Page 49 - The Drucker Lectures

30 [ The Drucker Lectures

a historical yesterday, the eighteenth century, did technological
innovations emerge which were comparable in their scope and
impact to those early changes in technology, tools, and processes.
Indeed, the technology of man remained essentially unchanged
until the eighteenth century insofar as its impact on human life
and human society is concerned.
But the irrigation civilizations were not only one of the great
ages of technology. They represent also mankind’s greatest and
most productive age of social and political innovation. The his-
torian of ideas is prone to go back to Ancient Greece, to the Old
Testament prophets, or to the China of the early dynasties for
the sources of the beliefs that still move men to action. But our
fundamental social and political institutions antedate political
philosophy by several thousand years. They all were conceived
and established in the early dawn of the irrigation civilizations.
Anyone interested in social and governmental institutions and in
social and political processes will increasingly have to go back to
those early irrigation cities. And, thanks to the work of archae-
ologists and linguists during the last 50 years, we increasingly
have the information, we increasingly know what the irrigation
civilizations looked like, we increasingly can go back to them for
our understanding both of antiquity and of modern society.
The irrigation city first established government as a distinct
and permanent institution. Even more basic: The irrigation city
first conceived of man as a citizen. It had to go beyond the nar-
row bounds of tribe and clan and had to weld people of very dif-
ferent origins and blood into one community. The irrigation city
also first developed a standing army. It had to, for the farmer was
defenseless and vulnerable and, above all, immobile.
It was in the irrigation city that social classes first developed.
It needed people permanently engaged in producing the farm
products on which all the city lived; it needed farmers. It needed
soldiers to defend them. And it needed a governing class with