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To Bind and Guide the World
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14516 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
2,145 Words |
| Author
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Samuel T. Francis
Samuel T. Francis is deputy editorial page editor of the
Washington Times. |
"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
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