The Corporation's Song
Berns, Walter
"The Corporation's Song" Walter Berns and lyrics by Hobbes, Locke, and Madison. Music by Mobil Oil? It may be a rule of democracy that the larger the business corporation, the poorer its...
...For the same reason, Secretary of State Vance was never heard to say of Mr...
...But for Locke as well as for Smith and Madison, and others of this school, wealth was not the end...
...For every Good Samaritan produced by preaching t h e r e were a hundred religious zealots (Archbishop Laud, George Jeffreys, Oliver Cromwell-Hobbes's time was terrorized by such men) eager to do unto others what they understood God wanted done to them, but disagreeing as to what God wanted done...
...The recent film, The China Syndrome, demonstrates how readily this can be done...
...They can point to their economic achievements and claim, truthfully, that most of the benefits of their activity flow to the consumer, but the Naderites can respond with the pious adage that man does not live by bread alone...
...Lincoln, probably our greatest poet, could utter immortal lines on the eve of a civil war--"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our n a t u r e " - - b u t even Lincoln would not be able to write lines of equal beauty about hospital insurance or the virtues of a free-market economy...
...What matters is the realm of privacy itself...
...that he is selfish and moved by a vanity that leads him relentlessly to seek power over other men, so that by nature "every man is enemy to every man...
...And the sad fact is that Ralph Nader has not always been wrong...
...Because of McGovern's "soak the rich" tax proposals, he was told...
...Instead of pondering this i n t e r e s t i n g and perhaps significant fact, and drawing the conclusion to which it would appear to 'lead, he tries to persuade us that corporations control not only the politicians but the media and the entire educational system (including, presumably, Yale University and the American Political Science Association of which he is Presiden 0. This is, of course, absurd, and could easily be shown to be absurd...
...But when they know, really know, that on their continued viability as private institutions depends the continued viability of liberal democracy in America (and, therefore, in the world), they may have greater reason to act in a fashion that makes it easier for their friends to defend them...
...Great choral music can be written about God (which is wby almost all of it is liturgica ! in form, and why almost all of it was written before we modern men "depopulated Heaven," as Tocqueville put it...
...The l.eviathan was to be a substitute for moral teaching, or for old-fashioned (but ineffectual) morality...
...But factions could be controlled in a properly structured system, according to Madison, one that, among its other f e a t u r e s , protected the equal right of everyone (however unequally endowed) to acquire property...
...Madison was not thinking primarily of profits and material comforts when he wrote that passage about the first object of government being the protection of unequal faculties of acquiring property...
...At first glance there appears to be little the corporation can do about this...
...Yale's C.E...
...As in other countries, the public realm continues to expand in America, and the control of it is increasingly centralized in Washington, which r e g u l a t e s our businesses, fixes our prices, buses our children, sets our quotas, and prescribes our diets as well as our medicines...
...Not only are they selfless, they are heroic: At great "risk" to themselves, they fight for justice for all mankind...
...characterizes democracy is the love of liberty, but, as Tocqueville warned us at more or less the beginning of the democratic era, while democratic communities have a "natural taste for liberty," their passion for equality is much stronger...
...dance can portray love, both requited and unrequited...
...His uncle, the Senator, wants to prevent oil company mergers because, he says, the political power of large corporations threatens our political institutions and even democracy itself...
...their causes are "sown in the nature of man...
...Coming to understand all this will probably not allow business corporations to mount a more effective public relations campaign (book and lyrics by John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, yes...
...it does not claim to know what happiness i s - - b u t will respect each man's natural right to pursue the happiness that he defines fbr himself...
...McGovern might have learned something about this in 1972...
...Since this blue-collar worker scarcely resembled his idea of a member of the idle rich, Mikva said (after appropriate apologies for his presumption): "But you won't be hit by those taxes...
...Control their effects...
...In short, to speak metaphorically myself, it is just not possible to " s i n g " about everything...
...Nor, to trace the principle back to the seventeenth century and the man who discovered it, was John Locke exalting a life of luxury when he argued that a "wise and godlike" prince would abolish all legal and customary restrictions on acquisitiveness...
...It is this that the corporation should understand...
...intelligence tests have been declared unconstitutional by a federal court...
...Thus, as Lenin predicted they would, our industrialists sell the Soviets the rope with which thev intend to hang us...
...business corporations was not leveled by Ralph Nader but by Vladimir Piukovsky...
...equal opportunity has come to mean equal results...
...The treatises against miracles were written by Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, in short, by the political philosophers who paved the way for the commercial society and capitalism...
...What is more, it constitutes the principal threat to libei'ty...
...Lindblom is currently the most successful of these...
...The Leviathan, now become the modern liberal st:tie, will not attempt to impose its understanding of happiness on its citizens--in t\wt...
...but the substitution does little or nothing to conceal the meanness or vulgarity of its principle...
...But what matters, surely, are their dissimilarities, and these continue to exist...
...This is why it is impossible to write even a play or novel--to say nothing of a poem in the strict sense--about business...
...And one can "sing" about justice...
...that is done we have a situation that can be set to music...
...Macaulay, writing 150 to 200 years later, and from a perspective that was not unfriendly to modernity, saw this as well as anyone...
...Unfortunately for the corporations, it is possibl e to "sing" against business, and it is not necessary to possess the genius of a Moli~re to do it...
...Jerry Brown sleeps on a straw pallet, rather like St...
...What is being pursued is still selfpreservation...
...In the words of James Madison, t h e f i r s t object of government is "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property...
...It is, he said, "ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible...
...To recount the history in another form (and with an apology for its crudeness), it was the 17th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes who argued, drawing an "inference" from his psychological study of the human passions, that man is by nature not a social being...
...As a brief statement of a complex matter, that can scarcely be improved upon, except by pointing out that, while capitalism may be responsible for the change of attitude of those "political philosophers" who followed its emergence, its emergence depended on the new political philosophy that preceded it...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATDR SEPTEMBER 1980 23 It was Hobbes who was persuaded--and who first persuaded those who mattered-that it was useless to preach that men ought to r e s p e c t the rights of others, or that they should love their neighbors as they love themselves, or that they should model themselves on the Good Samaritan...
...What it says may be true--indeed, is true--but such prosaic speech is not capable of arousing any audience (who even reads the Mobil Oil ads...
...Private vice equals public virtue, as Mandeville formulated the principle...
...it can leave men alon% at liberty...
...to employ the title of Smith's famous book, the wealth of nations would constantly increase...
...and it does seem that the security and extent of that realm constitutes a more decisive difference between western liberal democracies and communist states than [the critic of America] acknowledges...
...If then, Hobbes's Leviathan was to be a substitute for morality, Locke's commercial society was intended as a substitute for the Leviathan and, t h e r e f o r e , a more benign substitute for morality...
...Brezhnev's cheeks, refuses to be photographed with the chief executive officers of Gulf, Mobil, and other oil companies, even though the occasion would call for no more than a perfunctory l-;andshake...
...No capitalist, not even the first of the Rockefellers, could do this...
...Democratic communities may, he said, call for equality in liberty, but, if they cannot obtain it, "they still call for equality in slavery.'" Of course, this has not yet happened in America, for reasons that are reflected in a story Abner Mikva enjoys telling...
...I know very well that the modern multinational corporation is a far cry from the sort of economic interest Madison had in mind...
...As Locke argued in his Second Treatise, God's original bounty was nothing compared with the abundance possible under a properly organized political economy insuring the right of unlimited acquisition...
...The speech of a business corporation, to the extent that it is not simply commercial advertising, typically deals with moneymaking or its cognates, such as comfort or economic efficiency, or is used to compare the material abundance available through the free-market economy with the queues in the Soviet Union or the rationing in socialist Britain...
...it involves not gods, heroes, or lovers, but self-interested persons, and self-interested persons cannot supply models for poetry in any of its forms...
...When it comes to whipping boys, t h e r e ' s no business like the oil business, although, if it's large enough, any business will do...
...There is still, as there has always been in this country, a private realm, described by private rights and defended by private institutions...
...to show that it was in accord with nature, someone had to undermine the contrary teachings of the theologians...
...Walter Berns THE CORPORATION'S SONG Book and lyrics by Hobbes, Locke, and Madison...
...That is what counts...
...As he saw it, preaching morality was part of the problem...
...that men have rights, but that, because of this enmity, these fights are insecure in the state of nature...
...incapable of inspiringpoetry or poetic speech...
...A very American reply, that, and precisely the sort of reply the Framers of the Constitution sought to elicit from future generations...
...Channel the passions and energies of men into safe activities, Locke said, where they will compete not for dominion over others, not for glory, not for the blessings promised by competing gods, not fi)r those things that cannot be shared, but (in Kristol's terms) for a larger slice of a bigger pie, and bigger precisely because an enterprise inspired by the hope for more and more will produce more and more...
...The most obvious (but not the most important) consequence of this "unleashing of g r e e d " would be the increase of material goods available to the nation adopting the principle...
...but it does not yet command our minds or souls...
...He knew that an American, like any other man, was inclined to unite with others only for selfish reasons and only for the purpose of advancing his i n t e r e s t s . As readers of Federalist 10 know, Madison referred to those groupings of selfish men as factions, and he argued that popular government was impossible without a solution to the problem they presented...
...To it men would yield t h e i r rights which it would secure by keeping the peace...
...Corporations are big, and to be big is to be unequal and thus, in a democracy, sinister...
...The bandcuft~ the Sovk'ts snapped over his wrists, he points out, bore the stamp: "Made in the U.S.A...
...What changed the attitude of political philosophers was the emergence of modern capitalism, with its promise of economic growth--of an economic system in which everyone could improve his condition without having to do so at someone else's expense...
...Under their Constitution, the free market economy has provided unprecedented opportunites for material advancement, thereby serving to temper this passion for equality among us, and our carefully designed political and legal institutions have, on the whole and thus far, succeeded in controlling it when it broke through the economic and social constraints...
...As he put it: "Its existence makes corruption voluntary to an appreciable degree...
...Locke, one might say, was the first anti-environmentalist: Nature conquered or subdued would be infinitely more benevolent than nature ruling...
...Unequal faculties combined with equal right would issue in unequal acquisition, and Madison and his colleagues were, for reasons that I shall in due course explain, anxious to protect this right from those who had not acquired THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 21 much, or who had not yet acquired much...
...Remove their causes...
...Corporation bashing, then, is both painless and rewarding--in the famous words of Huey Long, "Corporations are the finest political enemies in the world...
...Carter told the National Conference on State Legislatures in March, "resist political pressures and tell the t r u t h " ; and with this he lit into" Mobil Oil...
...Poetry's subjects are love, family, war, justice, heroic deeds, and even what we vaguely call "nature," which is to say, unselfish things...
...Why not...
...Yes, but "we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control...
...i-__] 24 TIlE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980...
...I also know it is fashionable in some quarters to remark the growing similarities among all modern industrial states--their materialism, bureaucratization, alienation, and vulgarity...
...Businessmen are selfish...
...Business (busyness) is about moneymaking...
...but music by Mobil's Herb Schmertz...
...To Hobbes, then, peace and security for rights depended on purging men of their fear of " t h e power of spirits i n v i s i b l e , " which fear caused them to do t e r r i b l e things on this e a r t h , and replacing it with the fear of a very visible, temporal, and absolute sovereign, the Leviathan...
...They have on too many occasions dc'monstrated that Smith knew what he was talking about when he said ~hey would be inclined to p r e f e r t h e i r t;rofits to their country and to the principles they profess so sanctimoniously when it costs tilth1 nothing to do so...
...One working man, encountered at a factory gate with hard hat and lunch pail, told him he would not vote for any Democrat that year...
...The most damning cimrge agains...
...All that is required is the ability to contrive a dramatic situation in which the principle of business--selL interest or the "profit motive"--can be shown to have ugly aspects...
...Before selfishness could be seen as a virtue, someone had to argue persuasively that it was not a vice...
...And that, to put it simply, is one reason why the large business corporations are unpopular: They cannot rid themselves of the stigma that democracy attaches to their size and--Chrysler again excepted--their profits...
...he was, after all, a professor of moral philosophy, not of economics...
...The former was noble," he said, "but the latter was attainable...
...Francis...
...Under socialism, whatever its economic follies, there will be much talk about brotherhood and new forms of "meaningful" work, and no one will appear to be unequal...
...and to undermine the teachings of the theologians (and with them the authority of the established churches), someone had to argue persuasively against the very possibility of miracles, on which the authority of the churches depended...
...But before they begin to r e h e a r s e t h e i r new act, or ask their friends to do it for them, they will have to clean up their old one...
...Jane Fonda is an ununited fund of generosity...
...In his recent book, Politics and Markets, which is said to be the immediate inspiration for Senator Kennedy's various antimerger bills, Lindblom says flatly that the large private business corporation is incompatible with "democratic theory and vision...
...The typical motorist may know nothing about that, but he does know about gasoline lines, and i'ather than blame the government's regulatory policies, which are the real cause of his problem, he mutters imprecations against the oil companies...
...Madison, the principal author of our Constitution, understood this kind of reasoning perfectly...
...It also explains why in the public at large there is such a fertile field waiting to be plowed by the anti-corporation professors in the universities...
...Now this passion for equality threatens to overwhelm us: Programs to provide welfare have become programs with the avowed purpose of redistributing income...
...It was the means to the end of political liberty...
...No doubt it requires a suspension of disbelief to accept the possibility that anyone--whatever his business--is willing to risk a nuclear holocaust rather than forgo his profits, but once...
...Carter and the president of Exxon or Texaco what he once said of Mr...
...The oil companies especially are pariahs right now...
...Carter and Mr...
...drama can treat crime and punishment...
...The Framers of the Constitution understood this connection...
...The connection between economic and political liberty is one of the premises of the Constitution...
...Specifically it is not possible to " s i n g " about self-preservation--even of a comfortable sort--or about the institutions, such as the business corporation, organized to promote it...
...and that the institution of government requires all men to yield their natural rights to an absolute sovereign who will secure them by preset-ring the peace, and preserve the peace by keeping all men "in awe...
...Better "public relations," as that trade is understood by its practitioners,, will surely not solve the problems of the nuclear power industry, for example, or improve the public's opinion of the major oil companies...
...What is relevant here is "not that he fails to sustain this serious charge, but that he has to concede that every democratic country (there still are a few) has a market-oriented economy...
...It was useless to think of that...
...In such a setting it is not hard to understand why corporations are disliked and distrusted, and why it is so utterly painless for the politicians, in Washington and Hollywood alike, to inveigh against them...
...As Irving Kristol pointed out in a Wall Street Journal column last November, pre-modern political philosophers regarded democracy as an inherently unstable and therefore undesirable form of government...
...We may think that what best...
...The aim of ancient philosophy, he said, was to raise us far above vulgar wants, whereas the aim of the modern-that is, the 17th-century--philosophy was to satisfy our vulgar wants...
...that is to say...
...For, if the connection exists, they do have something to "sing" about, namely, free government and justice at a time when there is precious little of e i t h e r in this world...
...and is certainly not capable of arousing the passions of a people that is already comfortable and adequately insured and a large part of which, being characterized by yearnings it cannot define or even identify, is looking around for causes to engage its unused energies...
...So powerful is the hostility toward the oil companies that the President, who is by no means bashful when it comes to planting kisses on Mr...
...What matters, finally, is not that tllese private institutions are more efficient or that they are capable of producing the wealth that can be d i s t r i b u t e d privately, or 'even publicly...
...If men were to forgo their notions of heaven and glory (and the activities connected with such "life styles' ') and concentrate instead on improving their material conditions, they would not be so likely to get into arguments with their neighbors (and life might then cease to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short")In its modern, institutionalized form, to which we give the name political economy, money-making derives from John Locke's substitution of aomfortable preservation for Thomas Hobbes's mere preservation as the purpose of human life...
...It will respect his privacy because it will not have to fear how he uses it, or what he does in private...
...In the large commercial republic, the animosity of factions would become the competition of interests, and this competition would be peaceful because, all of them prospering to a greater or lesser extent, the various factions would recognize a common interest in the preservation of a system--or better, of a Constit u t i o n - t h a t secures everyone's right to prosper and, more importantly, to live as free men...
...Organized labor, which ought to know better, calls for their nationalization...
...Nor was Adam Smith concerned primarily with opulent dinners when, in the course of elaborating the features of the capitalist system built on the principle of self-interest, he made his famous statement to the effect that we owe our dinners not to the "benevolence" of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, but to-"their regard to their, own interests...
...A prosaic politics, it was thought, would be a peaceful politics...
...Music by Mobil Oil ? I t may be a rule of democracy that the larger the business corporation, the poorer its public image, especially when events conspire to focus the public's attention on the product or service it provides...
...Novels can be about justice and injustice...
...As a way of life, self-preservation, even of the Lockean sort, is unpoetic, by which I mean it is...
...Smith, too, was concerned with the conditions of political liberty...
...It is because this promise of economic growth has been kept that democratic politics has survived in the United States, in Western Europe, more recently in Japan . . . . It is the expectation of tomorrow's bigger pie, from which everyone will receive a larger slice, that prevents people from fighting to the bitter end over the division of today's pie...
...It is painless because, rather than retaliate, corporate executives are now inclined to apologize when they show a profit and become aggressive' only when, like Chrysler, their companies face bankruptcy;-and rewarding because it satisfies the strongest passion in the soul of a democratic people: the hatred of inequality...
...Corporations do have something to 'sing" about, then...
...J a n e Fonda has no trouble arousing crowds with her shrill cries of their "obscene profits" and criminal conspiracies, and young Joseph P. Kennedy III, Bobby's son, made his political debut with a speech accusing them of "squeezing" the poor and (through their subsidiary coal companies) killing miners, polluting rivers, and causing ".terrible life-taking floods...
...And it was .John Locke who, accepting Hobbes's premises concerning the nature of man, found the way to avoid his political conclusions...
...the Soviet dissident...
...This is what is meant by the formulation "capitalism for freedom...
...It is not simply that business corporations have, as Adam Smith complained, "both deceived and oppressed" the public, preferring their profits to the public's interests...
...rather, he was thinking of the means by which free government might be achieved...
...By the political philosophers whose thought underlies the founding of the modern money-making (or bourgeois) state this was understood to be an advantage...
...to show that it was not a vice, someone had to argue persuasively that it was in accord with nature...
...The point to be made here, however, is that if there is some sort of a connection between democracy and the free-market economy, or between political and economic liberty, it is important that business corporations come to understand it...
...Brezhnev, namely, that they "share similar dreams 'and aspirations...
...Acquisitiveness, or greed, to give it the ugly name it used to bear, or covetousness, instead of being regarded as one of the seven mortal sins, as it was in Christian doctrine, would in this new world provide one of the foundations of the free political order...
...These things--the hatred of inequality and the rhetorical advantage enjoyed by the enemies of big business--explain why the large corporations are on the defensive, 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 even when they don't deserve to be, and why it is so painless for the politicians and others to accuse and abuse them...
...Of course it has been tried, butwhat results is banal: No one cares whether the fictional salesman makes his sale, and no one with any sense or sensibility cares how or where or, indeed, whether he dies...
...that "to secure these rights"--and here I use the familiar language of the Declaration of Independence-government must be instituted...
...Running for reelection to the House of Representatives in 1972, he frequently found himself embarrassed by some of the radical egalitarian policies advocated by the head of his ticket, George McGovern...
...their opponents, whatever their vocations, are selfless (Ralph Nader accepts only a subsistence salary...
...We must stand firm," Mr...
...They were led to this conclusion not because of prejudice but because, on the basis of experience, they believed t h a t the majority, being poor, "would always use its power to expropriate the wealth of the more affluent minority, and that this would lead (as it always had) to economic chaos, followed by political chaos, followed by the restoration of order by a dictator...
...Walter Berns is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...When this happens, the Leviathan can become more or less invisible...
...asked Mikva, somewhat incredulously...
...As Werner J. Dannhauser has said so well, the private realm is one in which we can tend to the salvation of our own souls...
...T h e i r efforts to do so have failed because they labor under a severe rhetorical handicap: Business corporations exist to make money, and money-making is the most prosaic of activities...
...Like Tocque~'ille, they recognized the strength of the passion for equality--they referred to it as "democratic envy"--and the Constitution they wrote was designed to protect us from it, specifically from the "factions" that an envious majority would be likely to form...
...To which the worker replied: "No, but my kids might be...
Vol. 13 • September 1980 • No. 9
