Business: always the villain, never the hero

When I was at university, I did a course called Business Literature and Society, taught by the rather marvellous Neil McKendrick, later the Master of Gonville and Caius College.

The idea was to look at how business and industry were portrayed in British literature. It was rather depressing. We looked George Orwell's horror of business and money in general. He hated poverty (it "kills thought"), but he didn't fancy money or capitalism much either ("the advance of machine technology must lead ultimately to form of collectivisation").

We looked at EM Forster and the horror of technology-led progress he displays in The Machine Stops, as well as the ambiguity towards progress shown in Howards End. Think of quotes such as "the real thing is money and all the rest's a dream", or "humans heard each other speak with increasing difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky".

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Then there was DH Lawrence who raged against even Forster's portrayal of business ("you did make a nearly deadly mistake in glorifying those business people in Howards End"). and made his own views as a certain an unwavering critic of industry pretty clear in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

We looked, too, at Dickens, with his endless antagonism to the Victorian age and vision of money, commerce and industry threatening personal relationships.

Then we moved on a bit and read David Lodge (Changing Places, Nice Work) and Margaret Drabble, who worried endlessly about moral exhaustion in industrial society (a "huge icy fist... that is squeezing and chilling the people of England").

Flick through all this literature and much more modern and you will see that as a rule we haven't much good to say about businessmen, capitalism or even entrepreneurs, for that matter.

This all popped back into my mind this week when I was reading Janet Daley in the Telegraph. The column in question is here. In it, Daley rages against the idea that public institutions should be allowed to operate with an "aura of sanctity" around them "almost as if being employed by an outfit that is funded by state subsidy means that you aren't doing it for payment, that idealism and devotion to your vocation are somehow a substitution for renumeration." The public sector is, therefore, "inherently virtuous".

This is, of course, nonsense. Yet as an idea it increasingly runs parallel to the idea that "private enterprise, and specifically profit, are necessarily evil". Where does this extraordinary notion come from? asks Daley.

It is hard to put your finger on the very beginning (the defensive snobbery of the landed gentry during the industrial revolution is probably a good place to start) but what might help, just for once, would be a few popular books with a successful businessman as the hero. not the villain.

PS I am not so familiar with American literature, but this looks interesting. More on the businessman in UK literature here.