Someone once remarked that at the very beginning of the world, when, for disobedience, Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden and told that henceforth they must earn their bread by the sweat of their brows, Adam consoled Eve by saying: "We live in an age of transition." For them change was both rapid and drastic. Moreover the physical change was accompanied by an equally great alteration in their value systems -- for they had learned to distinguish good from evil.

All history has been dominated by change -- or the lack of it. Today, as at the beginning, change is swift and startling in the scientific and technological world, but it is the changes in our value systems which cause us the most agony. Despite protestations that innovation is welcome, mankind in general and sovereign authority and bureaucracies in particular resist it to the bitter end. Nothing upsets us more than to be told, as Abraham Lincoln put it, "that our purposes differ from those of the Almighty." Everywhere change is popular in concept but uncomfortable in practice. The canny bureaucrat never opposes the idea of change; instead he throws up a smokescreen of plausible reasons to abort change "now." Each new invention and innovation in thought is resisted in order to protect whatever status quo is regarded as normal in its specific environment.

This rearguard action takes many forms. Specifically, whenever the times are out of joint, the serpent-devil theory of history is revived to explain away some of the events which seem to have gone wrong. The first commentator on the human condition no doubt attributed society's troubles to some malevolent force. In every age since Eve was enticed by the serpent, observers have uniformly declared their problems to be unique, and caused by whatever passed, in their time, for a devil. Primitive societies, of which many survive, blame a bewildering array of gods for bad news. This habit of looking outward to explain trouble was, in fact, expressed in the early Judeo-Christian era under the broad rubric of "God's will."

Today, as always, we are in an age of transition, and, as always, various segments of society are moving at different speeds. For example, the value systems of the young generally change faster than those of the aged. The scientist who split the atom finds that his disciplines have moved at a faster gait than have those in international law. The economies of the developed countries surely move at a different pace from those of developing lands.

A few years ago, Thomas Hughes wrote, at least half seriously: "One can say that the 20th century is currently made up of 14th century farmers, 15th century theologians, 16th century politicians, 17th century economists, 18th century bureaucrats, 19th century generals and 21st century scientists." It is not a bad analysis save for the American farmer, who belongs to the 20th century.

The discontinuities in world society are partly responsible for the current concern about world corporations. Those multinational companies have been blamed for everything from interfering in the political affairs of host countries, to causing the revaluation of currencies by speculating on the international markets. One enterprising publisher, presumably in an effort to sell more books, entitled a scholarly work on the multinational company "Sovereignty at Bay." Recently Chile persuaded the United Nations to conduct an inquiry into the affairs of world corporations. For whatever reasons or whatever motives, all would agree that the world corporation is now being examined intensively and extensively, but not always competently or without bias.

In order to draw any useful conclusions about the place of the world corporation, it is necessary to set today's multinational enterprise in historical perspective. It may then be possible to advance some ideas as to why our world corporations are so profoundly upsetting to so many people in and out of governments around the world.

Each of us, in every country, is the child of his own experience. The difficulty of communicating our value systems to one another is further complicated by the fact that each other's cultural histories do not have high priority in our separate universities. In a word, we tend to be ignorant of other societies.

Despite the enormous advances in the sciences of communication and the remarkable technology for instant transfer of visual images via satellite, we are still surprised and amazed when other people in different parts of the world espouse value systems radically at variance with our own. For example, it surprises many Americans to find that some of the ideas of Colbert, Finance Minister of Louis XIV, still appear to dominate a section of European thinking about trade and investment. The highly restrictive purchasing regulations which obtain in many European countries stem from Colbert's dictum, "All purchases must be made in France rather than in foreign countries, even if the goods should be a little poorer and a little more expensive, because if the money does not go out of the realm, the advantage to the state is double..." In my own country, some of our Buy American laws were passed, unwittingly, under the influence of Colbert's dead hand.

To a European or to a Japanese it is elemental that foreign trade is a country's lifeblood; it generates the revenue that sustains their governments. It appears obvious to them that foreign trade should inevitably be part of their foreign policy. It comes as a shock to Americans, however, to discover foreign ambassadors in the United States helping to sell airplane engines, machine tools or whatever their nationals need help in selling. At the same time, it is equally incomprehensible to Europeans, to Japanese, to Latin Americans and Africans that the United States Government takes a basically adversary position toward business. Activities of American companies in foreign lands have long been regarded with great suspicion here at home. To Americans, foreign trade has, until recently, been a peripheral activity engaged in only in the event that the domestic market did not absorb our entire production. All these attitudes are deeply rooted in history and so will change only slowly. The consequence is the inherent unpopularity of the world corporation.

There are other roots of this hostility, however, which date back to medieval times. The first merchants, traders and money lenders were motivated largely by profit considerations. Feudal barons, on the other hand, looked to military power for survival and expansion. As competition between feudal rulers increased, the merchants and traders began to associate themselves with the sovereign authorities in order to gain commercial advantage. In return for commercial favors, they financed the wars of competing sovereigns. Merchants bankrolled the Crusades; in return they got monopoly powers in trade in large areas of the known world. The fusion of trade and the royal sovereign in the 15th to the 17th centuries eventually became known as mercantilism, and all external business was conducted by the chosen instruments of the state. It is not surprising, therefore, if today the developing countries believe that the navy always follows the traders, if indeed, it does not precede them. In the mercantilist world, total commerce and industry was viewed as a zero-sum game; profit for one side inevitably meant equal loss for the other. The trick was to maximize gains at the expense of others. The reality that buyer and seller could both profit from the same transaction defied mercantilist logic, and its truth was only perceived over many years with painful slowness.

In the mercantilist world, nations vied for overseas territories in order to control their markets. Many countries set up monopolistic trading corporations to manage trade and supply all commodities to the colonists, whether natives or settlers. There were the Dutch East India Company, the English East India Company, the French East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company and the Virginia Company. Since these companies made a profit, mercantilist dogma made it clear that exploitation of the colonists must be involved. Therefore, this practice of picking a commercial enterprise as a chosen instrument served to intensify the hostility against both the monopolistic companies and against the metropolitan country which chartered it. In the American case, enmity generated by this commercial device was one of the precipitating causes of the Revolution. An excerpt from a Boston newspaper printed in 1765 summed up the colonial sentiment: "A colonist cannot make a button, a horseshoe, nor a hobnail but some sooty ironmonger or respectable buttonmaker of England shall bawl and squall that his honor's worship is most egregiously maltreated, injured, cheated and robbed by the rascally Americans."

On the other side of the world, trade as exploitation also left its imprint. The Meiji restoration, dating from 1868, marked the beginning of the modern Japanese state. But even that enlightened restoration was based broadly on the concept that Japan could not withstand hated foreign encroachments unless its society was totally reorganized as an industrial power with great military strength. Japanese hatred of foreigners was not new; it dated back three centuries to the edict of 1636 which closed Japan to all foreigners, particularly Christians. The edict forbade Japanese ships from sailing to foreign countries, it prohibited Japanese from going abroad on penalty of death, and prescribed death to any Japanese who had lived abroad and tried to return to his homeland. While much of this changed following the restoration, the concept of strong, centralized power endured.

While many peoples of the world were building centralized government structures, America's economic and political impulses developed along contrary lines. Colonial experience led Americans to be opposed to centralization of economic power in chartered companies and to centralization of political power. The separation of powers, written into our Constitution as a guarantee of political freedom, also affected economic thought. The proof of this hostility to the centralization of power is evident from the fact that our basic antitrust law bears the name of a senator whose credentials as a conservative were impeccable.

Moreover, the existence of the frontier tended for many years to dominate our thinking. It was not a totally alien frontier such as existed in the older settled parts of the world, but was merely the edge of untapped resources and an enormous land mass. Our huge continent furnished an outlet for all our goods and services. The development of those seemingly illimitable resources demanded both practical and technical innovation. Because of this heritage, many Americans even today fail to understand that the American market is only a sub-section of the world market, and that our value system is not shared by many others. Thus, the Japanese and the Europeans are hard put to comprehend what often seems the strange behavior of my fellow countrymen. The arrogance of the American Government's desire to export its complicated antitrust concepts around the world is properly viewed by our friends abroad with both amazement and hostility. Governments in Japan and in Europe regard their business establishments as great national assets which furnish the revenue to support the increasing standards of living of their people and the world's people as well. It is difficult for them to understand, let alone credit, the basically adversary position taken by the American Government toward United States business.

In this country, we are acutely conscious of the mercantilist tradition in Europe and the enormous concentration of power in the zaibatsu complexes of Japan. Many former colonial countries see the chartered monopolies of the imperial nations as the forerunners of today's world corporations. To them, our global corporations seem to be merely thinly disguised government-directed chosen instruments dedicated to the pursuit of governmental foreign policy under the guise of a commercial establishment. Bitter experience with government chartered monopolies throughout history did little to create a welcome environment in many of the developing countries for the new world tide economic structures which began to grow during the great postwar international expansion. Even today, the Sunday supplements love to hint darkly that the modern world corporation is really an instrument of today's nation-state. The suspicion of a modern mercantilism hangs in the air. The days of gunboat diplomacy are indeed gone. We have now come full circle in the Western World to what appears to many as the successor of the chosen instrument of imperialism. Thus the world corporation is now under attack, not only by the host governments but, in many cases, by their own governments, wherever the head office may be located.

Part of this attack stems from the clash of historic value systems. As new philosophers, thinkers and traders appeared on the world stage at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the idea began to dawn that man by his own efforts could improve his lot in the world. Economic growth and improvement and the betterment of social conditions seemed attainable dreams. The enunciation of the principles of free trade and the doctrines of comparative advantage by Smith, Ricardo and others can be seen as a decisive break with the mercantilist tradition. What flowed from these new ideas was a concept of dynamic economic growth, as opposed to the old notion that profit to one was loss to the other -- the zero-sum game. With this new concept came a recognition of the growing interdependence of economic units. The new emerging entrepreneurial class showed an aversion to war, and began to develop more of an adversary relationship with government. In short, the hostility was mutual. The momentum of this new trend continued despite efforts by some governments to control it.

It was against this background of changing values that the prototype world corporations first began to appear in the latter half of the 19th century. As far back as 1865 Frederick Bayer put a plant in Albany, New York; the next year Alfred Nobel established a factory in Hamburg; and the year after that, Singer operated his first overseas plant in Glasgow.

In widest historical perspective, commercial and political history exhibited an interplay between two basically competing value systems. The first stems from the medieval age and developed through the mercantilism of the 16th and 17th centuries into 19th century imperialism, then 20th century totalitarianism. This was accompanied by the business tradition of the chosen instrument of governmental policy. The second value system arose from the earliest merchant and financier classes of the pro-capitalistic era and grew through the Industrial Revolution. The entrepreneurial tradition of the capitalist, independent of government eventuated in an adversary relationship between business and the state.

Of course, as in all living things, neither system developed in a pure form. But through the period of the Second World War, there is no question that the mercantilist-imperialist tradition was dominant. The latter entrepreneurial tradition when it gained preeminence, from time to time and from place to place, was responsible for much of the progress in general welfare that has taken place among the world's peoples.

Viewed against this background, the modern world corporation is the extension to global proportions of the business tradition that grew out of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. It is now learning how to operate in the global marketplace. The motivating factors which drive the world corporations today are basically the same as those which drove earlier entrepreneurs. Like their predecessors, the world corporations are a new expression of the entrepreneurial thrust that thrives on the free exchange of goods, services, factors of production, technology, capital and ideas. The engine that drives the growth of nations gives humanity the wherewithal to deal with the wretchedness of the human condition. Most important of all, it can function amid diverse value systems, though like all instruments of progress it must move in a resisting medium. The principal reason the world corporations are so profoundly disturbing to so many governments, and to the citizens of so many countries, is that they represent today's visible agents of change.

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a league of free nations -- but the League of Nations did not survive. Wendell Willkie argued, correctly, that we have one world, a fact which the astronauts vividly described. Nevertheless, the politicians of the world will not act. The political problems of the United Nations are a stark manifestation. The disorder -- almost paralysis -- of the political aspect of the European Economic Community is further evidence. Despite all our advances, the world is still socially fragmented and the incompatibility of the world's value systems has always been and still remains a cause of potential conflict. History is replete with the tragedies wrought by efforts of one society to impose its concepts upon others.

Agents of change involve new ideas and values. They have never been welcome in any society. This is especially true when the carrier of new or strange values is, or is thought to be, alien to the society that is affected. Often the most effective way to resist change is by identifying the carrier of the new values as foreign. The word for "foreigner" from the Golden Age of Greece right up to the Middle Ages was "barbarian." Anyone who spoke a foreign language, dressed differently, adhered to different customs and mores was automatically considered a barbarian. "Stranger" and "foreigner" have thus from time immemorial been pejorative terms, and often synonymous with "enemy."

It should not surprise us, therefore, that the world corporation is sometimes unwelcome even though it is the carrier of technology which is the best hope of closing the gap between the very rich and the very poor. It is often unwelcome because it is perhaps the most effective instrument by which value systems are transferred from one part of the world to another.

Mere physical change, manifested by a new factory, a new building or a piece of complex machinery generally does not arouse the passions of the populace. But when the change moves into the realm of ideas, a wholly different and more massive impact upon society follows. If, for example, a world corporation introduces the idea of upward mobility based only on merit and not on status, this may well offend an establishment fighting to preserve its privileges.

The nature of the value systems which are carried by world corporations as agents of change runs the gamut from simple improvements, like better lighting in manufacturing plants, to renovating whole neighborhoods. For example, Park Avenue in New York City north of Grand Central Station used to be lined on both sides with old apartment houses. It was not until a multinational corporation, Unilever, saw the potential of putting a modern office building in this area that a whole new development was sparked in my city.

In the ancient struggle between those who believe in an open society where men, money, and ideas can move freely across national borders and those who would return to the jungle of economic nationalism, the men and women of the world corporations may furnish a new weight in the balance. The world corporation specifically challenges the validity of the old tradition of the corporation as the chosen instrument of political domination. Because the world corporation confronts that ancient concept, we stand in danger on our planet of reverting to bankrupt atavistic ideas. The acceleration of change brought to a community by a world corporation unfortunately tends to make the old values look even better to many people.

Since time has proved that it is more effective to attack the carrier of an alien idea than the idea itself, the agents of change come under sustained intensified attack. The emergence in the United States of the Burke-Hartke Bill as the most retrogressive piece of legislation since the Smoot-Hawley tariff is only one national manifestation of this political device. Expropriation by developing countries is another.

At this moment, with currencies changing in value more often and in wider swings than we have recently been accustomed to, some governments resort to the ancient primitive device of finding a devil to divert attention from unpleasant facts. One such tact is that only governments create inflation, because they alone can print money. If it is true that the "gnomes of Zurich" were invented by a British prime minister to divert attention from the real reason he had to devalue sterling, it is equally true that the world corporation now furnishes a convenient scapegoat to explain away the fact that we in America have printed too many dollars too fast and that the American government has balanced the Federal budget only seven times in the last 25 years, and shows little inclination to improve on that record in the future.

The development of the world corporation into a truly multinational organization has produced a group of managers of many nationalities whose perception of the needs and wants of the human race knows no boundaries. They really believe in One World. They understand with great clarity that the payrolls and jobs furnished by the world corporation exceed profits by a factor of 20 to 1. They know that there can be no truly profitable markets where poverty is the rule of life. They are a group which recognizes no distinction because of color or sex, since they understand with the clarity born of experience that talent is the commodity in shortest supply in the world. They are managers who are against the partitioning of the world, not only on a political or theoretical basis, but on the pragmatic ground that the planet has become too small, that our fate has become too interwoven one with the other to engage in the old nationalistic games which have so long diluted the talent, misused the resources, and dissipated the energy of mankind.

The international managers in the great world corporations are exposed daily to a bewildering variety of value systems and a steadily rising tempo of nationalism in many of the nation-states of the world. Out of this experience is emerging the perception that the relationship of the world corporation to the various governments around the world is worthy of re-examination It is clear to those managing American-based multinational enterprises that a pure adversary relationship between business and government has become an anachronism in the 20th century. We have even permitted, without effective contradiction, the concept to be floated that a businessman who talks to his elected representative is somehow evil, and that his voice should not be heard on matters of public policy.

On the other side of the oceans, the perception is growing that a new age of mercantilism is not the answer to the problems of the 20th century. Neither the pure adversary relationship nor the chosen instrument approach is responsive to today's world. Old ideas die hard; yesterday's liberal, who feels that central, national control is the answer to everything, is still in control of many intellectual circles. They all labor under an old illusion which John Gardner once put as follows: "Those who seek to bring societies down always dream that after the blood bath they will be calling the tune." Their outworn doctrine of a controlled economy is becoming more and more a manifestation of the persistence of illusion over reality.

All the great issues of our time, and most of the small ones, are settled in the untidy atmosphere of give and take, of compromise and of negotiation. This is fortunate because the distributive judgment of the people, in the marketplace, as well as at the polls, has always been superior to the fiat of a dictator.

In this dialogue, the role of the world corporation as an agent of change may well be even more important than its demonstrated capacity to raise living standards. The pressure to develop the economy of the world into a real community must come, in part, from an increasing number of multinational firms which see the world as a whole. "Today's world economy...," Peter Drucker has said, "owes almost nothing to political imagination. It is coming into being despite political fragmentation." The world corporation has become a new weight in an old balance, It must play a constructive role in moving the world toward the freer exchange of both ideas and the means of production so that the people of our planet may one day enjoy the fruits of a truly global society. This is a goal worthy of us all.