Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation
-
- 14,99 €
-
- 14,99 €
Descripción editorial
The untold story of how efforts to hold big business accountable changed American capitalism.
Recent controversies around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and “woke capital” evoke an old idea: the Progressive Era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, the notion that big business should benefit society was a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history, Taming the Octopus, shows, the tools forged by New Deal liberals to hold business leaders accountable, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become dominant: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way, American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core.
In this vivid and surprising history, we meet activists, investors, executives, and workers who fought over a simple question: Is the role of the corporation to deliver profits to shareholders, or something more? On one side were “business statesmen” who believed corporate largess could solve social problems. On the other were libertarian intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and his oft-forgotten contemporary, Henry Manne, whose theories justified the ruthless tactics of a growing class of corporate raiders. But Williams reveals that before the “activist investor” emerged as a capitalist archetype, Civil Rights groups used a similar playbook for different ends, buying shares to change a company from within.
As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to environmental pollution to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximize value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, “stakeholder capitalism,” still dominates our headlines today. Williams’s necessary history equips us to reconsider democracy’s tangled relationship with capitalism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams, senior editor of the Hedgehog Review, debuts with a sharp study of the struggle to hold corporations accountable in the 20th century. Focusing on the politicians, economists, and activists involved, Williams tells how aggressive advocacy from lawyer Adolf Berle, a member of FDR's "Brain Trust," helped secure the 1934 establishment of the Securities Exchange Act, which "brought more specialized professional standards" to the New York stock exchange. New Deal regulation, Williams notes, came under intense scrutiny in the latter half of the 20th century from such conservative economists as Henry Manne, who argued that corporations should pursue profit without regard for "mutual fairness and individual morality." Williams's thought-provoking analysis pushes back against the notion that corporations are not public institutions, highlighting how grassroots accountability campaigns—including the 1950s push for Kodak to start a job-training program for Black workers, who were severely underrepresented at the company—"harkened back to an older view" of corporations as "concessions of state power created for the good of society." The fascinating history also presents glimpses into legislative roads not taken, such as an abandoned 1907 proposal championed by Theodore Roosevelt that would have granted the federal government a direct role in the administration of private companies. The result is a riveting look at corporations' ever-shifting role in American society.