Corporations and the Common Good

Multinational corporations are highly regarded by some as the crowning achievement of American enterprise. For a significant and increasingly vocal group of Americans, however, the large corporation inspires suspicion if not outright hostility. While some share these suspicions, the contributors to this volume are persuaded that the large corporation is not only here to stay, as Kenneth Mason argues, but has become the definitive institution of modern Western culture. The large corporation dominates the modern world in much the same way that the church and the university dominated the medieval world. Corporations and the Common Good clarifies the suspicions about how corporations came to be, what makes them work, and what needs to be done to change them and their impact on our society. These were the questions which motivated a colloquium at Boston University on what we chose to call "The Philosophy of the Large Corporation." That enigmatic title was their way of avoiding another conference on "business ethics" and inaugurating a too-brief, admittedly rough-edged, but nevertheless serious attempt to find out how large corporations affect the common good in our culture. The colloquium was sponsored jointly by Boston University's Institute for Philosophy and Religion and its School of Management.