Bakan argues that corporations behave ”pathologically” because of their inherent logic and legal obligation to pursue profit without regard to external costs borne by others. Nader says he made a similar argument to a conference of psychologists years ago. Both then seek to show how the restraints that hold this drive in check — unions, communities, even national governments — have been overridden by the scale of the modern corporation. Both cite Milton Friedman and others in defense of the focus on profit. Nader also quotes Peter F. Drucker, the preeminent student of American management: ”If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibility, fire him. Fast.” The quotation is eye-catching, because it directly contradicts Drucker’s earlier views. ”In modern society there is no other leadership group but managers,” Drucker wrote in the 1970’s. ”If the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.”

His battle with the automakers established Ralph Nader. In his history of the Ford Motor Company, Douglas Brinkley says Nader ‘’stalked General Motors like a big game-hunter desperate for a kill.” That intensity changed the balance of power between the makers and the buyers of automobiles. Brinkley relates a visit by Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca to the Oval Office of Richard Nixon (who of course taped the session). ”They’re a group of people that aren’t really one damn bit interested in safety or clean air,” the ever-calculating Nixon told the auto executives. ”What they’re interested in is destroying the system. They’re enemies of the system.”

Whether that was true of Nader then he will have to tell us in a more autobiographical book. But it is certainly true of him now. Or perhaps he would prefer to say that he wishes to destroy the power of megacorporations so as to retrieve the American system of representative democracy. ”The Good Fight” includes Nader’s disclaimer that ”this book is not about my current political campaign.” But if not, then what is his current political campaign about?

From Michael Orekskes’ NY Time review of Nader’s new book, The Good Fight