Monday Book Report: The Divine Right of Capital

I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept.

The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, by Marjorie Kelly

Returning to a book almost twenty years after its release may bring many pleasures, surprises, or insights. Reading an author’s words decades after they were written may cause us to nod our heads in thoughtful recognition of revealed truths, to shake our heads at prophetic predictions, or to bow our heads in respect for powerful words from the past. This book is not that book, however. Nor is Marjorie Kelly that author. This book—The Divine Right of Capital—is a puree of soft ideas, obvious observations, illogical connections, and unworkable prescriptions that caused this reader only to nod his head in fatigue, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs produced by trying to follow the fuzzy threads of Kelly’s various arguments, only to bow my head that only 19 years ago anyone could have been so naïve as to believe in the childish fixes proposed herein.

Reading this book also underscores how lost the battle is that Ms. Kelly wishes to fight. She decries the overwhelming influence of money in politics … nine years before Citizens United vs. FEC institutionalized and sanctified such influence. She inveighs against the disparity between rich and poor, which has only become greater since this book was published in 2001 (as the chart from the Federal Reserve shows). She identifies the main problem of the economy as the primacy of shareholders in corporations, and then proposes almost laughable ideas to overcome this threat. (She even calls some of her ideas “pranks”, in a misguided nod to the Boston Tea Party as such a ‘prank’.) The book highlights the fuzziness of most business school thinking, combined with the earnest allusions of the public speaking crowd, mixed up with the legal analysis of a 1st-year law student and the historical references of an economist who reads about history books in The New York Times Book Review. The main feeling of the book is “What a waste.” But then, I chose to read this book, and now you don’t have to.

One might see a stirring of revolution in such cases. They represent small chinks in the supposedly impenetrable legal wall protecting shareholder primacy. Perhaps we might use these laws one day to drive a truck (or a Trojan horse) through that wall.

Muddling metaphors like mint in a Virgin Julep

There are good things in this book: nice historical perspectives, important background on corporate and constitutional law, the usual panoply of statistics and examples that must accompany every hortatory business book nowadays. But the good things are buried under writing that jumps from here to there and back again with little regard for the reader, using metaphors from something her friend told her about architecture, or that feeling she got in winter when there was lots of ice on the ground. It is the usual attempt to engage the reader by personalizing the narrative, but since there is no particular voice or real focus to each chapter, save to bring up the examples she wrote on notecards for this topic and that topic, her writing style reveals only the conventional adipose tissue between her bullet points, so much loosely connective fat like the meaningless mission statements now de rigueur at every business. She presents (debatably) useful information, but then undercuts her own argument with boilerplate truisms such as this: “As both quantum theory and chaos theory teach us, the next state of the world is fundamentally not knowable.” That sentence is not true, nor is it meaningful. (The “state of the world” is certainly not a meaningful subject of quantum mechanics (I’m guessing that’s what she’s referring to by “quantum theory”; I really doubt she means quantum field theory), and chaos theory applies to systems where slightly different initial conditions lead to widely disparate results, as opposed to the system we have now, where concentrations of wealth and power tend to act to keep and increase that wealth and power.)

But the weakness of those statues may have something to do with the weakness of the theory itself. Indeed, its bagginess and shapelessness do seem fatal to its real usefulness.

Twenty years ago, irony had not been completely beaten to death

Going through Ms. Kelly’s arguments and assertions really is not worthwhile at this late date. The dangers she warned about have come true, and then some. She was wrong only in her deluded belief that so-called ‘Business Ethics’ (which was also the title of the magazine she edited when this book was published) could prevent the slide into pure, brutal plutocracy; if anything she was a dupe hoping that right-thinking people could triumph over “the Corporate Aristocracy”, as she calls the enemy in her subtitle. Perhaps the most telling or damning comment on her ideas and her life’s work is the judgment passed on her by the current social media trendosphere: Marjorie Kelly has no Wikipedia page, nor has she a blue check mark next to her Twitter handle. (She’s just @marjorie_kelly, for what it’s worth. Please don’t tell her about this book report; she seems like a nice enough person.)

The proposed solutions she offers are less likely to succeed now than they were in 2001, when they were almost ludicrous. Her ideas for employee ‘pranks’ include wearing T-shirts protesting buyouts, signing corporate documents with a skull-and-crossbones stamp (alluding to Revolutionary Era protests against the Stamp Act), or running for a spot on the board of directors. These might work in a revival of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, but …. She has more practical ideas for business students, investors, CEOs … but most of these I have met have other, more pragmatic, ideas of getting while the getting is good.

Speaking of which: Time for me to go. It’s a ‘No’ from me, dawg. Read Jim Sculley’s biography instead. At least that one has a lot of laughs (none intentional, however).