Thomas Klikauer: Hegel’s Moral Corporation

Excerpt

Thomas Klikauer might say that the problem of the twentyfirst century is the problem of the corporate line. In an era in which “Corporations Rule the World” (citing Korten 1996), corporate interests, practices, and ideologies (especially Managerialism) have so overtaken politics, education, and the media that the line between corporations and every other domain of social life has been virtually erased. In another sense, the problem is that the corporate line (what corporations are “about”) is a “one-dimensional” fixation upon profit-maximisation that renders other concerns—business ethics for example—subservient to “the Real Bottom Line”. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman defended this line iconically: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970, p. 32). Klikauer addresses both problems, corporate domination and the primacy of profit, as he undertakes a “norm versus norm” comparison of contemporary business corporations and Hegel’s conception of ethical (sittliche) corporations advanced in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1991 [1821]). Klikauer’s book is an impassioned essai—in his words, a “thought experiment”: a critical examination of “today’s business corporations in the light of Hegel’s sittliche corporations” (p. 16). …