Corporate Dreams: Big Business in American Democracy from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Introduction

1 Introduction Lunching alone in a business restaurant in Shanghai, I received a conversational gambit from the waiter. I was different, she said, from her usual clientele of “corporate types,” a phrase she had probably learned from the corporate types themselves. They had, according to her, “cold hearts.” “They’re busy,” I answered, “and far from home. Many have warm hearts.” “No,” she said with unusual assertiveness for the waiter types I had met in China. “People with warm hearts work in restaurants and bars.” Like the Shanghai waiter, we all define the moral world by antitheses such as warm hearts and cold hearts, corporate types and tavern types. Without evil, there would be no idea of good; without oppression, no freedom; without wrong, no right. Moral realists, unable to conceive of the elimination of evil, oppression, or cold hearts, aim instead to minimize them, to contain them, or to use them against themselves. The eighteenth-century American founders believed that liberty required authority. “If men were angels,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “no government would be necessary.” Not an end to power but separation of power was the basis of American freedom. Into this attempt to restrain power, this novo ordo seclorum or new order for the ages, as the founders called it, was soon to intrude the business corporation, bringing with it a new moral antinomy—corporate management versus the free market. The corporation created vast wealth and, with it, undemocratic managerial power to govern Americans at work. Second only to our democratic political system, the unelected power of business corporations is the modern world’s most important social innovation, and it gave rise to the mid-twentieth-century American Dream. Yet it did not do so on its own but rather because it was forced to do so by a democratic society. Getting the relation right between society and the corporation will be central to any possible revival of the American Dream. The American Dream is only one of the corporate dreams explained in this book. It came to fruition, at least for a time, whereas other corporate dreams have remained fantasies. Mainly figments of the managerial imagination, they are aimed at making corporate life seem more consistent with democracy than it can really be. These managerial fancies are harmless enough, perhaps, in corporate life, but they should now be scrapped, when corporate culture is becoming more and more our mainstream culture. Yet in the popular mind and media, the business corporation gets scant attention as a social or cultural institution. News outlets report the ups and downs of the stock market, but comparatively little is said about the general question of the business corporation’s ambiguous relation to a free society or about the particular danger that has arisen in recent years: that corporate culture could insidiously corrupt democratic values. In today’s America, for example, there is almost no recognition that the corporate world’s naive and unwittingly arrogant cult of moral leadership is a threat to democratic culture. The popular but mistaken idea of values-based leadership has seeped from the corporate sphere into American culture at large, where it endangers the old democratic recognition that power corrupts. Even CEOs, if they are wise and generous, will guard themselves against such conceit. Running the company well is the goal. Claiming the mantle of moral leadership is the first step in taking one’s eye off the ball. Awareness of the danger of corporate culture is the only safeguard against it. Otherwise, the “furnishings” of the mind may be “little by little changed” as a great historian wrote of the evolving ideas of seventeenthcentury New England Puritans as they encountered unexpected economic opportunities and temptations in the New World. Through a process “hardly perceptible to the actors themselves,” they eventually came to look “upon themselves with amazement, hardly capable of understanding how they had come to be what they were.”1 This book aims to keep in place the democratic furnishings of the mind through a viewpoint that, for want of a better term, I call moderate anticorporatism. The goal is not to attack those who live the corporate life, let alone the wealth they create, but only to reveal some dangerous corporate confusions and illusions. Too much of what is C o r p o r a t e D r e a m s 2 written on the subject...