Taming the Octopus

Recent controversies around ESG investing and "woke" capital evoke an old idea: the Progressive-era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, in fact, the notion that business leaders could benefit society had become a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams's brilliant history shows, New Deal liberalism realised a kind of big business supervision narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders.

This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become orthodoxy: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way, American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core.

As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to seatbelts to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximise value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, "stakeholder capitalism," still dominates our headlines today.

Taming the Octopus offers a necessary history that equips us to reconsider democracy’s tangled relationship with capitalism.