Review of the Book:
The Social Conscience
by Michel Glautier
H. William Batt
[A review of The Social Conscience. by ,
published in London by Shepheard-Walwyn, Ltd., 2007. Reviewed by H.
Willilam Batt, Ph.D., Albany, New York, June, 2007]
I have frequently thought of accountants as green eye-shade types who
work in back offices making sure that resources are, well, accounted
for. A surprise it is, then, to read a book by an established
professor of accounting that reaches to the most challenging and
wide-ranging issues of our contemporary world. Professor Michel
Glautier asks, in his book, The Social Conscience, whether a
caring society can exist in a market economy, and whether a market
economy is sustainable that denies man's fundamental nature. The
subtext of the book concerns the wisdom of integration and evolution
of the European Community through transcendent market instruments that
oppose the human impulses of a caring and sharing nature which are
just as important an element of society.
The author points out that "it has taken the USA at least two
centuries to build a nation. . . . By contrast, the European Union is
attempting to create one in a relatively short period of time by
uniting countries that have their own strong identities." What
does this do to family cohesion and to other institutions responsible
for the socialization and moral development of a citizenry? The market
system functions by encouraging people to function as autonomous
rational actors for instrumental gain, and is only one component of
civilization. As governments become instruments to foster ever greater
economic purposes, social programs are forced to take a back seat or
are eliminated altogether. What then is the proper role of government,
and what relationship should exist between markets and sovereign
authority? This is not an alarmist book, but the concerns expressed
are deeply felt and exhaustively explored.
The choices Professor Glautier poses are versions of either
conventional socialism or free-market capitalism, and it is quite
clear that he is sympathetic to the former if given a choice. He
explains that the failures of capitalism to address poverty and
hardship rely upon the charity of those more secure; the capitalist
system itself offers no guarantees of social justice. Enterprise is
its own reward. But a caring society, in contrast, rests upon a
pervasive social conscience, and this age-old tradition is jeopardized
by the veneration of contemporary mechanistic capitalist designs.
While recognizing that capitalism has led to prodigious wealth in the
past century, its damaging impacts have been tempered by the
persistence of other social structures. As these bulwarks of culture
and sensitivity disintegrate, what patterns will emerge on the
horizon?
At this point separate chapters examine the condition of education,
of government, of religion, and even business as vehicles capable of
protecting and preserving a sharing and caring community. As he sees
it, none is capable of the task, either individually or collectively.
Market behavior, in contrast, has been given every endorsement, buoyed
by an ideology that assures its expansion and dominance. Corporations
given the status of individual persons more than a century ago now are
situated such that they can control political discourse and decisions
beyond what courts could ever have envisioned. Regulatory measures
pale in their effort to police market abuses. The ideology of
comparative advantage makes free trade a byword to fulfilling every
material promise, ignorant of any impact upon the natural environment,
culture, or upon time dimensions beyond the present. The veneration of
economic designs, based on the fictional assumptions of perfect
competition, provide a defense of policies that jeopardize social
interests beyond immediate gain. An accountant's appreciation of the
differences between production capital and finance capital -- a
distinction of only recent origin -- leads to his recognition of the
failures of markets to distribute wealth in an equitable manner. The
transformation of social sharing to paper-based shareholder value is
his special bane, one which has transformed corporate culture and
behavior in ways that further distort social wealth.
Glautier says that we owe to Marx the insight that class struggle is
responsible for producing "two alternative theories of
government: one representing a state in which the interests of an
oligarchy of wealth are uppermost, the other representing a state in
which the interests of the citizens at large, without wealth
distinction, are dominant. . . . The substantial difference between
these different definitions of the concept of the State as a unified
social entity stems from the concept of private property, as a social
phenomenon." (p. 201-2) The power of propertied elites,
especially by means of their corporate control, has led to the
existence of sham democracies, only superficially able to express
their will. Due also to a complicit system of media empires, we now
have what he calls a "democratic deficit" in nations that
for all their posturing have ceased to be responsive to the social
conscience. The current war in Iraq is only the most recent travesty
plaguing the English-speaking democracies, and leading him to conclude
that, "it is inevitable that the time will come when the US
Government and the British Government will be brought before the
International Criminal Court and will have to answer for war crimes
committed in Iraq, including the illegal invasion of that country."
(p. 226) The phrase, "of the people, by the people, for the
people" has in the author's mind ceased to have meaning in the
political affairs of these nations.
The Social Conscience is a treatise that ranges widely, at
times too widely in my view, over the challenges faced by contemporary
government and politics. The strongest chapters are, as one would
expect, those that deal with economics and accounting. One needs to be
reminded, perhaps, that Professor Glautier's textbook, Accounting
Theory and Practice, has been through seven editions, and an
earlier text, Basic Accounting Practice, also had several
printings. One is left believing that The Social Conscience is his
desire to set down thoughts that an accounting text or his other
published journal articles would preclude his addressing. But for all
the breadth of his thought, I regret that he seems unaware of the
Georgist philosophy that steps outside of the conventional capitalist
socialist dichotomy to a genuine "Third Way." Those he knows
he sees as "compromises that lead to unsatisfactory solutions in
the long-term, because they avoid addressing the central issues and
often introduce other and difficult problems." (p. 134) Yet this
book is issued by Shepheard-Walwyn Press, the same outlet responsible
for publishing the work of Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison, Robert
Andelson, Ronald Banks, and other Georgist writers. Defending public
welfare and common interests through reliance upon the social
conscience is essential, but Georgists also argue for protecting the
commons through law, economic understanding, and community enterprise.
The most effective instrument for doing this is the recapture of
economic rent for support of public services and welfare, and to
jettison reliance upon tax instruments in use today.
One can imagine that an interpretation of accounting history
comparable to that which Professor Gaffney has provided for economics
could be an extremely valuable addition to the ongoing discourse on
economic justice. It could also offer to Professor Glautier a chance
to escape from the either - or paradigm of capitalism vs socialism.
The Social Conscience has occasional allusions to the place of
land, natural resources and or property in fostering wealth and
justice, (p. 107, 115, 128), but it never appreciates that the "shareholder
value" that presently compromises and corrupts capitalist
enterprise could easily be modified to incorporate the Georgist
paradigm. What better definition of "shareholder value"
could there be than a recognition that all people are shareholders of
the earth in all natural resource forms, and that the rent from its
use should be rightfully claimed by society as a collectivity!
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