This volume examines the question of the ethics and ethos of business through Friedrich Nietzsche’s understanding of value in the age of nihilism, and through Martin Heidegger’s further explanations of Nietzsche’s thinking. For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, ‘business’ was the underlying engine of the production-destruction of value and values in the modern age. Unrecognised in the fields of management, organisation, or business ethics studies, and despite making for uncomfortable reading, both thinkers offer a precise apparatus through which the question of the ‘ethics’ of business is transformed into the prior question of the origins of the centrality of ‘business’ to contemporary life at global (or, as they would phrase it, “planetary”) level. What system of values, what ethics, in other words, has ordered existence to the principles of valuation represented by ‘business’ as historical paradigm?
Is business good or evil, moral or immoral? Such questions, although arising daily in all public spheres, remain as frustrating as ever in their refusal to open up to an answer. Formulated in this way, they remain stubbornly circular and divisive. This volume brings to the debates about the ethics of business, for the first time, two thinkers who have neither written about business, nor were conventional philosophers of ethics: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Yet both provide analyses of modernity that allow us to think about the way in which business has become the defining expression of the spirit of our age. Through them, we return to fundamental questions that are prior to any judgement about the morality or ethics of business. What is the character and place of business in our understanding of ourselves and of the world? What is the relationship between business, freedom and the manner in which we claim the power to bestow value upon the world? Is the endless production of ‘goods’ and ‘goodness’ as such really possible?
