Power and the Useful Economist (1973)
Context: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.
“A wise Government, allying itself with religion, would, as it were, consecrate society and sanctify the State. But how is this to be done? It is the problem of modern politics which has always most embarrassed statesmen. No solution of the difficulty can be found in salaried priesthoods and complicated concordats. But by the side of the State in England there has gradually arisen a majestic corporation wealthy, powerful, independent with the sanctity of a long tradition, yet sympathising with authority, and full of conciliation, even deference, to the civil power. Broadly and deeply planted in the land, mixed up with all our manners and customs, one of the main guarantees of our local government, and therefore one of the prime securities of our common liberties, the Church of England is part of our history, part of our life, part of England itself.”
Source: Speech in Aylesbury (14 November 1861), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 96
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Benjamin Disraeli 306
British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Pri… 1804–1881Related quotes
Source: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967, p. 357 (1967, p. 313)
Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. x
As quoted in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”, Jane Soames translator, Hogarth Press, London, authorized edition (1933) p. 23
1930s
Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p. 13 (Zeitschrift der Akademie fuer Deutches Recht, July 1, 1938, p. 513)
Source: Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (2003), p. 3