The corporation - Joel Bakan

What would the world be like if the ruling elite were insane? This isn't a question for science fiction but a matter for social scientists. The most powerful class of institution on earth, the corporation, is by any reasonable measure hopelessly and irrevocably demented. The corporation lies, steals and kills without remorse or hesitation when it serves the interests of its shareholders to do so. Corporate social responsibility is a contradiction in terms.

As incisive as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, as rigorous as Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents, Joel Bakan's new book is a revolutionary analysis of the corporation as an artificial person, programmed by law to operate in ways that in a human would be clearly psychopathic. And, since the corporation has claimed rights once reserved for human beings, Bakan argues that it is time for us to decide whether we are happy to put our trust in a system in which the lunatics have not only taken over the asylum but also own it lock, stock and barrel.

At once a diagnosis and a course of treatment, The Corporation is essential reading for those who want to understand the nature of the modern business system. It is a sober and careful attempt to describe the world as it is rather than as corporate public-relations departments would have us believe it to be. It reveals a world more exotic and more terrifying than any of us could have imagined. And although a billion-dollar industry is trying to convince us otherwise, the corporations that surround us are not our friends. Charming and plausible though they are, they can only ever see us as resources to be used.

'The Corporation' has been published to coincide with the theatrical release in the UK of The Corporation, a documentary feature co-produced by the author and based on this book.