The Fire of Invention: Civil Society & the Future of the Corporation

by Michael Novak

Book Overview

Many Americans today consider the corporation to be the number one public enemy. Downsizing, corporate greed, an exclusive focus on the needs of shareholders at the expense of workers--the list of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0847686655
• ISBN13: 9780847686650
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.1" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Correction, should be read by every person in America

... and the rest of the western world. This is an incredible book, successfully debunking every anti-corporate myth. Far more than the usual abstract pro-capitalist treatise; it focuses on the single institution that underpins the success of capitalism, AND that is the sole salvation of the Civil Society - the corporation.

should be read by the head of every corporation in America

Since at least the 1982 publication of his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak has been the leading voice in the effort to reconcile Catholicism and capitalism, an effort which bore spectacular fruit with the 1991 papal encyclical, Centisimus Annus. The tension between the two -isms, though partially a function of the fact that Capitalism is associated with Protestantism, was for the most part a fairly natural result of capitalism's dependence on individualism and self-interest, as opposed to Catholicism's hierarchical and authoritarian structure and Christianity's requirement of selflessness and charity.The three essays in this collection, originally delivered as the Pfizer Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, address the future of the corporation, intellectual property rights, and corporate governance. They are unified by the way in which Novak treats business and the corporation as institutions which have important moral roles to play in society. First he discusses the fact that corporations are voluntary associations, which allow individuals to work together in ways that make them more powerful and effective than they could ever be on their own and which serve important social ends : From the point of view of civil society, the business enterprise is an important social good for four reasons. First, it creates jobs. Second, it provides desirable goods and services. Third, through its profits, it creates wealth that did not exist before. And fourth, it is a private social instrument, independent of the state, for the moral and material support of other activities of civil society.In fact, he argues, the effectiveness of corporations in providing goods and services, in creating wealth, jobs, and opportunities, and in providing a counterweight to the power of central government, makes them second in importance only to religious organizations in terms of the role they have played in creating and guaranteeing democracy.In this section he makes the really intriguing point that some of the earliest capitalist corporations were born out of the Catholic monasteries of the Middle Ages. He quotes the great modern Tory historian Paul Johnson to the effect that : A great and increasing part of the arable land of Europe passed into the hands of highly disciplined men committed to a doctrine of hard work. They were literate. They knew how to keep accounts. Above all, perhaps, they worked to a daily timetable and an accurate annual calendar--something quite alien to the farmers and landowners they replaced. Thus their cultivation of the land was organized, systematic, persistent. And, as owners, they escaped the accidents of deaths, minorities, administration by hapless widows, enforced sales, or transfer of ownership by crime, treason and folly. They brought continuity of exploitation. They produced surpluses and invested them in the form of draina