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(8,155 posts)
Thu Apr 4, 2013, 05:34 PM Apr 2013

Owners of industry "claim a kind of power to which they have no right."

Today, there are many men and women who preside over enterprises in which hundreds and thousands of their fellow citizens are involved, who direct and control the working lives of their fellows, and who explain themselves exactly as George Pullman did. I govern these people, they say, in the same way a man governs the things he owns. People who talk this way are wrong. They misunderstand the prerogatives of ownership (and of foundation, investment, and risk taking). They claim a kind of power to which they have no right.

To say this is not to deny the importance of entrepreneurial activity. In both companies and towns, one looks for people like Pullman, full of energy and ideas, willing to innovate and take risks, capable of organizing large projects. It would be foolish to create a system that did not bring them forward. They are of no use if they just brood in their castles. But there is nothing they do that gives them a right to rule over the rest of us, unless they can win our agreement. At a certain point in the development of enterprise, then, it must pass out of entrepreneurial control; it must be organized or recognized in some political way, according to the prevailing (democratic) conception of how power ought to be distributed. It is often said that economic entrepreneurs won't come forward if they cannot hope to own the companies they found. But this is like saying that no one would seek divine grace or knowledge who did not hope to come into hereditary possession of a church or 'holy commonwealth,' or that one would found new hospitals or experimental schools who did not intend to pass them on to his children, or that no one would sponsor political innovation and reform unless it were possible to own the state. But ownership is not the goal of political or religious life, and there are still attractive and even compelling goals. Indeed, had Pullman founded a better town, he might have earned himself the sort of public honor that men and women have sometimes taken as the highest end of human action. If he wanted power as well, he should have run for mayor.


- Sourced from "Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality" - Michael Walzer



George Pullman, who Walzer references, was a man who built his own private down, Pullman, Illinois, in the late 1800s. He ran it like a business and he was the lone dictator. Even though it began peacefully, the townspeople eventually revolted against his autocratic rule, forming unions and striking. The Supreme Court of Illinois ruled against Pullman, forcing him to divest ownership of the community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pullman

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