Several years ago, I took over teaching an interdisciplinary elective in the Management Department at Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business entitled “Ethics, Economics, and Entrepreneurship.” Loyola’s Jesuit Mission, especially the Ignatian Pedagogy Paradigm’s emphasis on cura personalis, care for the whole person, places a high emphasis on critical thinking. So I decided to try and build a syllabus that would allow the students to criticize the content of the class I usually teach, “Ethics in Business,” a core class in Quinlan’s curriculum that every student is required to take.
This syllabus thus addresses the “dark side” of capitalist social dynamics through the lens of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction, focusing on those initial, often institutionally unstructured moments after a successful innovation disrupts a given market or industry.
We begin the class by reading Smith’s famous passage on “the little boy who wanted to play” from The Wealth of Nations, opening the class with the idea that one of the main drivers of “innovation” is the desire to be free from work. From there, we turn to Marx and Engels’ “Manifesto of the Communist Party” to raise the question of capitalism’s inner history, specifically the way that capitalism is driven to undermine its own legitimizing narratives and contexts. I ask the students to focus on the Manifesto’s affirmations of capitalism—what is this power capitalism possesses to profane, integrate, accentuate, and clarify its own conditions? This point of departure frames the problem of destruction as ambiguous: it can be both a catastrophic and an emancipatory force. We conclude the opening section of the class with one of the most fascinating affirmations of experimentation in the liberal democratic tradition, John Stuart Mill’s “eccentricities of conduct” from Chapter Three of On Liberty. The idea here is to raise the question of whether deviation and novelty as such have normative value.
We then move on to Schumpeter’s concepts of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction. We begin with an exploration of Schumpeter’s critique of the neo-classical conception of the economy as a “circular flow” in which consumer demand determines production via price signals. On this model, producers compete for the opportunity to satisfy that same demand in what Schumpeter refers to as a primarily spatial form of competition, thereby establishing a kind of internal relationship between capitalism and democracy (where the consumers’ and voters’ sovereignty are understood to legitimize the form of society in which they live).
Entrepreneurial labor, however, does not begin from a pre-existing form—it does not “react” to consumer demand; it determines it by introducing new models for what consumers ought to want. Schumpeter contends that it is in fact capital, not individual consumption, that is sovereign in a capitalist society. It is at this point that the critique of “business ethics” proper comes fully into view. For if it is true, as Schumpeter contends, that consumer desires are in fact internal rather than external to capital, i.e., that firms are determinative of rather than determined by people’s “freely chosen” desires, then these experiences and interests’ capacity to produce a set of norms that bind firms’ conduct is less clear.
The next section turns to Nietzsche’s work, looking in particular at his concepts of “activity” and “reactivity.” Using the chapter on the will to power from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy as our guide, we take up the idea that, for Nietzsche, being and becoming are not expressive of any pre-existing moral idea or essence but are essentially conflictual and bellicose: everything that exists does so in virtue of a victory of one force over another, reactive forces being nothing more than defeated active forces. However, Nietzsche’s thinking also suggests that whatever appears as reactive, captured, habitual, or self-undermining can always potentially be “reactivated,” broken out of its reactive fascination with another’s activity and set in motion to exercise its own strength to its conclusion. Every reactive force—every relation of employment, but also every investment in a “fixed asset”—can always be turned back around into activity under the right conditions.
We conclude the first half of the semester by returning to the tradition of business ethics and examining a more functional concept of the entrepreneur in the economist Ronald Coase’s work, who argues that submission to hierarchy is, in fact, rationally motivated by the “efficiency gains” it affords to particular individuals.
The second half of the class begins with Saras Sarasvathy’s concept of “effectuation” and examines whether domination and victory are the right categories with which to explain the possibility of an innovation. She suggests that, rather than competition, cooperation creates the “outside” of the market from which innovative disruptions emerge. Here we also look at Rene Girard’s concept of “mimesis,” which suggests that individual desires are modeled by others—and that therefore what Nietzsche calls “reactivity” could in fact be productive for cooperative efforts. The final texts from this section of the class look at workers’ cooperatives and the unique way in which workers’ cooperatives increased trust with key stakeholders gives them a unique capacity for innovation. From here, we turn to the complex problem of automation and labor by reading Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work. This text sets out to demystify technological innovation and show that contemporary anxieties around automation “stealing our jobs” are misplaced. Following Robert Brenner, Benanav claims that declining rates of employment have much more to do with declining output and the overall stagnation of the capitalist economy than with the runaway productivity of process-innovations. This sets up our discussion of Mary Gray and Siddarth Suri’s Ghost Work to get a more vivid picture of the precarious forms of “underemployment” that Benanav describes. We then conclude this section by examining the growing role of artificial intelligence in the late capitalist economy, focusing in particular on the current rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic.
The class concludes with Hardt and Negri’s “Entrepreneurship of the Multitude,” reading the Hong Kong Uprising in 2019-20 as an example of “entrepreneurship without a subject,” or innovation that does not proceed from any stable subjectivity—no matter whether domineering, cooperative, collective, or functional—but rather produces a subject. It is therefore a properly “emergent” form of innovation insofar as it harbors the possibility that new kind of “people” might come into being in and through the distributive praxis of many different individuals’ collaborative innovation through radically de-centralized means. We end by suggesting that this kind of “horizontal” entrepreneurship will likely become increasingly prevalent, and important, in these dark, illiberal times.
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James Murphy
James Murphy is a Lecturer of Business Ethics at Loyola University Chicago. His research intersects critical social theory and business ethics, drawing from both democratic theory and the Frankfurt School to articulate the parameters of ethical experience at the limits of institutions. He is interested in the inter-corporeal mediation of intersubjectivity and the role of the body in the construction of moral and political autonomy, as well as the relationship between libidinal and political economy in entrepreneurial experience and process.
