Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation

Recent controversies around ESG investing and \”woke\” capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, in fact, the notion that business leaders could benefit society had become a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history shows, New Deal liberalism realized a kind of big business supervision narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become orthodoxy: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core. As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to seatbelts 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.

Format: Hardback
Pages: 304
Imprint: W W Norton US
Publication date: 12/03/2024