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To Bind and Guide the World
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14516 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1988 |
2,145 Words |
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Samuel T. Francis
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"Elites," wrote Vilfredo Pareto, who spent most of his life studying them, "usually end up committing suicide," and the act of self-destruction has become an increasingly common metaphor for students of social and political phenomena in the twentieth century. Historian Arnold Toynbee concluded that civilizations generally end by suicide, and the late James Burnham applied the idea to Western civilization. Paul Weaver's use of the metaphor with reference to the modern corporation belongs in the same category.
Writers who dwell on the metaphor, as Weaver does, generally subscribe to an ideology that emphasizes self-interest as the basis of morality. Since self-destruction is clearly contrary to one's self-interest, to demonstrate that a pattern of behavior logically leads to self-destruction is a comparatively easy way to argue against the behavior. The argumentum ad suicidiam also usually saves its author the trouble of challenging the more fundamental moral and philosophical premises of his opponents. Regardless of whether those premises are true or false, good or bad, easily discernible or deeply hidden, those who hold them can be forced to examine and purge them more easily if their implications are shown to be destructive to their own interests and even their own existence.
Weaver's excellent critique of the corporation is based on his recently acquired libertarianism, and ideology that allows for little moral judgment apart from self-interest, and his use of the suicide argument is therefore appropriate. It is his thesis that corporations typically, historically, and inherently behave in ways that are destructive of the free market--that is, that corporations are anticapitalist--and therefore that they promote the destruction of the social, political, and intellectual order from which capitalism springs and, ultimately, their own destruction. Despite his closely reasoned and well-informed development of this case, however, there are some flaws in his conclusions and some important omissions in his argument.
Weaver's account is partly autobiographical (his employment in the public affairs section of the Ford Motor Company from 1978 to 1980) and partly analytic and prescriptive (an essay on the history of the corporation and its role in the modern democratic state and capitalist economy), and both parts are compelling. Weaver joined Ford as a self-described neoconservative, convinced that "democratic capitalism" or "liberal capitalism," exhibiting "individual rights, reasonably free markets, representative government, economic growth, and a well-tempered welfare state," was the best possible political-economic system. After two years of witnessing, resisting, and participating in the lies, bureaucracy, cowardice, and selfishness of his colleagues at Ford, all in the service of anticapitalist actions that in his view were contrary to Ford's own interests, he began to question his beliefs. His skepticism was encouraged, he says, by the refusal of his neoconservative friends in New York to take his criticisms of the corporations seriously and by their eventual coolness toward him personally. Persisting in his doubts and his criticisms, he eventually embraced a species of libertarianism close to that of the Cato Institute in Washington, and he came to an understanding of why his ideas were not welcome to neoconservatives in general.
The view of the corporation to which Weaver came to subscribe was drawn in part from libertarian thought and in part from New Left historiography presented by Gabriel Kolko and
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