THE END OF ECONOMIC MAN

A text booky title which will make the general reading public gun-shy. Too bad, since this is one of the best presentations of the basic causes and meaning of Fascism. Drucker dismisses the popular fallacies that Fascism was created through propaganda, force, etc., and gets down to bed rock causes, the despair of the masses when the old spiritual and social order collapsed, when both Marxist and capitalistic economy failed, when war or fear of war and unemployment became rampant. He shows up the ideology of fascism, as purely negative and destructive. He analyzes economy under fascism; anti-Semitism as a means of attacking the bourgeois class and facilitating fascism thereby; Germany's relations to Russia (he makes a German-Russian entente a near actuality, socially, ideologically, economically). To offset Fascism he offers a new creed, order based on freedom, economic man. He claims that people cling to Fascism only because the collapse of Marxism, socialism and of capitalism left them no other issue. Not light reading, but constructive, challenging, worth while.