not only a system of analysis, or analytical “model,” intended to be useful to the explanation of economic behavior but also a defense – and a carefully reasoned defense – of the proposition that the economic behavior promoted […] by the institutions of a free-enterprise system is, in the main, in the public interest. It cannot be too strongly emphasized’, he continued, ‘that the growth of nineteenth-century capitalism depended largely on the general acceptance of a reasoned justification of the system on moral as well as on political and economic grounds. The managerial literature appears devastatingly to undermine the intellectual presuppositions of this system. And what does it offer in its place?’62 Nothing, or almost. Worse than that, the ethical managerialism that has striven to fill the void is dangerous, giving a foothold to the demands for democracy in business, thus weakening the institution in its very principle.
Among the intransigent, calls were heard to repudiate such unnatural language and to extol capitalist values: ‘Instead of fighting for its survival by means of a series of strategic retreats masquerading as industrial statesmanship’, advised Theodore Levitt in 1958 in the Harvard Business Review, ‘business must fight as if it were at war. And, like a good war, it should be fought gallantly, daringly, and, above all, not morally’.63
Notes
1 1. Wilbur Hugh Ferry, The Corporation and the Economy (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1959), p. 9.
2 2. Karl Marx, ‘British Commerce and Finance’, The New-York Daily Tribune, no. 5445, 4 October 1858, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 16 (1858–60) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980), pp. 33–6 (p. 36).
3 3. Charles Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Librairie sociétaire, 1846), p. 189.
4 4. Ibid.
5 5. Ibid., p. 190.
6 6. Charles Périn, Le Patron, ses devoirs, sa fonction, ses responsabilités (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1886), p. 49.
7 7. What Macpherson writes in another context about the contradictions of modern liberal theory is also valid here: this theory must continue to use the postulates of possessive individualism at a historical moment when the structure of market society no longer provides the necessary conditions for us to deduce a valid theory of political obligations from these postulates (see Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 275).
8 8. Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, p. 312.
9 9. Ibid.
10 10. Edwin Merrick Dodd, ‘For Whom Corporate Managers Are Trustees: A Note’, Harvard Law Review, vol. 45, no. 7, May 1932, pp. 1145–63. Tellingly, Dodd had borrowed the title of his article from the speech of a CEO of the period, Owen Young, President of General Electric.
11 11. Lewis Brown, CEO of the Johns-Manville Corporation, quoted by Edwin G. Nourse, ‘From the Point of View of the Economist’, in Stuart Chase (ed.), The Social Responsibility of Management (New York: New York University, School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance, 1950), pp. 47–67 (p. 53). ‘The manager’, we likewise read in 1951 in La Révolution permanente [sic], a collective work published by the editors of the magazine Fortune, ‘is becoming a professional in the sense that like all professional men he has a responsibility to society as a whole’ (Russell Wheeler Davenport (ed.), U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951), p. 79).
12 12. T.H. Robinson, ‘Attitudes patronales’, in Bénéfices sociaux et initiative privée (Québec: Les Presses universitaires Laval, 1959), pp. 65–82 (p. 72).
13 13. Howard R. Bowen, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2013; first published in 1953), p. 17.
14 14. Ibid., p. 50.
15 15. Hal Draper, ‘Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformers’, New Politics, no. 1, Autumn 1961, pp. 87–106 (p. 91).
16 16. Sanford Lakoff, ‘Private Government in a Managed Society’ (1969), in Sanford Lakoff (ed.), Private Government; Introductory Readings (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1973), pp. 218–42 (p. 237).
17 17. ‘The manager, in short, is a mediator, as his predecessor was an autocratic entrepreneur’ (Lakoff, ‘Private Government in a Managed Society’, p. 237). Model managers will now behave like model umpires, ‘considered able to determine independently the public interest that they are to implement’ (Roberta Romano, ‘Metapolitics and Corporate Law Reform’, Stanford Law Review, vol. 36, no. 4, 1984, pp. 923–1016 [p. 938]).
18 18. Bowen, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, p. 49.
19 19. Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 4. A 1956 study of the new business creed in America concluded that ‘managers are assigned a more important and more autonomous role than that of agents for the owners. Theirs is the statesman’s function of mediating among the groups dependent on the enterprise, satisfying just claims and preserving the continuity of the organization’ (Francis X. Sutton et al., The American Business Creed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 57.
20 20. Bazelon, ‘The Scarcity Makers’, p. 304.
21 21. Quoted in Maurice Zeitlin, ‘Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79, no. 5, March 1974, pp. 1073–119 (p. 1074). The following references are quoted in Zeitlin.
22 22. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1971), p. 19.
23 23. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 46.
24 24. David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd; a Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 236).
25 25. Berle, paraphrased by Zeitlin, ‘Corporate Ownership and Control’, p. 1076.
26 26. Carl Kaysen, ‘The Social Significance of the Modern Corporation’, The American Economic Review, vol. 47, no. 2, May 1957, pp. 311–19 (p. 312).
27 27. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 44.
28 28. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict, p. 47. What the thesis of the separation of ownership and control made possible in political terms was a questioning of control apart from that of ownership: as the capitalist was dead, all that now needed to be settled, here as elsewhere, was the case of the bureaucrat. We can find the trace of this reformulation in the programmatic aggiornamento of European social democracy, starting, at a very early date, with the Labour Party. In Great Britain, the managerialist thesis of the separation of ownership and control, said Mason in 1958, had apparently become a flagship argument against any additional wave of nationalization: ‘if big enterprises tend to “socialize” themselves, why should the government bother to nationalize them?’ (Mason, ‘The Apologetics of “Managerialism”‘, p. 4). In 1957, the leadership of the British Labour Party had published a programme that consecrated the triumph of its right wing. This document was not placed under the auspices of Marx or Ruskin, or even Bernstein, but of Adolf Berle and Peter Drucker. The architect of this ‘revisionist metamorphosis’ of the Labour Party, Anthony Crosland, had laid out the groundwork of this programme in a book-length manifesto: ‘ownership has less and less relevance
