Socialist Alternative to Business (1964)
I think business is a good way of getting the work of the world done, or organizing the production of goods and services, and of promoting a good deal of economic development. The socialist alternative, even though it is unquestionably workable and pretty stable once it is underway, has a great many disagreeable features, for the plain fact is that once we have given up exchange as the major organizer of social life, we tend to slip back into the threat system and coercion rather than go forward to the ideal world in which everybody does things for love, as the lamentable history of coercion in the socialist countries all too clearly shows. Even where the socialist society develops to the point where naked coercion is no longer so necessary, the mobilization of the arts of persuasion in getting out production seems to be even more corrupting than the similar mobilization of the arts of persuasion in capitalist societies for the purpose of increasing consumption. ... I do not want business as such to take on too much of the integrative roles. I do not want the corporation to become a church.
"The Changing Role of the Business Man," Speech to Kalamazoo College on December, 3, 1964 (unpublished). Kenneth E. Boulding Papers, Archives (Box # 37), University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.
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