Ma Xiangyang/Wen When 27-year-old Peter F. Drucker landed on the New York docks in the spring of 1937 with a suitcase, he was a young man with new hopes. Along the way, he moved from the United Kingdom to the United States, where he worked as a correspondent for several newspapers in England and Scotland and provided financial advisory services to several European financial institutions, including the United Kingdom. Behind him is the "paralyzed" Continent of Europe abandoned by the young man.
At this time, Drucker had not yet gained a prominent reputation in the future. As early as 1933, before Hitler really came to power in Germany, the Austrian keen observer conceived a book on the "Origins of Totalitarianism," which he later titled "The End of the Economic Man" and published in the United States in 1939.
The End of the Economic Man is the debut of a series of works by Drucker, in which Drucker uses the perspective of the "bystander" that he is best at to comprehensively analyze the historical, cultural, and socio-commercial soil of the emergence of Nazi totalitarianism in the 1930s, and even accurately predicts the Nazi final "social solution" - the plan to slaughter all the Jews in Europe, and the subsequent compromise between Hitler and Stalin.
Today, nearly a century later, revisiting the basic judgments of The End of the Economic Man, you cannot fail to marvel at Drucker's social analysis and depth of philosophical speculation. In fact, this pamphlet can not only help readers look back and understand the turbulent Continent of Europe, which was mired in two world wars at the beginning of the last century, but also use it to analyze the chaotic and dangerous post-pandemic world we live in today, although time has passed, it is still not outdated, it is still as wise and vivid as it is.
How to understand the "despair of the masses"
One of the most insightful journalists, Drucker's writing is characterized by a penchant for the systematic analysis of social history. The End of the Economic Man, which focuses on the origins of totalitarianism in Europe in the last century and compares it to similar themes in the same period, is neither the allegorical and novelist critique of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) nor the bag-dropping, metaphysical philosophical framework of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951). Drucker was Drucker because he always observed, thought about, and documented society with a "social" perspective—the social changes in the fields of commerce, history, and thought in a particular period.
In Drucker's view, a society is concrete, vivid, and real because each society is based on a concept that is used to "encompass the essence, social function, and status of man."
Whether this concept is a true portrayal of human nature or not, it must truly reflect the essence of society, and society also recognizes and identifies itself according to this concept. This concept presents what it considers to be the defining and most important category of human activity in society and serves as a symbol of the fundamental principles and beliefs of society. "The Continent of Europe before World War I was mired in the defeat and incompetence of capitalism, which finally provided nihilistic intellectual soil and real motivation for the emergence of the utopian concept of Nazism.
The End of the Homo Economics: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Peter Drucker / by
Hong Shimin Zhao Zhiheng / Translation
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
August 2015
In Drucker's writing, in Western Europe in the 1930s, after the Great Depression, the collapse of old values and social systems, and the failure to establish new ideological systems and value authorities in time, fascist totalitarianism found a historical gap and spread rapidly in Europe.
According to Drucker's observational analysis, the totalitarianism represented by the Nazis at that time, in addition to being welcomed in a few Western European countries such as Germany and Italy, actually encountered universal hostility. To most people in Europe, the cruel, radical and hateful slogans and creeds that totalitarianism brings are undoubtedly frightening, worrying and abhorrent. Although Nazi fascism emerged as a so-called new "revolutionary force", unlike all previous European revolutions, even the minorities in the "old-order countries" could not accept the purpose, spirit and goals of totalitarianism. None of these disadvantages, however, prevented totalitarianism from rapidly gaining social dominance and spreading steadily to other regions until it finally dominated Europe.
In Drucker's view, European history is essentially a history of humanity projecting the concept of freedom and equality onto the level of social existence and reality. However, fascism is distinguished from any progressive revolution in European history in three ways:
Fascism no longer contains any positive ideology, but blindly rejects, suppresses and denies all European traditions, including freedom and equality, which is the most important cornerstone of tradition.
Fascism not only criticizes all old ideas, but also denies the basic principles of the establishment of all previous political and social systems, as well as the legitimacy of the governing bodies established on the basis of which they are established, and even more rarely regards absolute power as the sole legitimacy.
The ordinary people believe in fascism not because they believe that fascism is to be a positive creed, but because they no longer believe in such so-called positive commitments.
In addition to these three symptoms, Nazi fascism also hid a peculiar symptom, that is, to do what it likes — to the psychology of the masses. In Germany before Hitler came to power, almost no one would have believed the promises of the Nazis, and even the most fanatical Nazi leaders, including Hitler and Goebbels, were indifferent to the Nazi creed, just as Goebbels said every time he heard people cheer for a brilliant lie at a mass rally: "Of course! You know it's all propaganda. ”
The Nazis laughed at their own creeds, just as they did with the famous internal document that outlined the blueprints of the Nazi state, the "Baushan" project, and non-Nazi party members openly ridiculed them, and the Nazi ideas were so absurd that the masses still threw themselves into the arms of the Nazis.
This mass psychology is so strange and complex, but it is so ordinary, because it is everywhere in our daily lives, and it is used every day without knowing it— in times of crisis, people are willing to believe what they do not believe, to pray, to hope and believe that miracles will happen, and that they can escape the disaster.
After the First World War, the European continent was in ruins, and the collapse of the old order did not bring about any new order designed and established in the ruins of capitalism. According to Drucker's analysis and observation, people throw themselves into the arms of fascism precisely because of the absurdity, contradiction and impossibility of the fascist creed—"because if you are trapped in the torrent of the past, unable to go back to the road, and there is a white wall ahead that obviously cannot be climbed, you can only hope that magic will miraculously save you." ”
In the end, drucker, the master of thought, stood on the "paralyzed" European continent, and after experiencing the deepest and darkest pain, he shouted out the voices of countless people: "I believe, because of absurdity!" ”
From "spiritual man" to "economic man"
The city of Berlin in the 1920s, like the kaleidoscope presented in the German tv series "Babylon Berlin", was once a testing ground for various social trends. Capitalism, Marxism, syndicalism and Nazi totalitarianism were all there. As the nihilistic evil flower that formed on the ruins of capitalism, mussolini and Hitler emerged to take advantage of the ideological vacuum after the Great Depression in Europe.
In order to claim "true democracy," Mussolini and Hitler allowed society to remain only a series of empty cultural forms, while at the same time promising a purely utopian society through violent revolution, at the cost of the abandonment of the traditional values of freedom and democracy throughout Europe and the extra harsh rule that it was illegal to vote against the Nazi dictators.
Looking at the history of Europe, it is believed that freedom and equality for all people are the essence of European thought. Drucker argues that Christian thought in the 11th-13th centuries was a concept of "spiritual man", and that man's place in the world and society was seen as his place in the spiritual order, a historical epoch about people having the right to pursue equal freedom from the spiritual level.
After the collapse of the spiritual order, the idea of freedom and equality began to shift to the intellectual level. Lutheranism encourages everyone to understand the doctrines of the Bible with their own understanding and to have a direct dialogue with God. In Drucker's view, this was a moment of major transformation in the "Intellectual Man" order—people began to pursue more authentic freedom and equality at the social level, and people first became "political people" and later evolved into "economic man". The concept of the "economic man," after being blessed by Adam Smith and his school of thought, became the most fashionable social concept of the 20th century. As a fictional character, the economic man is encouraged to be treacherous, cunning, unscrupulous, and to base everyone's actions on the basis of economic benefit maximization. This school of thought is convinced that economic freedom can lead to social equality and that there is no end to economic growth.
In Drucker's view, Europeans' desire to pursue the social ideal of freedom and equality through capitalism was disillusioned as early as the European Revolution of 1848. After 200 years of development, capitalism has brought material peaks to Europe without the equal society it promised, and even formal equality such as "equal opportunity" has disappeared. The bankruptcy of the equal myth of economic freedom has not only disillusioned the proletariat' faith, but even the middle class, which has received the greatest economic and social benefits, has not been spared.
The rout of all these experiments of social thought, which was active in Western Europe, provided a breeding ground for the emergence of totalitarian ideas in Europe in the 1930s. In the beginning, fascism was only a ghost wandering in Europe, but in the mid-1930s, the Nazis began to attack the ideological sphere, denying European tradition while declaring that "power itself is its legitimacy", that is, all power is self-evident, as Mussolini claimed: "action precedes thought", and revolution should precede the development of new creeds or new economic orders.
Throughout European history, all the revolutions of the past have taken place in the field of knowledge or society (or both), and the "great historical figures" are at best fuses or instruments. But in fascism, the praise for the dictator of power became "Mussolini made history." At the time of the "action" (revolution) proclaimed by the fascists, they did not develop any positive social creeds or a new socio-economic order.
The inevitable result is that totalitarians take the negation of everything as their political programme, while also negating essentially opposing ideas or tendencies. As Drucker said, "Fascism is opposed to both freedom and conservatism; anti-religion and anti-atheism; anti-capitalism and anti-socialism; anti-war and anti-peace; anti-big business, and against the skilled workers and shopkeepers who are considered superfluous." ”
In this way, Nazism began to elaborately promise a contradictory, non-existent utopian society. In 1932, Goebbels claimed in a public speech that farmers would earn more from growing grain, that workers would be able to buy cheaper bread, and that bakeries and grocery stores would have higher wholesale and retail surpluses. During this period, Hitler, in a public speech, promised the owners of very class-conscious metalmakers that as long as Nazism existed, they would be able to regain their right to operate.
Eventually, almost all factory owners and many laborers became nazi believers. Drucker once witnessed a public speech by a Nazi demagogue at a rally of frenzied peasant cheers, declaring: "We don't need bread to be too cheap, we don't need bread to be too expensive, we don't need bread to be the same price — we just want the price of bread that belongs to National Socialism." ”
When a society leaves only empty cultural forms and is promised a pure utopia that does not exist, totalitarianism begins to grow. This is the basic experience of the fascist era: the old order is no longer legitimate and authentic, the new creed and the new order have not yet been established, and the world constructed by the totalitarians can only become irrational and demonically evil.
By this time, the end of the economic man had come, but the Europeans had not yet realized it. At the special moment when the old and new worlds alternated at the beginning of the last century, the world had not yet appeared to construct a new order, the traditional spiritual authority, including the traditional Christian church, had begun to decline, and people could not follow and develop new forms and mechanisms to organize social entities and achieve the goal of new social construction.
People in the midst of two social changes naturally suffer doubling down on their pain and confusion. As the Danish writer Kierkegaard describes it, each individual feels like he or she is just an isolated atom in modern society. On the one hand, it is no longer possible to maintain the connotations of the old order because it brings about a spiritual confusion that the masses cannot tolerate; on the other hand, it is impossible to immediately abandon the old forms and mechanisms, because doing so would also create social and economic chaos, which would be intolerable.
In Europe in the 1930s, there was an urgent need to find a way to give new meanings, to convey new reasons, and at the same time to maintain the old external forms as much as possible, which was not only the desire of the desperate masses, but also the task of fascism at that time.
It's totalitarian turn. According to past historical experience, the glory of any revolution lies in the fact that it must break the old appearance and create new forms, new mechanisms and new slogans. The fascists, in the spirit of opposing all freedom and hostile to all rational principles, are doomed to wait only for miracles to happen before it can accomplish their task—on the one hand, to maintain external forms (such as revolutions) that summon demons, and on the other hand, to propose a new connotation capable of expelling or re-rationalizing the same group of demons.
In the face of this irreconcilable contradiction, fascism found that in their deepest despair reason was untrustworthy, truth was false, and lies became true, so that "expensive bread", "cheap bread" and "bread of constant price" could no longer convince the desperate masses, and they could only create a "bread" that did not belong to any of the above prices, pinning their hopes on a "bread" that no one had ever seen and that reason proved to be false, in other words, Hope is on a miracle.
Finally, Drucker concludes, the European masses threw themselves into the arms of Mussolini and Hitler because "the magician is a magician because he overrides all rational conventions, subverts all laws of logic, and does supernatural things in supernatural ways." At that time, the European public desperately needed a magician to create a social miracle to quell their intolerable fears. ”
In his biography The Spectator, Drucker looks back at the moment when the 27-year-old had just landed on the American continent and uses the phrase "the sunset years of selfless innocence" to describe the transition between the old and the new world. In it, he wrote emotionally: "I think there is no period in social history like this era (the United States in the last years of Roosevelt's New Deal before World War II), mixed with hope and disappointment, intellectual fanaticism, intransigence and diversity, which shocked young people who landed in North America from 'paralyzed' Europe in 1937. For Europe at the time. The clichés of 'pre-war' (i.e., before 1914) were the only options, but terror, totalitarianism, and loss. ”
I don't know how Drucker would have explained it if he had lived another century, to see today's historical changes: an international system torn apart by the pandemic and ideology, a nationalist awakening in parallel with globalization and national protectionism, a crumbling and equally clichéd "paralyzed" North America, and, of course, a world in which pluralism is drifting apart...