Entrepreneurs and Democracy is an important and timely book. For scholars of corporate governance, the book establishes a truly comprehensive political and social context for current debates on the roles and responsibilities of investors and owners in the modern corporation. And for practitioners, Entrepreneurs and Democracy is a highly readable guide to the historical and philosophical antecedents of some of the dilemmas they face in reconciling the demands of diverse and increasingly fragmented groups of shareholders. For example: what duty is owed to investors who do not care about the long-term prospects of the firm and wish merely to profit from the short-term upsides (or downsides) available to them through rapid changes in stock market valuations?

Authors Gomez and Korine are suitably modest in asserting their purpose as simply to create a common space for historians, economists and political philosophers ‘to talk to each other’. In fact they embrace a breathtaking array of sources, ranging from Hobbes, Locke and Smith to Tocqueville, Schumpeter and Keynes, to create a strong theoretical basis for their central assertion that democracy is vital to the effective functioning of the capitalist enterprise because ‘democracy imposes the competition of markets on the entrepreneur’.

With their arguments firmly rooted in the domain of liberal political philosophy, Gomez and Korine advance an elegant critique of the contradictions inherent in purely economic approaches to corporate governance.