Page 156 - The Drucker Lectures

The New Priorities [ 137

the most extreme manifestation. One of my first good jobs was
as the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in Moscow in 1929,
which by the way cured me of ever becoming a left-winger. That
was the year Stalin liquidated 20 million kulaks, and I still wake
up at night with the screaming jeebees and nightmares. But that
was only the extreme manifestation of a worldwide belief that by
changing society, you could change the old Adam and create the
new Adam, the perfect man. And that belief is gone. It peaked
in this country in the Kennedy years. And now it’s gone. The
belief in salvation by society is gone.
Whether we are going to come back to an age in which faith
again becomes important, or whether we are entering an age in
which there is no such thing as any kind of belief, I don’t know.
But we no longer believe in salvation by society. There is no way
of restoring it.
Another thing is exceedingly important. For 200 years, the
question was: What should government do? In 1792, a very bright
cookie asked the question: What can government do? Nobody
listened. For 200 years, the only question was what government
should do, not what it can do. As recently as 1944, a very eminent
social philosopher and economist [Friedrich von Hayek] pub-
lished a book called The Road to Serfdom. The author only said
that if government does it, this means tyranny. Nobody doubted
what government could do. The only difference was between
countries like ours, in which we said government had better be
limited not for the sake of efficiency but for the sake of freedom,
and countries that put efficiency first. And that also peaked, I
would say, around the late 1960s. But now, “What can govern-
ment do?” is again the question.
In 1968, I published a book [The Age of Discontinuity] in
which I coined the word privatization. Government would never
privatize, yet it was very clear that we had reached the end of the
question of what government should do. The question “what can