The influence of Peter F. Drucker is hard to overestimate; postwar America, indeed the postwar world, might have looked dramatically different but for the contributions of this premier theorist of business management.

The influence of Peter F. Drucker is hard to overestimate; postwar America, indeed the postwar world, might have looked dramatically different but for the contributions of this premier theorist of business management. His first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) received a positive review from no less a figure than Winston Churchill; and his reputation would only continue to grow. The Wall Street Journal, for which he frequently wrote about management, has hailed him as "the Shakespeare of [that] genre"; the New York Times notes that he espoused some of his most important views "decades before they became so widespread they were taken for common sense." Drucker knew that the free market was better than any economic system that relied on command and control. But he focused less on the fact that the market worked, more on how it worked--and how it could be made to work better. Peter Drucker has died at age 95. R.I.P.