Peter Drucker Dies

Patricia Sullivan writes that Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies:

"There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer," [Peter Drucker] said 45 years ago. Central to his philosophy was the belief that highly skilled people are an organization's most valuable resource and that a manager's job is to prepare and free people to perform. Good management can bring economic progress and social harmony, he said, adding that "although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism."

It was a typical remark for a man who believed in the empowerment of workers and the futility of big government, which he called "obese, muscle-bound and senile."

Emphasis Mine

This is an interesting quote. A fuller version was posted by Martin Bento

"although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism. Any system that makes one value absolute is wrong." Interview in Inc., 1985 In The Frontiers of Management

Michael Lewis, in his review of The Man Who Invented Management, concluded:

One way of viewing Peter Drucker's career is as a spiritual exercise performed for the spiritually impoverished. ''Faith is not what today is so often called a 'mystical experience,' '' Drucker wrote in his 1949 essay on Kierkegaard, ''something that can apparently be induced by the proper breathing exercises or by prolonged exposure to Bach (not to mention drugs). It can be attained only through despair, through suffering, through painful and ceaseless struggle.'' In Drucker's attempt to bring a kind of faith to business there is a lingering mystery. How did a man with deep skepticism of capitalism, which he gave voice to over the decades, become the sage of the capitalist class? Could it be that somewhere deep in their hearts the men he advised shared his doubts?

Emphasis Mine

Again we have sloppy definitions. How can one consider free markets outside of Capitalism? This is the heart of Capitalism. Take away free markets and you destroy Capitalism. Introduce free markets and you introduce Capitalism. The two are inseparable.

Without a reference to The Frontiers of Management, I cannot find what Peter Drucker meant by free markets as distinct from Capitalism.