Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New "Post-Modern" World

by Peter F. Drucker

Landmarks of Tomorrow forecasts changes in three major areas of human life and experience. The first part of the book treats the philosophical shift from a Cartesian universe of mechanical cause to a new universe of pattern, purpose, and process. Drucker discusses the power to organize men of knowledge and high skill for joint effort and performance as a key component of this change. The second part of the book sketches four realities that challenge the people of the free an educated society, economic development, the decline of government, and the collapse of Eastern culture. The final section of the book is concerned with the spiritual reality of human existence. These are seen as basic elements in late twentieth-century society. In his new introduction, Peter Drucker revisits the main findings of Landmarks of Tomorrow and assesses their validity in relation to today's concerns. It is a book that will be of interest to sociologists, economists, and political theorists.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Management

290 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was a writer, management consultant and university professor. His writing focused on management-related literature. Peter Drucker made famous the term knowledge worker and is thought to have unknowingly ushered in the knowledge economy, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political economy. George Orwell credits Peter Drucker as one of the only writers to predict the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.

The son of a high level civil servant in the Habsburg empire, Drucker was born in the chocolate capital of Austria, in a small village named Kaasgraben (now a suburb of Vienna, part of the 19th district, Döbling). Following the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, there were few opportunities for employment in Vienna so after finishing school he went to Germany, first working in banking and then in journalism. While in Germany, he earned a doctorate in International Law. The rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933. After spending four years in London, in 1937 he moved permanently to the United States, where he became a university professor as well as a freelance writer and business guru. In 1943 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University.