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to rout for two generations the conservative movement led by Drucker's
champion, Hamilton. Nor does he quote Jefferson's reaction to Shays'
Rehellion: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing....
God
forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. • • •
What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty
must
be
refreshened from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants. It is its natural manure."
The way Drucker tugs and sweats to wrench the American revolution
into his conservative pattern in fact, reminds me of the similar operations
conducted by the Communists in the Popular Front period, when no
issue of the
New Masses
was complete without an essay on the striking
resemblance of Washington to Lenin, the Minute Men to the International
Brigade, and Aaron Burr to Trotsky.
As applied to the world of today, Drucker's conservative approach
is
either meaningless or else a cover for big-business reaction and eventual
fascism. He insists that the separation of political and economic power,
and the system of checks-and-balances provided in our Constitution are
necessary conditions for freedom. But he never touches on the real
problem, which is how these principles can be applied to the social
etructure that exists today. The rock on which his thesis splits is the
concentration of social, economic and political power in the hands of
a big-business ruling class, so that no such harmoniously balanced
system
can be
peacefully
established. (And Drucker is a man of peace.)
Furthermore, to advocate the independence of the economic from the
political sphere without proposing the expropriation of the big business
oligarchy-and Drucker makes no such proposal-is simply to create an
ideological shield for big business against any control by the ·state. The
kind of freedom Drucker is interested in is the kind the Liberty League
used
to preach, and his book might be summarily, and not entirely fairly,
described as a Hegelian restatement of the League's doctrine. The essen·
tials of Drucker's position were sketched out many years ago in the
chapter on "Juridicial Defense" in Mosca's
The Ruling Class,
and it is
perhaps worth noting that Mosca, for all his sincere love of freedom,
wound up as a Fascist senator.
There is a lot of talk about morals and ethics in
The Future of
Industrial Man,
and Drucker professes to
be
defending human values
against the inhuman absolutism of practically every progressive tendency
in
the science and politics of the last two centuries. (In a way, I suppose
fm
the real conservative in this argument.) But as a good Christian,
lhouldn't he pay a little more attention to the mote in his own eye before
attempting to cast out the beam from the eyes of Rousseau, Darwin, Marx,
Fmd and Lenin? I notice, for example, that he is extremely sensitive
to
the totalitarian tendencies in the Great French Revolution, but that
he
says nothing about the brutality, ignorance and corruption of the
deeply religious feudal society it overthrew. He is horrified by
the
dlousands guillotined during the Terror, but he says nothing about the
llillions who died of slow starvation and inhuman over-work in England
