Non-fiction: The Future of Industrial Man

Overview
Peter Drucker’s 1942 treatise argues that the survival of a free society in the age of large-scale industry depends on rebuilding community and meaning inside its central institutions. He calls for a “functioning society” in which individuals gain legitimate status, participation, and responsibility through their roles in organizations, especially the modern corporation. Against both laissez-faire atomization and collectivist command, he sketches a conservative social philosophy grounded in pluralism, self-government, and moral purpose.

Context and Aim
Written during World War II and following his analysis of fascism’s rise, the book reads as a blueprint for a postwar order that could resist both totalitarianism and the failures of unmoored capitalism. Drucker’s diagnosis is that mass society broke traditional bonds of status and belonging, leaving isolated individuals vulnerable to ideological movements promising identity and authority. The task is to reconstitute community without sacrificing liberty, by anchoring it in the concrete functions people perform and the institutions they inhabit.

From Status to Function
Preindustrial society conferred status by birth; industrial society destroyed inherited status but failed to replace it with durable membership. Drucker argues that modern legitimacy must rest on function: what one contributes, and how that contribution is recognized and integrated. “Function” alone, however, is not enough. It must be embedded in institutions that provide standing, rights, and obligations. A functioning society therefore organizes social life so that roles confer both accountability and dignity, preventing the drift toward either anomic individualism or collectivist absorption.

The Corporation and Industrial Self-Government
For Drucker the corporation is not merely an economic machine; it is a social institution whose legitimacy hinges on enabling “industrial citizenship.” He advocates constitutional structures inside enterprises, clear purposes, representation of different interests, forums for participation, and safeguards of due process, so that workers and managers share responsibility for results. Profit is necessary and a decisive test of performance, yet the corporation’s social purpose is to create goods, services, and meaningful work while integrating people into a community of achievement. Unions remain important but cannot substitute for internal self-government; antagonistic bargaining alone cannot supply status or shared purpose. What is needed is organized cooperation around results, with authority derived from competence and service.

Pluralism, Community, and the State
Drucker’s political vision is pluralist. Between the individual and the state stand a range of autonomous, function-based communities, firms, professions, schools, localities, churches, each with its own jurisdiction and self-governing norms. The state’s role is limited yet vital: to set the rule of law, protect rights, prevent monopoly of power, and recognize the legitimacy of intermediate institutions. He rejects both the fiction of a self-regulating market that needs no social framework and the tyranny of centralized planning that dissolves free institutions. Social order emerges when multiple centers of authority balance one another, and when membership in institutions is anchored in responsibility and performance.

Implications and Legacy
The book prefigures Drucker’s later ideas about management, objectives, and the “society of organizations.” It frames management as a public trust, not a private technique, and treats the enterprise as a community bound by mission and accountability. By insisting that status and freedom must be rebuilt through function, participation, and ethical purpose, Drucker offers a durable answer to the dislocations of modernity and a path toward an industrial order that is both productive and humane.