“Capitalism had been dominant for over a which we have only just embarked. It would be as century when Karl Marx in the first volume of foolish to predict the knowledge society as it would Das Kapital identified it (in 1867), as a distinct have been foolish to predict in 1776—the year of social order. The term “Capitalism” was not coined the American Revolution, of Adam Smith’s Wealth until thirty years later, well after Marx’s death. It of Nations, and of James Watt’s steam engine— would therefore not only be presumptuous in the the society of which Marx wrote a hundred years extreme to attempt to write The Knowledge today; later. And it was as foolish of Marx to predict it would be ludicrously premature. All that can be in mid-Victorian Capitalism—and with “Scientific attempted—all this book attempts—is to describe infallibility”—the society in which we live now. society and polity as we begin the transition from the Age of Capitalism (also, of course, the But one thing we can predict: the greatest change Age of Socialism). will be the change in knowledge—in its form and content; in its meaning; in its responsibility; and in But we can hope that a hundred years hence a what it means to be an educated person.” book of this kind, if not one entitled The Knowledge, can be written. That would mean that we have -Peter F. Drucker, 1993 successfully weathered the transition upon 164