At the same time however, Drucker was already making preparations for his departure from Germany. He also decided "to make sure that I could not waver and stay. The day after my evening with my friend Berthold, I began to write a book that would make it impossible for the Nazis to have anything to do with me, and equally impossible for me to have anything to do with them. It was a short book, hardly more than a pamphlet. Its subject was Germany's only Conservative political philosopher, Friedrich Julius Stahl - a prominent Prussian politician and Conservative parliamentarian of the period before Bismarck, the philosopher of freedom under the law, and the leader of the philosophical reaction against Hegel as well as Hegel's successor as professor of philosophy at Berlin. And Stahl had been a Jew! A monograph on Stahl, which in the name of conservatism and patriotism put him forth as the exemplar and preceptor for the turbulence of the 1930s, represented a frontal attack on Nazism. It took me only a few weeks to write the monograph. I sent it off to Germany's best-known publisher in political science and political history, Mohr in Tübingen."

In his cover letter, dated April 4, 1993 and addressed to Oskar Siebeck, the proprietor and director of the publisher J.C.B. Mohr, Drucker introduced himself as the "foreign affairs editor" of the newspaper Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, and as assistant in the international law seminar at the University of Frankfurt. He suggested his manuscript be published in the series Law and State in History and the Present, "as this series, with its great reputation and wide circulation, already seemed to me from the beginning to be the best place to publish. I also know that your publishing house, which ventured the publication of the only new edition of Stahl's principal work, is interested in this author and knows his importance."

On April 6, Oskar Siebeck answered Drucker's suggestion: "I am very much prepared to publish your piece in my series Law and State in History and the Present. However, for this collection I am already expecting a further manuscript, which I have already promised to adopt. That your work would then first be able to be published in the issue after next is not so unfavourable, in that it would then be the one-hundredth issue in the series. As such, an essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl would be especially welcomed by me."

"Clearly", remarked Drucker in retrospect in Adventures of a Bystander, "the people at Mohr, whom I had never met, felt the way I did. The book, I am happy to say, was understood by the Nazis exactly as I had intended; it was immediately banned and publicly burned. Of course it had no impact. I did not expect any. But it made it crystal-clear where I stood; and I knew I had to make sure for my own sake that I would be counted, even if no one else cared." (p.138)

The essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl appeared on April 26, 1933. Directly afterwards, Drucker left Germany. The correspondence between Drucker and the J.C.B. Mohr publishers, which is kept today at the publisher's archives in Tübingen, continued until the middle of September, 1933. The sender's addresses on Drucker's letters show his further stations after his departure from Germany: He first returned to Vienna to his parents' house in Kaasgraben 10, where on May 17, he requested the publisher to send a review copy to the magazine Prager Archiv (Prague Archive). On July 11, he wrote to the publisher from a hotel in Lancaster Gate in London and requested ten author's copies. On September 18, the sender's address on his letter was "40 Belsize Park Gardens, London NW3": Drucker requested ten further author's copies.

While Drucker emigrated to England, the publisher Oskar Siebeck remained in Germany. In a letter of January 5, 1999, Georg Siebeck, who today runs J.C.B. Mohr, wrote Peter Drucker about the further fate of his grandfather: "He was the director of the publishing house from 1920 and in 1936, after hopeless negotiations with the Reichs-chamber of literature, he took his own life."

In his first letter to Oskar Siebeck, Drucker indicated that his essay on Stahl was originally part of a larger work on conservative state theory. In "Reflections of a Social Ecologist," the epilogue to his essay collection The Ecological Vision (Transaction Books, 1992), Drucker mentioned details of this planned work, which was to have the title Der Rechtsstaat ("The Constitutional State"):

"I was barely twenty at the time, in early 1930 ... All around me society, economy, and government - indeed civilization - were collapsing. There was a total lack of continuity. And this drew my attention to that remarkable trio of German thinkers who in a similar period of social collapse, a little over a hundred years earlier, had created stability by inventing what came to be known as Der Rechtsstaat ... They were a remarkable trio, both because of the breadth of interests and activities of each of them, but also because they were respectively an agnostic Protestant, a romantic Catholic, and a converted Jew. The first of them, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was the last great figure of the European Enlightenment, a leading statesman during the Napoleonic Wars, the founder of the first modern university, the University of Berlin in 1809, and later the founder of scientific linguistics. The second, Joseph von Radowitz (1797-1853) was a professional soldier and the King's confidant and first minister, but also a crusading magazine editor and the progenitor of all Catholic parties in Europe - in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Holand, in Belgium, in Austria. The third and last, Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861), was Hegel's successor as professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. A legal philosopher he also revived the moribund theology of Lutheran Protestantism. And he was the most brilliant parliamentarian, in fact the only brilliant parliamentarian in German history." (pp. 442f.)

In this connection, Drucker points out a central theme in his thought and work, that of continuity and change: "The three do not enjoy a good press. They are suspect precisely because they tried to balance continuity and change, that is, because they were neither unabashed liberals nor unabashed reactionaries. They tried to create a stable society and a stable polity that would preserve the traditions of the past and yet make possible change, and indeed very rapid change. And they succeeded brilliantly. They created the only political theory that originated on the continent of Europe in modern times - at least until Karl Marx fifty years later. But they also created a political structure that survived for almost a hundred years, until it came crashing down with World War I." (p. 443)

Finally, Drucker, looking back on the protagonists of his planned work, sees a connection with the political system of the United States, which he has studied intensively since the early forties: "Of course, Humboldt, Radowitz, and Stahl did not realize that what they were trying to do had actually been accomplished in the United States. They did not realize that the United States Constitution first and so far practically alone among written constitutions, contains explicit provisions how to be changed. This probably explains more than anything else why, alone of all written constitutions, the American Constitution is still in force and a living document. Even less did they realize the importance of the Supreme Court as the institution which basically represents both conservation and continuity, and innovation and change and balances the two ... And I too, it should be said, had no inkling in 1930 that what the three Germans in the early years of the nineteenth century had tried to accomplish had already been done, and far more successfully, by the Founding Fathers and by Chief Justice Marshall in the infant United States." (p. 444)

But there is yet another connection, that between Drucker's essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl and Europe, indeed: to the political system of contemporary Europe. Drucker's treatise served the purpose after April 1933 of reminding the conservative elites of their own tradition and warning them of any cooperation with the "total state" of National Socialism. In one of the concluding paragraphs, Drucker remarked on the relation of conservative state theory to the state:

"The Conservative theory of the state must affirm the state because and insofar as it represents an obligation. It must also, however, prevent the state from becoming the only obligation, from becoming the 'total state' for the state is an order of this world, an institution arisen out of the dissolution of a supreme, timeless order, a kingdom with a human goal and meaning. And this meaning and goal, that is to say, power, is evil and demoralising, destructive, if it is not bound to a divine, immutable order, if it is not bound to God's plan for the world."

In 1970, Walter Hallstein, who after the Second World War became one of the founders and the first president of the European Economic Community, told Drucker that as a young lawyer at that time, his reading of the Stahl treatise had kept him from joining the National Socialists (Letter of Drucker's of November 22, 1998 to the editor of the website).

Druckers Essay "Friedrich Julius Stahl: Conservative Theory of the State and Historical Development " is offered here for the first time in English translation. Translation: Martin Chalmers. The imprint of the text as well as the publication of excerpts from the publisher's correspondence with kind permission of Peter Drucker and Georg Siebeck of J.C.B. Mohr publishers in Tübingen.

>> To the original text "Friedrich Julius Stahl: Conservative Theory of the State and Historical Development" by Peter Drucker