Corporate Social Responsibility, or csr, has been with us at least since the 1950s and the publication of Howard Bowen’s book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman (1953), which broached the notion that the value, and the virtue, of a corporation should be measured by its social as well as its financial performance. Since then, csr has colonized boardrooms and business schools worldwide with ever-expanding formulas for what “responsibility” ought to entail. Archie Carroll gave us the csr Pyramid, with its hierarchy of responsibilities, from profitability at the bottom to philanthropy at the top. And things got ever fancier. John Elkington coined the term “Triple Bottom Line,” with its mandate that companies attend to “people, planet, profits,” more or less in that order. This has been augmented by much sloganeering about sustainability and all manner of social-justice cant. Contrarians of a classical disposition, from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, who believed the spillover from long-term profit-maximization inevitably benefits the larger society, would no doubt be appalled, but the mood of the times is not in their favor.

We guilty postmoderns do it differently, loading up business itself with burdens it is ill-designed to carry.

csrand its endless mutations rest on a mistrust of capitalism, played out in an emotivist therapeutic age. How often have you heard from retired executives, or practicing ones for that matter, platitudinous talk about “giving back,” as if they had wrongly taken something out and felt moral obligation to make