Spiritual Enterprise
Doing Virtuous Business
by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Encounter Books; 150 pp, $21.95

THE PRIVATE SECTOR corporation is so ubiquitous in our economy that it's easy to overlook the vital role it plays. Yet these "little republics" are the essential wealth-creating constituents of free economies and free societies in the West.

The philosophy and spirit that animates private sector companies therefore has an enormous impact on all of civil society. The more companies strive to treat their employees and customers with justice and respect, the less need or excuse government will have to interfere with their liberty. As the great philosopher of freedom Edmund Burke said: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites...Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

Elevating the spiritual values that founders and employees invest in their companies is the goal of this important book by Theodore Malloch. The nub of his argument is that moral and economic values are not in competition. In the business context, to pursue the first is to obtain the second--to the great benefit of society.

Malloch begins with the concept of "social capital," the accumulated social resources inherited by each new generation from its predecessor. He demonstrates that the

Theodore Malloch's thesis is that religious faith and spiritual commitments change business for the better. The faith commitments of founders and employees gives businesses an asset he calls "spiritual capital." It can arise from a wide variety of faith traditions, and provides a significant advantage to the firms that develop it.

Spiritual capital, he contends, has an economic function and potential comparable to other forms of capital. "When people join together in an enterprise they create a new person, the firm itself, which is something greater than the sum of its parts. It too has a soul, and if its members honor God, then it too honors God. If its members aim to do good, it too aims to do good."

Malloch also conducts an enlightening debate with the disciples of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. The full title of Darwin's 1859 book is On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In 1860 Marx wrote Friedrich Engels "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history." The Marx/Darwin focus on struggle provides the foundation for the leftist critique of businessmen as greedy predators who exploit workers in the zero-sum struggle for scarce resources that only the all-encompassing state can distribute justly.