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The same holds true for the public-service institutions, and espe-
cially for those discharging nonpolitical functions, whether owned by
government and financed by tax money or not; for hospitals, schools,
and universities; for the public services of local governments; for
community agencies and volunteer organizations such as the Red
Cross, the Boy Scouts, and the Girl Scouts; for churches and church-
related organizations; but also for professional and trade associations,
and many more. A period of rapid change makes obsolete a good
many of the old concerns, or at least makes ineffectual a good many
of the ways in which they have been addressed. At the same time,
such a period creates opportunities for tackling new tasks, for exper-
imentation, and for social innovation.
Above all, there has been a major change in perception and
mood in the public domain (cf. Chapter 8). A hundred years ago,
the “panic” of 1873 brought to an end the century of laissez faire
that had begun with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776. For
a hundred years from 1873 on, being “modern,” “progressive,” or
“forward-looking” meant looking to government as the agent of
social change and betterment. For better or worse, that period has
come to an end in all non-Communist developed countries (and
probably in the developed Communist countries as well). We do
not yet know what the next wave of “progressivism” will be. But
we do know that anyone who still preaches the “liberal” or “pro-
gressive” gospel of 1930—or even of 1960, of the Kennedy and
Johnson years—is not a “progressive” but a “reactionary.” We do
not know whether privatization,* that is, turning activities back
from government to nongovernmental operation (albeit not nec-
essarily to operation by a business enterprise, as most people
have interpreted the term) will work or will go very far. But we
do know that no non-Communist developed country will move
further toward nationalization and governmental control out of
hope, expectation, and belief in the traditional promises. It will
do so only out of frustration and with a sense of failure. And this
is a situation in which public-service institutions have both an
opportunity and a responsibility to be entrepreneurial and to
innovate.
But precisely because they are public-service institutions, they face
specific different obstacles and challenges, and are prone to making

A word that I coined in 1969 in The Age of Discontinuity (New York: Harper &
Row; London: William Heinemann).