20 Peter F. Drucker Quotes on Society

Peter F. Drucker quotes on society

2. This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. ...the most striking growth will be in 'knowledge technologists:' computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. ...They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as 'professionals.' Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social--and perhaps also political--force over the next decades. -- 'The next society' Economist.com (November 2001)

4. ...all earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it. -- The New Pluralism Leader to Leader, No. 14 (Fall 1999)

5. ...human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities... Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens... What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city. Civilizing the City, Leader to Leader, No. 7 (Winter 1998)

10. The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights--and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans--signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century. We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world. -- Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995)

16. That knowledge has become the resource, rather than a resource, is what makes our society 'post-capitalist.' -- Post-Capitalist Society p. 45 (1993)

17. If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the 'bourgeois' under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource. -- Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

24. One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. That is why there is an enormous surge in the number of unpaid staff, volunteers. The needs are not going to go away. Business is not going to take up the slack, and government cannot. -- 'New Priorities' Dancing Toward The Future, Context Institute, (1992)

34. In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions 'against' rather than revolutions 'for'... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration. -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

38. Tomorrow everybody--or practically everybody--will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man. -- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)

50. The fundamental reality for every worker, from sweeper to executive vice-president, is the eight hours or so that he spends on the job. In our society of organizations, it is the job through which the great majority has access to achievement, to fulfillment, and to community. -- The Practice of Management (1954)

52. Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society. The Practice of Management (1954)

58. If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression. Note: compare Dwight Eisenhower's January, 1961 Farewell Speech Concept of the Corporation (1945)

59. No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate. -- The Future of Industrial Man (1942)

62. We have only one alternative: either to build a functioning industrial society or see freedom itself disappear in anarchy and tyranny. -- The Future of Industrial Man (1942)

63. Political freedom is neither easy nor automatic, neither pleasant nor secure. It is the responsibility of the individual for the decisions of society as if they were his own decisions--as in moral truth and accountability they are. -- The Future of Industrial Man (1942)

68. Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior... -- The End of Economic Man (1939)

69. Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order. ...catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society. -- The End of Economic Man (1939)

70. [the masses] ...must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. 'Higher bread prices,' 'lower bread prices,' 'unchanged bread prices' have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason. -- The End of Economic Man (1939)

75. Legitimate is a power when it is justified by an ethical or metaphysical principle that has been accepted by a society.

81. Limiting access to opportunity to those with a diploma is a crass denial of all fundamental beliefs--beliefs, by the way, that have been amply validated by experience. ...[it] restricts, oppresses, and injures individual and society alike.