Everything Has a Price: Or Businessmen Know Best

Abstract

The dominance of neo-liberal thinking and the economic power of business leaders has had a profound, even if at times unacknowledged, impact on western society. Many of the values that were once thought to be its defining characteristics — conservative values, such as loyalty, honesty, duty and patriotism, as well as more progressive values such as tolerance, compassion, collective enterprise, social responsibility and generosity — have been increasingly abandoned in favour of a more aggressive sense that the only value by which actions and attitudes are to be judged is the pursuit of individual self-interest. It is increasingly accepted that, whatever claims might be made for what are now seen as the old-fashioned values, they can and should be trumped by the imperative of pursuing individual advancement and self-interest.