THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 |C1
When
Corporations
ChangedTheir
SocialRole—
AndUpended
OurPolitics
What brought about this dramatic shift? To un-
derstand that, it’s necessary first to recall what the
American economic order used to be and what
made it come apart.
A good place to begin is at Bennington College
in Vermont during the worst years of World War
II. Two émigré Viennese intellectuals, Peter
Drucker and Karl Polanyi, had holed up there to
teach. Drucker, who went on to become probably
the world’s most famous management consultant,
was then in his early 30s, orderly and ambitious;
Polanyi, more than a decade older, was messy and
voluble and considerably to the left of Drucker po-
litically. Each of them was working on a book pro-
posing a large social vision for the second half of
the 20th century.
Through the long Vermont winters, Drucker and
Polanyi would trudge between each other’s houses
in the snow so they could argue about their books.
Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” treated the
rise of unimpeded modern capitalism as a vast, long-
running social disaster. “At the heart of the Indus-
trial Revolution of the 18th century,” he wrote,
“there was an almost miraculous improvement in
the tools of production, which was accompanied by
a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the com-mon people.” The only possible lasting solution to
the problem of capitalism, he believed, was for gov-
ernment to make itself such a forceful presence that
the economy would be made the servant of society
instead of society being the servant of the economy.
Drucker’s book was called “The Future of Indus-
trial Man: A Conservative Approach.” The subtitle
was apt. He saw the end product of the Industrial
Revolution as the modern corporation, which was an
institution he very much admired. Drucker thought
government control of the economy would lead to
“centralized bureaucratic despotism.” Instead, the
corporation, on its own rather than under the gov-
ernment’s direction, must invent something hereto-
fore unknown: “a functioning industrial society.”
Not long after “The Future of Industrial Man”
was published, Drucker was surprised to get a call
Please turn to the next pageMr. Lemann is a staff writer at the New Yorker
and the dean emeritus of Columbia University
Graduate School of Journalism. This essay is
adapted from his new book, “Transaction Man:
The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the
American Dream,” which will be published on
Sept. 10 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.ILLUSTRATION BY PEP MONTSERRAT; ALAMY (BOOKS)
TABLE TALKSnacking between
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CULTURE|SCIENCE|POLITICS|HUMORREVIEW
Return to Gilead
Margaret Atwood writes a
sequel to her ‘Handmaid’s
Tale’: a profile & review C6-7Empire Inc.
A history of the British
East India Co.
Books C7Large companies once offered
workers lifetime security
and generous benefits. Then
they stopped, setting the stage
for our populist moment.
By Nicholas Lemann
P
residential elections in the U.S. are traditionally about economics.
Next year’s vote, and others around the world, have the feeling, how-
ever, of being not just about how the economy is performing in the
moment but about something more fundamental: the economic sys-
tem. What drove the rise of Donald Trump and politicians like him
elsewhere was the promise that a new government with new policies could restore
a fondly remembered (by some) economic and social order from the past. Those
politicians’ opponents on the left have a similar interest, though with completely
different specifics, in remaking the political economy. It seems like centuries ago,
though it was actually only four or five election cycles, when immediate economic
conditions were a political issue but not the basic design of the economy.