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This chapter explores a number of relatively unknown aspects of the controversy over Milton Friedman’s March 1975 visit to Chile through the analytical framework provided by James M. Buchanan’s late 1950s assessment of the economist-physician analogy. The chapter draws upon a range of archival and neglected primary sources to show that the topics which generally rear their head in any contemporary discussion of Friedman’s visit to Chile – for example, whether it is appropriate to provide policy advice to a dictator – were aired in a largely private mid-1970s exchange between Friedman and a number of professional associates. In particular, the controversy over Friedman and Chile began several months before Friedman arrived in Santiago.

Calls for corporate social responsibility are widespread, yet there is no consensus about what it means; this may be its charm. However, it is possible to distinguish the fi duciary obligations owed to shareholders, as expressed by Milton Friedman, from all other paradigms of corporate responsibility. Friedman maintains that: “ ...there is one and only one social responsibility of business‐to‐use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.” All other paradigms argue that corporations have social responsibilities that extend beyond the pursuit of shareholder benefits to stakeholders. The list of cited stakeholders is ill‐defined and expanding, including non‐human animals and non‐sentient things. This paper defends the intellectual and ethical merits of fiduciary duties, and compares and contrasts it to the stakeholder paradigm. The fiduciary duty to firms’ owners is the bedrock of capitalism, and capitalism will wither without it.

The traditional role of business as essentially fulfilling a limited economic role has its articulate proponents (Milton Friedman, 1962; Theodore Levitt, 1958; Frederick Hayek, 1944). Friedman and others who see business as having a very central but limited role in society contend that the business of business is business — not social issues or politics.

The paper aims to explain why and how, in the USA, a very particular interpretation of economic liberalism, faring though different historical contexts, has generated, since the 1970s, a new kind of capitalism whose language, logic, legitimating paradigm and associated practices have become, thanks to “organic intellectuals” and active networks of power and influence, the “newspeak” and compass of chief executive officers from around the world, despite their always direst societal consequences.

Using history as a support to investigate the domestic and international relations contexts that bore financialized globalization, the paper is strongly located into political sociology. As such, and if we consider that political sociology is the “science of power”, the paper tries to identify precisely the networks of power and influence which transformed a specific interpretation of liberalism and business into a dominant paradigm and specific kind of capitalism, in the USA and the rest of the world. The approach helps to understand which sets of ideas and authors were deemed worth supporting by business and political networks of power and influence and how both sides drew on their reciprocal resources to transform their cosmogonies into dominant paradigms and real politics (corporate and States).

The paper provides a global but precise understanding of the complex processes that allowed some vested interests to impose their vision of economics and business on a domestic, then world, scale. It also questions the relevancy of that vision according to a presentation of the negative societal externalities the associated policies generated and according to the official investigations that have been conducted on the corporate and banking misdemeanors that it contributed to generate.

The paper illustrates a method of investigation that can be used to develop the “global view”, a prerequisite to making decisions in full knowledge of causes and consequences and thus a means to train future “globally responsible leaders”.

By revealing the hidden interests behind financialized globalization and the societal consequences of their power plays, the paper indirectly demonstrates the urgent need for an “alter‐economy” geared to meet the fundamental needs of societies and to preserve their natural environment in the long term.

The paper offers a different perspective on economics and business which is seldom presented in business schools where, owing to the discussed dominant ideology, politics is considered irrelevant to understand business and economics and where the latter are nearly always presented as vectors of good.

It is suggested that the approach of the social economist to social problems, if followed, would lead to The Good Society, one in which the lot of our “human resources” would be considerably ameliorated. For the social economist the goal of the economy is not private profit nor is it improvement in the fertility of the soil nor capital accumulation for their own sakes and that of their owners, but the material, moral and spiritual well‐being of homo sapiens. The social economist is concerned with the efficiency of the capitalist system relative to the broad goals of society, rather than the maximisation of private property.

In order to answer this question, it will first be necessary to distinguish between political and economic correctness on the one hand, and then between Austrian and mainstream economics on the other.

Friedman and Schwartz have argued that the Great Depression was primarily caused by mistakes in monetary policy. This paper presents evidence supporting this view. Four percent money growth over the period 1929–1941 is found to prevent the Great Depression completely. Indeed, had such a policy been followed, real income would have grown nearly as rapidly in the 1930s as it grew in the 1920s.