The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition

By Peter F. Drucker

Book Overview

Periods of great social change reveal a tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation. The twentieth century has witnessed both radical alteration and tenacious durability in social organization, politics, economics, and art. To comprehend these changes as history and as guideposts to the future, Peter F. Drucker has, over a lifetime, pursued a discipline that he terms social ecology. The writings brought together in The Ecological Vision define the discipline as a sustained inquiry into the man-made environment and an active effort at maintaining equilibrium between change and conservation.

The chapters in this volume range over a wide array of disciplines and subject matter. They are linked by a common concern with the interaction of the individual and society, and a common perspective that views economics, technology, politics, and art as dimensions of social experience and expressions of social value. Included here are profiles of such figures as Henry Ford, John C. Calhoun, Soren Kierkegaard, and Thomas Watson; analyses of the economics of Keynes and Schumpeter;and explorations of the social functions of business, management, information, and technology. Drucker's chapters on Japan examine the dynamics of cultural and economic change and afford striking comparisons with similar processes in the West.

In the concluding chapter, "Reflections of a Social Ecologist," Drucker traces the development of his discipline through such intellectual antecedents as Alexis de Tocqueville, Walter Bagehot, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He illustrates the ecological vision, an active, practical, and moral approach to social questions. Peter Drucker summarizes a lifetime of work and exemplifies the communicative clarity that are requisites of all intellectual enterprises. His book will be of interest to economists, business people, foreign affairs specialists, and intellectual historians.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765807254
• ISBN13: 9780765807250
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 474 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A good reprint.

This book was originally published in hard cover in 1993 and is quite expensive. This is a paperback reprint and the price is much cheaper. The essays collected in the book were written over a period of more than forty years. They show other concerns of Drucker other than his achievement in management.

Deep, deep insights

The writing is as great as ever by Drucker, I don't understand why this book is less popular than others.For example, the essay on Japanese culture and why Japan will fail economically was written almost ten years ago, and it is the deepest and best analysis I have seen. The time was 1993, everybody in Japan including the monks that Peter talked to was talking about economics, yet Peter rightly sensed that the problem of Japan was cultural and social rather than economic.