Facing the brutal reality of a mean-spirited corporate downsizing after a long and successful media career, Wade Rowland didn’t just get mad, he got philosophical. What results is a happy conclusion, in that he’s produced a thoroughly readable historical look at the roots of the modern corporation.

By going back hundreds of years to explore the economic and political thinking that led to the development of capitalism, Rowland is able to answer the questions that arose in his mind when the otherwise cheery and friendly co-workers and consultants with whom he dealt suddenly looked the other way when he was sacked by his employer.

Like Joel Bakan’s The Corporation, which posits that corporations fit the profile of criminal sociopaths, Rowland uncovers the seamier side of major companies that daily replicate the kind of heartless actions that inspired him to take this journey. Rowland originally set out to write a science fiction novel, so convinced was he that the corporate entity is so insidiously anti-human that it qualifies as an alien creature, something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Indeed, he reasons that it must be a form of artificial intelligence that plagues the world, for what would account for otherwise moral people making a living based on immoral decisions?

Concluding that truth is stranger and more interesting than fiction, he instead focuses his inquiry on making sense of the sometimes impenetrable writings of everyone from John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith to Hobbes and Spinoza. Rowland demonstrates how their musings helped form the basis for the “cognitive dissonance” that allows people to change their ethical outlook when placed inside a corporate structure whose first aim is obedience and profit.

Rowland patiently explores this thesis, illustrating how the market economy has transformed such concepts as evil and immorality into virtue. He believes corporations could be structured in a way to benefit humanity, and offers an admittedly short but sensible list of suggestions on how to tame the beast that has unleashed such human and ecological carnage.