ultimately remain provisional and changeable, given history's inexorable dynamism. “Every Protestant doctrine must of necessity be of its own time, since it is subject to review in the conscience of each individual.”Footnote ¹⁸ For Drucker, conservatives, inasmuch as they are continually overtaken by historical development, must perennially reinvent the unity that synthesizes all the forces and particularities of a given age under the sign of an immutable God-given moral kingdom, knowing all the while that this synthesis is destined to be superseded in turn. One can neither look backward, in reactionary fashion, to a lapsed golden age, nor forward, to a providentially guaranteed ideal final state. The only alternative is an almost Sisyphean resignation to the “heavy burden of again and again binding together all the powers of a supreme order in a new unity.” This was all the more challenging in a time of relentless upheaval unleashed by modernity and marked (here comes the Nietzschean cherry on top) by the “transvaluation of all values.”Footnote ¹⁹ Stahl, because he was a conservative who embraced adaptability and made it the very heart of his thinking, spoke to Drucker as the best hope for Protestant spiritual and political renewal.

If the Stahl essay ends on a note of grim determination, a strange optimism concludes Drucker's 1937 essay “The Jewish Question in Germany,” authored in London, written in German, published in Vienna, and ultimately burned by the Nazis. Its title a direct echo of Marx's “On the Jewish Question” (1843), the piece likewise ascribes the fate of Jews in bourgeois society to the dynamics of emancipatory liberalism after 1789.Footnote ²⁰ But it then turns in quite a different direction.

Declaring himself a “German [sic] of Jewish origin,” Drucker dispensed quickly with the notion that Jews are somehow biologically inferior or irreconcilably alien.Footnote ²¹ Instead he claimed that because they owed their civil freedom to post-Revolutionary reform from above, they entered bourgeois society as vulnerable, atomized, deracinated products of secular liberal individualism, deprived of precisely that which had sustained them for millennia—their religious identity, community, and culture. Prosperous Western Jews who entered the learned professions, augmented by Eastern ghetto Jews fleeing pogroms and persecution, each underwent, in distinct ways, a total identification with liberal values—those of meritocratic individualism and religious tolerance respectively. Beyond these sociological accidents, however, the Jewish question had less to do with Jews than with the fortune and fate of bourgeois liberalism across Europe, a view he shared with Marx.Footnote ²²

Just as for Marx, too, this general problem of European modernity merely took on a particularly acute and illustrative form in Germany. For much of the nineteenth century, Drucker found the plight of Germany's Jews to be a reasonably happy one. The country's belated unification meant that it was in no position to impose rigid expectations of ethnic, religious, or political conformity on its new national citizenry (a claim that, by the way, completely overlooked the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf). Germany, alone among Western nations, was best suited to assimilate Jews because it had always “carried within itself every site, battlefield, [and] reckoning place of all of Europe's spiritual conflicts.” Precisely because Germany had for so long been uniquely receptive to a diversity of religious movements and ideas, the Jewish stranger was greeted as a “contribution to the spiritual cosmos in which the life of the German nation took place.” And yet, Germany's nagging insecurity and incompleteness as a nation resurfaced with an all-too-predictable vengeance after its defeat in the Great War and the subsequent crises of the Weimar Republic. Inasmuch as Jews were totally identified with the liberal bourgeoisie, they bore the brunt of the blame for the failure of democratic capitalism. Weimar liberalism being “spiritually too infertile” to redeem democracy, a specifically racialized anti-Semitism emerged as the result of a frantic search to reconstitute national unity on any other basis besides liberal constitutional values. In an arresting metaphor that elides as much as it explains, Jews in other Western countries were regarded as “a grain of sand in the skin,” whereas in interwar Germany they became “a grain of sand in the eye,” small in numbers but intolerably irritating.Footnote ²³

How could one salvage optimism from such a dire situation? Drucker believed that a “state based on a real Volksgemeinschaft,” not the arid doctrines of bourgeois liberalism, might yet be possible. Such a state would be founded upon the “only possible and only Christian” alternative to the Nazi subjection of religion to political control, namely its opposite: a “spiritualization [Beseelung] of the state by the church.” A faint but unmistakable millenarianism underlay his hope—maintained in the teeth of Nazi anti-Semitism—that if Jews would only decide in favor of Germany rather than to remain Jews, they themselves could bring about, in his eerie phrasing, “the final solution to the Jewish question in Germany.” At that happy time, Jews would be “integrated in a German spiritual unity that, as in the great past, is Europe's center, support, and dominant spiritual power.”Footnote ²⁴ A united German nation at the heart of a Christian Europe: this was as yet the only vessel he envisioned for the spiritual renewal he sought; his similar hopes for the industrial corporation were still a long way off.

Drucker's analyses of Stahl and of the Jewish question both revolve around a fear of liberalism's corrosion of social bonds, of deracination, counterposed against a Hegelian yearning to synthesize opposing forces in a higher spiritual–political order. In some ways he was a Christian Democrat avant la lettre, elevating European unity and spiritual community up alongside liberalism, capitalism, and democracy as mutually indispensable supports. But his was also a vision lacking any organic connection to contemporary political movements, whether the Catholic Center Party—reincarnated after the war as the basis for German Christian Democracy—or to the entire tradition of Christian social reform, Protestant or Catholic. Drucker rather proceeded on a purely abstract plane of freedom, faith, and unity. He did not even pose the question dictated by his own analysis: how could Christianity itself survive the corrosive effects of secular modernity and the relegation of all religion to a “private affair” under liberal constitutionalism? As the next section will show, he saw little chance that either Protestant or Catholic churches could retain their traditional, compensatory, moralizing role in modern society. And yet, in the two mature works of social theory that followed his emigration from England to the United States, the failure of organized religion only made more urgent the modern world's need for spiritual redemption along Christian principles.

CHRISTIANITY, CAPITALISM, AND THE CRISIS OF MAN

The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942) argue, respectively, that totalitarianism grew out of a spiritual and social collapse experienced by all of European civilization, and that a new form of industrial society would soon arise to satisfy both spiritual and social needs in a way that Depression-era capitalism had clearly failed to do. To use Drucker's terms, Economic Man, the atomized, mechanized, property-owning individual of classical economic theory, must give way to Industrial Man, still a creature of a liberal capitalist society, but one who would now inhabit and be sustained by organizations that provide community, status, and identity as well as the means to earn a decent living. Written in New York, where he taught for a few years before attaining a steady professorial position in Vermont, the two treatises were the products of a “writer who believes in an absolute good and evil,” as Drucker proclaimed early on in the 1939 volume.Footnote ²⁵

As their titles suggest, the pair also rank among the earliest instances of the influential “crisis-of-man” genre inaugurated by America's preeminent Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and especially The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–3). The two thinkers shared a great deal, including a skepticism toward the Social Gospel movement and other meliorist currents of Protestantism, a belief that sin and evil could never be expunged from the human condition, a commitment to an Augustinian theology of freedom, and, not least, anticommunist politics. Drucker once referred to Niebuhr as “my greatest teacher,”Footnote ²⁶ and while he remained frustratingly vague about why, both were preoccupied by whether and how human nature had changed under modern conditions. Niebuhr steadfastly insisted on its immutability, denying that a sinful humanity could ever perfect itself.Footnote ²⁷ Drucker, for his part, sought to reconcile this Christian dogma with a deep and characteristically German historicism. Interpreting the progress of civilization as a succession of different types of “Man,” Spiritual, Economic, and Industrial, he held that radically different social orders nonetheless faced the same perennial moral challenges. The fascist and communist attempts to remake homo economicus had given this whole issue a burning urgency.

Among the most arresting insights of The End of Economic Man is the observation that “the abracadabra of fascism is the substitution of organization for creed and order.” Fascism had succeeded because it gave the suffering atomized individual something higher to belong to, now that both religious and secular creeds (specifically liberalism and socialism) no longer could. But “the glorification of organization as an end in itself,” however satisfying as a means to alleviate the despair of the masses, remained for him contrived and ultimately insubstantial. The fascist “mirage” could not ultimately forestall a “reformulation of the old fundamental values of European tradition: freedom and equality,” a rejuvenation that was as inevitable as it then seemed unlikely. Freedom and equality were, for Drucker, the cardinal and essential values of Europe itself, first realized under the supremacy of Spiritual Man in medieval Catholicism, then, after Luther and Calvin, carried over into what he called (with little further elaboration) the “intellectual sphere,” and finally, with the advent of nineteenth-century market capitalism, institutionalized in the economic sphere. A belief in the periodic, Providential rebirth of freedom and equality, even at Europe's darkest hour, inspired Drucker to contend that a new dispensation for European values was just around the corner.Footnote ²⁸ Even though the Spiritual Man of the Middle Ages had long been superseded, these same Christian precepts had always reasserted themselves in new forms, and could be expected to do so again.

Drucker confronted head-on the objection that organized Christianity had disastrously failed to offer an alternative to fascism. Pioneering Christians, he retorted, had in fact recognized the limitations of Economic Man ever since the nineteenth century. During this era, religious impulses arose to fill the spiritual void by spawning compensatory institutions that ministered to tangible social needs unmet under the regime of laissez-faire economics. Drucker thus credited the earliest social-insurance schemes to evangelicals and Quakers; agricultural and credit cooperatives to the lower clergy; and “all modern education in Europe,” from Pestalozzi onward, not to the secular humanism of the late Enlightenment, as one might assume, but to the “Christian concept of man.” Name checking a host of little-known Christian reformers—from Lammenais and Döllinger to Berdyaev and Chesterton—Drucker sketched a counterhistory to illustrate that the flame of religious social concern had never been completely extinguished in such an aggressively secularizing age. Some of the century's greatest thinkers had taken refuge in religion as a means of escaping the soullessness of a mechanistic society and the isolation of the modern individual. Dostoevsky's novels, Kierkegaard's “flight to God,” and even Nietzsche's nervous breakdown, Drucker claimed, all sprang from the recognition that only Christianity can serve as the basis for a rational, sane existence.Footnote ²⁹

The problem was that the established churches had done too little to recognize, much less confront, the spiritual malaise of modern society, by gathering up and building upon these inchoate impulses and provisional solutions to stave off the “return of the demons” that fascist movements had so ruthlessly exploited. In their mainstream forms, Catholicism and Protestantism were both to blame, the backward Bavarian or Italian peasant a reactionary force just as complacently inert as, in a pithily damning juxtaposition, “the retired English colonel.”Footnote ³⁰ Truly pious Christians could still find personal refuge in established religion, but a church that offers merely private satisfaction, and fails to project its vision into the public realm, “ceases to be a church altogether.”Footnote ³¹ If the containment of a rebellious conscience was the first problem courted by any Protestant political theory, then its inverse—the quietistic retreat into a purely interior spirituality—was the second. Unlike Stahl, Drucker never proposed a formal restoration of an official state church. But like him, he longed for the integrative power that issued from a moral sphere standing above and outside the temporal realm, suffusing its social institutions, and informing the actions and consciences of individual people.

The quest for moral integration led Drucker to a novel, if underdeveloped, theory of the “socially constitutive sphere.” Articulated more fully in The Future of Industrial Man, this held that during any given epoch, societal aspiration and individual striving were only organized around one key dimension—spiritual, political, or economic—thereby unburdening other spheres from having to serve as arenas of contestation. Whenever a new socially constitutive sphere emerges to organize the pursuit of freedom and equality in a different form, it relieves its predecessor of that same obligation. Thus, just as “religious freedom and religious equality could only be realized after the spiritual sphere had been abandoned as the basis of society,” and just as political freedom and equality only became possible once the economic sphere “had become the basis of social distinction and satisfaction,” so too “economic equality will equally become possible when it has ceased to be socially all-important.”Footnote ³² People will no longer have to contend for economic sustenance, any more than they have to contend for confessional autonomy or political rights, once they can contend for status and seek belonging in some other domain yet to be realized. Precisely because any future social order must have some other basis besides Economic Man, it would be the first to make economic freedom and equality actually possible.

Fascism, from within the depths of the Depression, had been the first movement to recognize the need for and then actually create a “non-economic society” through its party apparatus, auxiliary organizations, and (para)military mobilization—but only by inverting the moral order; by organizing for war and sacrifice instead of peace and prosperity; and by structuring the quest for rank, status, identity, purpose, and dignity around race and nation—the values of “Heroic Man”—rather than common Christian brotherhood. The task ahead was to locate a different, better alternative to the dilemma of Economic Man.

The Future of Industrial Man took up that charge, arguing that when the industrial plant is itself converted into a true community, a new socially constitutive sphere will have arisen to secure the perennial Christian European values of freedom and equality. Turning for the first time squarely to the analysis of industrial enterprise and economic institutions, the predominant concern of all his later work, Drucker was exercised by the emergence of large corporations and mass-production factories as unprecedented forms of social organization. Together these had upended the mercantile society of high nineteenth-century liberalism: the world of the individual entrepreneur, the family farm, the limited-liability partnership, and the joint-stock company. Property ownership under that old order had held out ever-expanding opportunities for freedom and equality, with property forming both the gateway to economic participation in the free market and the principal source for social prestige and political citizenship. Not only had the crisis of capitalism cruelly undercut such promises, but the contemporary big-business corporation had hollowed out the meaning of property ownership itself. Modern industrial operations had simply become too large and too complex to be overseen by their titular owners, the stockholders. Stockholders had abdicated their power to a new class of managers who in theory acted as their proxies and agents, but who in practice exercised an increasingly unchecked authority within the corporate bureaucracy and on the factory floor. This observation, credited to Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means's seminal The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), led Drucker to conclude that “managerial power is illegitimate power”—at least under the regime of Economic Man.Footnote ³³

The question became how the management of large industrial corporations could be made legitimate under a new dispensation. Drucker bristled at what he took to be the central claim of James Burnham's influential The Managerial Revolution (1941): that Nazism, Communism, and the New Deal, for all their differences, had converged in elevating managers to a rightful place of commanding influence over modern society.Footnote ³⁴ But he echoed Burnham's underlying insight that the steady expansion of managerial rule was a trend observable across all advanced economies. Drucker in fact feared that after defeating Nazism, Western nations would themselves impose a more insidious totalitarianism in its place, erecting a postwar “superstate” nominally pledged to peace and security but failing to restore true freedom to the individual.Footnote ³⁵

In pivoting from the crisis of capitalism to the threats to freedom faced even and especially in the recovering advanced democracies, Drucker in 1942 anticipated the concerns with economic central planning and statist micromanagement that vexed his fellow Austrian émigrés, including Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944), von Mises in Bureaucracy (1944), and Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)—the last of which, incidentally, Drucker helped into print.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, he rejected the methodological individualism that these three shared, and that had undergirded Austrian school economics since Schumpeter, decades earlier.Footnote ³⁷ Drucker's newfound focus on the dynamics of organizations and institutions was formed in opposition to the idea that individual actions and motivations explain aggregate social behaviors and thereby confound any attempt to steer, control, and manage them. For all his support of the free market, he had little to say about its purportedly self-organizing and self-regulating properties, because organization was itself the critical intervening variable, and its proper constitution and management the key problem to be solved in the transition to Industrial Man. Nor was the question, as in Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), how to carve out a space for innovative individual entrepreneurs to overcome bureaucratically managed large organizations. Instead it was how to infuse those same organizations with a truly social dynamism that could guarantee both economic growth and individual dignity. Drucker's view of freedom was, in short, moral and not economic.

The Future of Industrial Man invoked a specifically Protestant view of individual freedom in articulating what for Drucker must become the bedrock principle of the modern corporation and, more broadly, a functioning industrial society. “Freedom is not fun,” he announced at the book's midpoint. “It is responsible choice . . . not so much a right but a duty.” Freedom springs from the need faced by every human being to choose between good and evil, a responsibility thrust upon us by our fallen natures. We are each “imperfect, weak, a sinner, and dust destined unto dust, yet made in God's image.”Footnote ³⁸ This very imperfection imposes on us the privilege of free will and the obligation of responsible choice, a staggering burden but also a profound source of moral strength. For if perfection were possible, we would have no choice but to follow the path that leads to it: once one concedes that human perfection is attainable, there is no recourse against any power that claims to know absolute truth and to bring it about in earthly institutions. This is the reason totalitarianism tramples freedom. Absolutes do exist for Drucker, but only in the Godly realm.Footnote ³⁹

Lest there be any doubt, Drucker stressed that his conception of freedom was specifically, inherently, and ineluctably Christian, not a legacy of any secular tradition, whether issuing from the Enlightenment or ancient Greece. “Freedom, as we understand it, is inconceivable outside and before the Christian era.” Neither Plato nor Aristotle had known, or could have known, individual freedom as conceptualized as a right held against society; absent a transcendent order of moral absolutes, there was for the ancients no higher authority to appeal to. Freedom in the Christian sense was still realized within society, but one that could only operate under divine sanction. Earthly society exists not to preserve freedom as an autonomous capacity or to institutionalize it in a protected space, but to guide the individual pursuit of moral improvement by creating the conditions in which it alone can have meaning. Freedom was not even a cardinal value in and of itself, merely an “organizing principle” for social relations, one following from the “Christian dogma of man's nature . . . [as] a ‘proud and yet wretched thing’” in desperate need of the moral scaffolding that society provides.Footnote ⁴⁰ From this Drucker claimed that freedom can only have meaning and purpose within the socially constitutive sphere, the one realm, whether spiritual, economic, or cultural, specifically organized to confront the individual with moral choices and the responsibility to act upon them. In other spheres of social life lies not freedom but “permissible license,” the ability to follow one's impulses in ways that society—and prevailing morality—are unconcerned with.Footnote ⁴¹ By inscribing this understanding of freedom into his vision of the large industrial enterprise, Drucker sought to reconcile Christian dogma on human sin with a historicist understanding of social institutions.

Tellingly, the one sphere of human activity that for Drucker ought never to become socially constitutive was politics. “The political sphere is never in itself the socially constitutive sphere—except, perhaps, in a society engaged in total war.”Footnote ⁴² To see politics in any other way was a category error; politics was simply not an ethical pursuit in the same way that spiritual flourishing, cultural progress, or economic prosperity was. Viewing the state as a constrained arena for enforcing justice and preserving basic order, not for collectively identifying, debating, and pursuing visions of the good life, Drucker betrayed a stalwart limited-government liberalism that accompanied his Christian conception of freedom. Crucially, however, his liberal convictions followed from his reading of Christian history and were not simply adjunct to it. America's Founding Fathers, England's Glorious Revolution, and the fifteenth-century Italian republics had, he said, all developed institutions of limited government grounded in this conception of Christian freedom. Even further back, “it was St. Augustine who first separated society: the City of God, from temporal government,” prescribing the conditions under which, in a hopelessly imperfect earthly realm, political power can and must be deployed to safeguard the higher moral purpose of the human community.Footnote ⁴³

It was instead modern liberals who had forgotten these lessons in becoming captives to an arid rationalism. Drucker tarred with one brush Enlightenment philosophers who had disdained Wesley's Methodism; Benthamite utilitarians who had looked down on Low Church evangelicalism; arrogant American economists (he did not say which) who had called forth an evangelically inspired populism; and, in his own day, the motley assortment of natural scientists, psychologists, eugenicists, and behavioralists who in different ways had disastrously revived the pursuit of perfectibility in humankind. Worse yet, a century of rationalist liberals, lacking any grasp of true Christian freedom, had tilled the soil for totalitarian experiments in the Absolute. In a delirious provocation, he proclaimed that the “fathers and grandfathers of Hitlerism are not medieval feudalism or nineteenth-century romanticism but Bentham and Condorcet, the orthodox economists, and the liberal constitutionalists, Darwin, Freud, and the Behaviorists.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Each of these culprits had abandoned the “starting point that no man or group of men is perfect or in possession of Absolute Truth and Absolute Reason.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Drucker's next task was to explain how this Christian conception of knowledge and truth should be put into economic and political practice. Embryonic solutions to the problem of Industrial Man must, he explained, surely lie in wait locally, making it the task of postwar leaders to apply a “principle of selection” to discover and identify which of these might harbor the potential for a truly revitalizing social transformation. But, lacking perfect knowledge and absolute reason, the last thing one should attempt at such a moment was to plan, direct, or steer this change from on high.Footnote ⁴⁶ What he envisioned was a kind of decentralized, experimental planning that very much resembles Popper's advocacy of “piecemeal social engineering” in The Open Society. But whereas Popper grounded his epistemological humility in a thoroughly secular philosophy of science, Drucker literally adopted as an article of faith that to “develop a legitimate power in industry on the basis of responsible self-government” would remedy “centralized bureaucratic despotism.”

We know, he claimed as a logical deduction, that for true freedom to take root in the contemporary industrial enterprise, it must assume the form of a new “constitutive social activity” distinct from economic pursuits. Particularly once economic abundance is secured for all—a foreseeable reality—the industrial plant must grow to afford a host of noneconomic opportunities for participation and rewards for achievement, ultimately becoming “a functioning self-governing social community” and the nucleus of a new and spiritually energizing fusion of work and social life.Footnote ⁴⁷ By self-government Drucker meant, crucially, not the autonomy of workers against managers, but of holistic industrial social communities against the inappropriate intrusion of state power, economic dirigisme, and crypto-totalitarian centralizing bureaucracy. Drucker made little attempt in The Future of Industrial Man to describe what the autonomous industrial social community would look like. But in later writings, notably The New Society (1949), Drucker envisioned workers organizing themselves to run the company cafeteria, plan company picnics, found hobbyist clubs, or design the vacation schedule, even while their actual time on task remained rigidly organized—by management—around profit and loss, hierarchy and specialization.Footnote ⁴⁸

As time would tell, Drucker's quasi-utopian hopes for the self-governing industrial plant community were fated to disappoint him. But his other goal, that of elaborating the role and functions of the manager in an industrial enterprise, proved eminently practical, indeed the very source of his vast postwar influence. For now, it is worth pausing to emphasize two intellectual choices that set the stage for the later development of his thought. First, despite his rhetorical pairing of freedom and equality, he said far more about the one than he did the other. Equality, except in the formal sense of equal rights, had no place in his vision. A clear preference for freedom followed not only from his commitment to liberal rather than socialist economics and government, but also from a Christian faith that was specifically informed by Protestant rather than Catholic concerns—questions of freedom centered on moral individualism, liberty of conscience, and the Lutheran attempt to reconcile autonomy with authority as opposed to questions of equality centered on charity, solidarity, and social justice that, while also found in the Protestant Social Gospel and other reform traditions, were much more firmly anchored in Catholic moral teaching and political activism.Footnote ⁴⁹

Second, after he tacitly abandoned the hope that industrial social community was actually attainable, Drucker's Protestant individualism preconditioned him to return to the issue of managerial authority, and to invest his hopes in the moral and intellectual formation of the manager as an individual whose task it is to reconcile freedom and authority. If the individual practice of management could only be made morally legitimate, as the conduit for a reciprocality between firm and employee providing social belonging and spiritual meaning in the industrial workplace, then corporate hierarchy became not merely a defensible restriction of human freedom, but in fact the sole domain in which the pursuit of freedom could be fully and truly realized. For by Drucker's logic, the socially constitutive sphere not only enabled but morally obliged individuals to labor on behalf of whatever higher communal purpose defined the society to which they belonged. At least for the foreseeable future, until some kind of “Post-industrial Man” emerged, the corporation would necessarily remain the organizing locus for a Christian conception of freedom. In his next two major works, he would explain why this was true even in a liberal society where Christianity had lost all purchase on formal political power.

KIERKEGAARD MEETS GENERAL MOTORS

In 1943, grappling with the Protestant existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Drucker came to a profound reckoning with death—and promptly set off on an eighteen-month study of General Motors. His descent from rumination on the sublime and the eternal into the technical organization of automotive manufacturing came as the result of an unexpected request from a senior GM executive impressed by The Future of Industrial Man.Footnote ⁵⁰ But Drucker had long been seeking to embed himself in a working corporation as a means of deepening the insights of that book. It was a goal that followed with impeccable logic from his prior social theories and professional aspirations, and in critical but less obvious ways from his long engagement with spiritual questions. In Concept of the Corporation, Drucker awakened from the crisis of capitalism to a sunny embrace of the “American creed.” Here was the pivot that would make his entire career—but one that, far from marking a radical departure, merely continued his prior concern with religiously inspired issues of freedom, fulfillment, and dignity.

Drucker had moved in 1942 to a steady teaching position at Bennington College, arriving there shortly after fellow émigré Erich Fromm and soon helping to recruit another Viennese social theorist, Karl Polanyi, to the faculty in turn. With Fromm, the neo-Freudian psychoanalyst formerly affiliated with the Frankfurt school, Drucker shared an interest in the Protestant roots of freedom—Fromm's recent Escape from Freedom (1941) had devoted a long chapter to the Reformation—as well as the belief that fascism thrived on providing a psychic salve to the isolated, powerless individual who yearned for belonging and for submission to a higher authority.Footnote ⁵¹ As we have already seen, these were the very themes that, in a sociological and theological rather than a psychoanalytic vein, animated Drucker's two books from the time. Polanyi, whom he had known well in Vienna, became an even more important interlocutor. He owes his fame to the contention, in The Great Transformation (1944), that the free market was no natural social order but had had to be artificially, even forcibly, constructed.Footnote ⁵² Polanyi's belief that nineteenth-century market society must be fundamentally reengineered to inaugurate a new “era of unprecedented freedom” clearly paralleled Drucker's own project. But his secular cast of mind and avid endorsement of social-democratic planning also put him on a collision course with the latter's religiously and politically grounded conservatism.Footnote ⁵³

The enduring religiosity of Drucker's social vision came to the fore in his 1943 engagement with Polanyi. In April of that year, Polanyi gave a lecture at Bennington entitled “Jean Jacques Rousseau, Or Is a Free Society Possible?”. In it, he attempted to account for the perennial tension between survival and freedom, the needs of society versus the liberty of the individual: a problem of political obligation and right first confronted by Aristotle. Freedom Polanyi defined in conventionally Millsian terms as the opposite of slavery, as liberty from constraint by an “alien will,” and as the duty to obey only the laws that a democratically constituted society has properly established. “When we do what we truly want, what we feel to be right, believe to be true, accept as our personality, we are free. For in each case we obey a law ordained by ourselves.” Freedom did entail obligation—to a collectively self-legislated “moral liberty,” necessary to elevate us above dissipation, libertinism, and immorality—but Polanyi recognized no higher claims on the individual than society itself. It was Rousseau's genius to have been the first thinker to distill how a secular democratic society could arise from the dialectic of individual freedom and group survival after the artificial buttresses of the “Christian Commonwealth,” once muting their conflict, had been stripped away, leaving only the general will, the sovereignty of the people, as the supreme legislator. But Polanyi said nothing about where morality comes from or consists in. He consigned the entire philosophical tradition between Aristotle and Rousseau to that “great intermezzo of the Church world,” the very centuries during which, in Drucker's rival view, the only possible doctrine of human moral freedom had been formulated and institutionalized.Footnote ⁵⁴ No conception could have been more at odds with Drucker's grounding of freedom in mortal imperfection, societal imperfectibility, and consequent need for divine grace.

Weeks later, Drucker framed his rejoinder, “Soren Kierkegaard: Or, How Is Human Existence Possible?”, as the antithesis to Polanyi's talk, right down to the title.Footnote ⁵⁵ His genially respectful tone belies a determination to undermine Polanyi's secular grand narrative by posing an even more fundamental question than that of a free society's foundations. In Kierkegaard, Drucker found a worthy intellect to deploy against Polanyi's Rousseau and, for that matter, Fromm's Freud, parlaying Kierkegaard's Christian existentialist vision into a social critique that amplified the lessons of his two recent books.

As Drucker explained it, Kierkegaard's shattering insight is that we each face death alone, as naked individuals, shorn of all the illusory, evanescent social relationships that we cleave to for meaning and succor, from our most intimate relations to our friends and coworkers to the city crowds and national societies through which we move, live, and grow. Not only are social customs, rewards, and punishments ultimately vain and unreal, but so is earthly love itself; quoting Luke 14:26, Drucker explained that we must actually hate our closest relatives in order to become Christ's disciples. For if all society is existence in time, then existence in eternity necessitates an individual confrontation with God, and only by severing all social relations—in death—can the paradox between existence-in-time and existence-in-eternity be resolved.Footnote ⁵⁶ The nineteenth century, lacking this tragic sense, had lived in denial of death, whether by sweeping it under the rug through the invention of actuarial tables and life insurance or attempting to conquer and transcend it through seances and spiritualist practices. Its faith in Progress was driven by “a fervent belief that by piling up time we shall attain eternity; by piling up matter we shall become spirit; by piling up change we shall become permanent; by trial and error we shall find truth.” Predictably, however, the century's failure to acknowledge catastrophe and disaster had rebounded, in Drucker's own times, to produce precisely those outcomes. Intoning what was by then for him a familiar refrain, Drucker held that “the optimistic creed that started out by making life in this world mean everything led straight to the Nazi glorification of self-immolation as the only act in which man can meaningfully exist.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Even as he again blamed secular progressivism for the evils of totalitarianism, Drucker demarcated himself against every mainstream religious alternative as well. Kierkegaard, in articulating a sterner doctrine than that espoused by contemporary churches, enabled Drucker to critique organized religion from a Christian standpoint. He had no truck with those who sought escape from existential despair by equating tempered rationality with moral virtue. Thus he decried “that brand of liberal Protestantism that sees in Jesus the ‘best man that ever lived’,” and all those who based their ethics in the Golden Rule and its philosophized equivalent, the Kantian Categorical Imperative. Equally lost were those who sought, in faith, not rational guidance but emotional transport, those whom Drucker ridiculed as extolling “mystical experience . . . induced by the proper breathing exercises or by prolonged exposure to Bach.” The temptations of renunciation and flight took their most extreme form in the divorce in contemporary spiritual life between the “Yogi” and the “Commissar,” the reclusive purist and the amoral functionary, terms borrowed from Arthur Koestler, yet another Austro-Hungarian émigré. Most insidious of all were the Christian political parties in Europe, Protestant and Catholic, who with the advocates of “Social Christianity” in the United States were rendered impotent against all rivals by their failure to assert suffering, pain, and struggle as central to faith. Drucker betrayed here his deep neo-Lutheran revulsion against backsliding, compromise, meliorism, and the reluctance to grapple with the doctrine of sole fide in all its terrifying profundity. This was a vision with an unmistakably Protestant tinge: an existence in faith committed to “serious thinking and learning, of rigid discipline, of complete sobriety, of humbleness, and of the self's subordination to a higher, an absolute will.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Published six years later, in 1949, Drucker's Kierkegaard lecture has attracted historians’ interest because it contrasts so jarringly with the plunge into corporate management that he took in the interim. What Nils Gilman aptly terms the “existentialist roots of modern management” is echoed in Drucker's much later recollection that the Kierkegaard piece had been “written out of despair” during World War II “as an affirmation of the existential, the spiritual, the individual dimension of the Creature [sic].”Footnote ⁵⁹ It has since been seen as a clarion call to content ourselves with a bearable, good-enough, decently functioning society while we await salvation beyond death, focusing for the time being on “managerial techniques . . . to mitigate the psychological pain of the existential dilemma” that in the end we each must face alone.Footnote ⁶⁰

This reading has a lot of merit, to be sure. For one thing, it helps to further explain why Drucker focused increasingly on the ethical formation of the individual manager as his wider hopes for industrial community faded. Yet ever since the Stahl essay, Drucker had resolutely refused to treat faith as a private affair, still less as an individual existential struggle, or been willing to cordon off religion as a lonely, interior, solitary practice removed from the pressing problems of contemporary society. Indeed, his entire subsequent oeuvre consisted in helping managers to design and calibrate social rewards, incentives, and sanctions that would moralize and motivate the worker but that a true Kierkegaardian would have found spiritually hollow and lamentably evanescent. It seems far more plausible to assume that Drucker had deployed existentialism for more tactical reasons, as a means of rebutting all of his traditional antagonists in one fell swoop: socialists, psychologists, and mainline liberal Protestants who blithely subscribed to the perfectibility of humankind while forsaking the richer, more consoling, more multifaceted Christianity of which Kierkegaard was but one especially fearsome avatar. In the depths of war in 1943, Polanyi in particular must surely have seemed exasperatingly obtuse, with his naive endorsement of Rousseau's general will, his impatient dissatisfaction with Anglo-American capitalism, and his fervent hopes for social-democratic renewal. Drucker's bracing endorsement of Kierkegaard is thus best regarded as a strategic maneuver to shore up his Christian reading of the European humanist philosophical tradition. It marked the end, the summation, of what that tradition could tell him about the ethics of capitalism—and the beginning of his own independent contribution to that question.

The more practical, forward-looking project of building a better-managed capitalism in America was the focus of Drucker's influential next book. Concept of the Corporation confidently embedded his utopian vision for an industrial community in the religiously inspired society he found uniquely in America. The book is not really a study of General Motors; rather, it exploits this one case study to advance larger theoretical claims about industrial capitalism (one reason GM executives were so disappointed in the final product). Drucker presented GM's vaunted decentralization as a solution to the “curse of bigness,” one that not only overcame the dichotomy between economies of scale, on the one hand, and local flexibility and efficiency, on the other, but also offered realistic prospects of meaningful “industrial citizenship” for the worker as well as attainable advancement opportunities for managers and other leaders. This model corporation figured, in short, as the democratic capitalist mirror image of Nazi organizations.

Starting with Concept of the Corporation, and continuing through the rest of Drucker's major writings, explicit spiritual concerns steadily recede into the background, eventually to be replaced by an anodyne secular humanism that still traffics in teleological interpretations of Western civilization but in a less theologically inflected vein. And yet Christian ethical principles, precisely because they now became largely hidden, still provide the critical architectural supports to his larger intellectual enterprise. Tellingly, as in his two prior books, Drucker invokes Christianity at the precise midpoint of his argument, in an excursus on American beliefs.

America is fundamentally unlike Europe, Drucker claimed, because it never abandoned the Christian tradition that sees “social institutions as a means to an end beyond society.” The modern American project remains for him an instantiation of the ancient Augustinian project of ensuring that the City of Man ultimately remains subservient to the City of God. European observers fail to grasp this basic fact, mistaking America for a crassly materialistic country when in fact it has always been idealistically millenarian in equal measure, one reason that a country ostensibly dedicated to the “almighty dollar” is also fitfully prone to irrational outbursts of chiliastic energy. This was because, unlike post-medieval Europe, the United States had never embraced either Machiavelli (who reduced society to calculating brute force, sundering it from the Godly realm) or Hegel (who, secularizing Providence, deified society and remade it into the vessel of collective moral striving). America's political culture instead updated the fundamentally medieval synthesis that prevailed from the fifth through the fifteenth centuries before it was reinvented in turn by Luther and Calvin—and then decisively transposed to the advanced conditions of modern democratic capitalism.Footnote ⁶¹ Specifically, he continued, America had elevated belief in a universal middle-class society to the status of a creedal commitment. However implausible as a demographic reality, that commitment rested upon two principles that each flowed from “the Christian basis of the uniqueness of the individual”: the “promise of justice or, as we usually phrase it, of equal opportunities” and the promise of individual fulfillment, of ‘the good life.’” Both belonged to a specifically “Protestant tradition” that projected religious values into the social and economic sphere, granting individuals unparalleled chances at uplift and self-determination but also prescribing that their value to the larger society was wholly determined by one's activity, performance, and contribution, above all in economic terms.Footnote ⁶²

Again betraying a totalizing view of the corporation as the one socially constitutive organization of his epoch, Drucker proceeded to argue that the same creed that defines American society as a whole ought also to apply, in microcosm, to its representative social institution—the corporation, which, to be true to that creed, must be remade into a moral community without infringing upon its primary nature as a maximally efficient economic organization. He held out little hope that recreational or leisure activities outside the workplace could ever compensate for the diminution of the status, function, and livelihood of the individual under prevailing industrial conditions. By the same token, he completely overlooked the possibility that family, church, or voluntary associations could act as compensatory institutions to provide the dignity and belonging so painfully lacking on the factory floor—a deficit he would remedy late in life, when the concept of civil society enjoyed a revival in the 1980s and 1990s. For now, he continued to assert, in good Protestant fashion, that “individual dignity and fulfillment in an industrial society can only be given in and through work.” This meant, in turn, that the individual must be accommodated to the inevitably hierarchical nature of the large industrial corporation, one in which stark inequalities of “rank, power and income” cohabited with a spirit of common enterprise.

For managerial hierarchy to become morally legitimate, “everybody from the boss to the sweeper must be seen as equally necessary.”Footnote ⁶³ Two conditions must be fulfilled in order to make this social bargain tenable. First, no worker must be consigned to permanent inferiority and subordination. Each must instead be afforded chances at promotion, advancement, and leadership, not simply in the interest of morale and efficiency but as a fundamental corollary to the “Christian concept of human dignity.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Second, social policy must clear an open terrain for the corporate pursuit of profit. Statesmen, recognizing the weakness and imperfections of humanity, must nurture institutions that sublimate pride and the lust for power rather than suppress or confine these impulses. “The profit motive is the one way known to us to divert ambition from the socially destructive goal of power over men, into a socially constructive channel, that of economic production.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Anticipating an argument made much later by Albert O. Hirschman, Drucker neatly inscribed an entire tradition of Enlightenment thought, post-Christian in the sense that it rejected a view of profit as the sin of avarice, into what remains for him a fundamentally religious framework.Footnote ⁶⁶

What Drucker saw in America—and what America perhaps came to see in him—was a vibrant cohabitation of Christian piety, democratic values, and economic ambition that Europe had not so much lost as simply never known. In a 1954 article, “Organized Religion and the American Creed,” he reiterated his contention that the United States was the West's only truly religious society, pinpointing its fundamental difference from Europe in the ways religious and social organizations were unselfconsciously intertwined, with Girl Scout troops meeting in church basements, Rotary Club luncheons kicked off by the local minister, or the UAW union local far more connected to the Catholic Church than its nominally Christian counterpart back in Europe. Anticlericalism, too, was essentially unknown in a country where religion's social power was as unchallenged as its political power was constitutionally circumscribed. Drucker here deepened his prior argument for liberalism's basis in Christianity. “It is basic to the American creed that a society can only be religious if religion and the state are radically separated, and that the state can only be free if society is basically a religious society.” Because religion acknowledges and accepts the “kingdom of this world,” it gives free rein to “natural [secular] reason” to guide political action even while emancipating it from any higher need to furnish the metaphysical justifications that only faith can ultimately provide.Footnote ⁶⁷ America's genius in separating church and state, then, consisted not so much in limiting the power of government, or in erecting a secular bulwark against theocracy, as in emancipating religion from the clutches of political power so it can flourish in social life, indeed suffuse it so completely that social morality becomes the very fundament for political democracy.

In this short, suggestive piece, Drucker had apparently resolved, to his own satisfaction, the proper public role of religion in a liberal-democratic industrial society. Making clear his profound admiration for the role Christianity played in the civic life of his adopted country, he dispelled any lingering suspicion that he was a closet Kierkegaardian who, faced with irresolvable existential questions, had bracketed off religious values from his vision for a functioning industrial society. That said, his tantalizing treatment only engages the relation between religion and politics, and explicitly denies that American creed could provide a “spiritual answer to the crisis of our time.”Footnote ⁶⁸ He says nothing about capitalism and management, leaving his views on the subject as of the mid-1950s unclear.

MANAGEMENT AS A LIBERAL ART

Two questions remain, then. Had Drucker abandoned the hope, conceived in the 1930s, of infusing Christian precepts into industrial capitalism—or seen it perfectly realized in postwar America, leaving that job complete? And did business elites and his other devotees confer such towering stature on Drucker because of—or in indifference to—the residual aura of spiritual, moral, and ethical commitment that continued to animate his thinking and writing after he made his fame as a management guru? To put these two questions together: did Drucker help in some small measure to moralize and legitimate postwar American capitalism by drawing on a Christian faith widely shared among the reading public? Answers to these questions are worthy of a separate study, but scattered clues from his later career permit at least some provisional conclusions.

Having embraced the American creed in the mid-1950s, Drucker put aside overt engagement with religion in the remainder of his major writings. In the coda to Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957), the Atomic Age treatise where he confronted the power of knowledge either to remake society or to destroy it, he did prophesy a revival of religion and a return to spiritual values in the West. But he conceded that simple piety was no match for the complexity of the technological, political, and social challenges faced by “the new post-modern world”: “To be able to die as a man today it is still enough, as it has been before, to know and to believe that ‘Blessed are those which die in the Lord henceforth.’ But spiritual existence, however profound, does not by itself give the answer to the new questions of absolute knowledge and absolute power.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Training his sights now on the problems of the future rather than the past, he now wrote almost exclusively about business management and about the broader economic and educational trends shaping the knowledge society.

Drucker invested significantly more of his ethical and religious aspirations in his consulting practice. In the 1980s and 1990s, increasingly disillusioned with Reagan-era capitalism, he began working with and writing about “third-sector” institutions—charities, churches, hospitals, and other social-welfare organizations that filled the gap between the state and the corporation. The same management principles that he had developed for business life could also be applied to nonprofit civil-society organizations, he maintained, and with far more direct moral benefit. Among his pro bono clients were the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and the Girl Scouts, as well as some of the key architects of late twentieth-century mass evangelical Protestantism. Bob Buford, the Texas cable television entrepreneur-turned-venture philanthropist who befriended Drucker in the early 1980s, founded the Leadership Network to train Christian leaders to build and manage innovative churches. In Drucker & Me, Buford tells how the two men collaborated to support Bill Hybels and Rick Warren, legendary pastors in suburban Chicago and Orange County, California respectively, whose congregations grew to more than 20,000 parishioners apiece. Warren, whose “purpose-driven church”—now a giant operation with global reach—applies management by objectives to faith-based organizations, attributed this quotation to a man he called his “mentor”: “The most significant sociological phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. The most significant sociological phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century has been the development of the large pastoral church—of the mega-church. It is the only organization that is actually working in our society.”Footnote ⁷⁰ No conceivable organization could better embody the fusion of Protestant religiosity, corporate-style management, and social community than the late twentieth-century evangelical mega-church, and Drucker played a critical role at its institutional inception.

When asked in 1989 why he had turned from management to religion, Drucker replied, “it's the other way around . . . I became interested in management because of my interest in religion and institutions.”Footnote ⁷¹ Starting with the Stahl essay, Drucker had wrestled with the question whether and how Christianity could survive modernity. He went on to argue that ever since the original society of Spiritual Man had been transcended, Christian values of freedom and equality had continually been reinvented on a new plane—culminating in the contemporary United States. Nothing about the spiritual challenges of the twentieth century dissuaded him from that belief. “It is simply not true that Christianity is dying in this country,” he told a conference of evangelicals in 1991. “The Gospel is not being changed. The mission is still that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”Footnote ⁷² And yet, his quixotic turn to evangelicalism in late life reveals just how far Drucker had retreated from the hopes he had once placed in remaking the capitalist enterprise at its core. Even while the entire bent of his managerial philosophy focused on the organization as a community larger than the individual, Drucker ultimately devolved on the manager's individual capacity to navigate a course through large, often amoral, business organizations. Only by educating moral managers could the intractable tension between transcendent values and the mission-driven business enterprise be overcome.

In embracing the resolutely unintellectual (if not anti-intellectual) piety that came to define conservative evangelicalism in postwar America, Drucker had become unmoored from the rich humanistic traditions of European Protestantism. What took the place of Protestant intellectualism in Drucker's later treatises on social forecasting and managerial practice was an insistence on liberal education as the fundamental cornerstone of the new knowledge society. Maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the great men and great ideas of Western civilization, he now engaged that tradition in a completely secular spirit, as a repository of humanistic wisdom to be dipped into for useful insights. By the late 1980s, Drucker had even christened management a “liberal art,” as perhaps the highest expression of a humanistic education:

Both by precept and by example, Drucker held that for a flexible intellect with capacious learning and a refined sensibility, there was no higher calling than that undertaken by the enlightened manager of human talent in a society populated by complex organizations. A final assessment of Drucker and his wider influence depends a great deal on what one makes of this ideal—whether one sees in him an apologist for the business world's most callous and unsavory practices, an idealist too naive to realize that capitalism and morality belonged to separate spheres, an existentialist who ultimately accepted that the two could never be meaningfully reconciled, or a Christian humanist who accurately appraised the potentials for both moral and technical knowledge in managing the problems of contemporary society.