The author James Baldwin once wrote with great insight, ‘‘The - TopicsExpress

The author James Baldwin once wrote with great insight, ‘‘The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.’’ As Baldwin suggests, language gives us a way of tackling and containing the great mysteries of existence. It is the foundation of religion, of philosophy, of our systems of government. But language also migrates. Words change meaning, or new meanings are forced on them or wrung out of them. The genius of George Orwell’s 1984 doesn’t lie in imagining the ultimate totalitarian state—Orwell had a ready example of that in front of him. The true genius lies in the way Oceana’s totalitarians manipulate language to create an alternate reality. In Orwell’s New-Speak, ‘‘war’’ becomes ‘‘peace,’’ ‘‘love’’ is ‘‘hate,’’ ‘‘Big Brother’’ rules with a smothering iron hand. As with governments, so with corporations. We understand them through the language we use to describe them, yet the words constantly struggle with one another to increase their power and prestige, much like the ferocious competition between brands. Take the phrase maximizing wealth. For generations, it was understood that publicly held corporations would promote a politically defined objective of the general good and that their managers would strictly limit the application of power to optimize the interest of the beneficial owners: the shareholders. This was, in essence, the social contract that freed corporations to maximize wealth. Today, at least in the United States, that understanding no longer holds. Maximizing wealth has shed its obligations to the general good. Almost everyone now understands wealth maximization to be an unquestionable good in its own right— a worthy explanation of a corporation’s objectives and goals even if that means quashing other concerns about corporate citizenship such as pollution, deceptive accounting, or tax evasion. Good deeds are for Eagle Scouts. Big Business’s goodness is measured in profit and loss. As they were with so many things not related to production and sales, CEOs and other corporate interests were initially slow to catch on to the importance of these word- struggles. The bottom line was what mattered, not the linguistic envelope that Big Business operated within. That, too, has changed dramatically. Over the past three decades, corporations have been employing well-funded armies of top legal talent and alleged experts not just to win court battles and favorable legislation but to change the very language that we use to describe their activities and, in the process, to alter our understanding of the basic nature of corporate responsibility. The rapid spread of this new corporate language has been helped along by many events—the rise of global competition, an almost unbroken string of largely pro- business presidential administrations, even an entire branch of the media devoted to business, corporate news, and commentary. But no single factor has been more important than the ascendancy of a once-overlooked and devalued discipline: economics. Like corporations, economics today enjoys a much more privileged standing in the world than it once did. Often mocked as the ‘‘dismal science’’—after Thomas Carlyle’s famous phrase—economics began to emerge as its own discipline separate from philosophy with the 1776 publication of Adam Smith’s landmark Wealth of Nations. But even Adam Smith could carry the ball only so far. As a social science that attempted to quantify the human exchange of resources, economics faced constant scorn from other academic fields, particularly the so-called hard sciences, for not being sufficiently scientific. This distaste for economics was never clearer than in 1969 when the first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded. Created on the initiative of the Bank of Sweden and not by Alfred Nobel’s will as was the case with, say, physics or literature, the new prize immediately faced charges of being an imposter award. Peter Nobel, a descendant of Alfred, has carried the fight forward to the present day, claiming the prize amounts to trademark infringement of the family name. ‘‘There is no mention in the letters of Alfred Nobel that he would appreciate a prize for economics,’’ Peter Nobel told one interviewer. ‘‘The Swedish Riksbank, like a cuckoo, has placed its egg in another very decent bird’s nest.’’ Monks