The Hungry Spirit by Charles Handy Hutchinson, 272pp, £14.99 in UK
Charles Handy regards himself as a social philosopher these days, and the success of his last major book, The Empty Raincoat, was undoubtedly due to his ability to put his readers' worries and dissatisfactions into an encouraging, optimistic context so that they felt better about their lives.
Much of the material for his philosophical books is drawn from his own experiences and his personal quest for meaning. This is fine. However, for the formula to continue to work from one book to the next, the path Handy's life takes has to be reasonably close to those of his readers if the thoughts he develops as a result are to have much relevance to them.
In his new book, The Hungry Spirit, the writer's path and those of most of his readers have probably diverged too far. This is a pity, because the book tackles an important subject. It asks how the capitalist system can be made our servant rather than our master and thus leave us freer to develop other equally important areas of our lives apart from getting and keeping reasonably well-paid jobs.
Leading a balanced life is certainly difficult if one works for a company fighting for its survival in a highly competitive international market. Handy quotes British statistics which show that 36 per cent of managers or professionals and other non-manual staff were working more than 48 hours a week. As a result, 77 per cent of managers found their hours stressful and were worried about the effects they were having on their families
"Capitalism, which was supposed to be setting us free, may be enslaving us in its turn, with its insistence on the dominance of the economic imperative," he comments. So how can that dominance be broken?
At this point he closes off an avenue any book tackling this question ought to have explored. "Capitalism is too strong for governments," he says briskly, forgetting that governments rather than the capitalist system itself created the grotesquely over-competitive international trading system which forces firms and their employees to behave as they do. "If we want to control it we must do so ourselves. It will take the collective will of many individuals . . ."
So although capitalism served the Swedes, the West Germans and others well when their governments could still regulate it within the framework of their national economies, Handy places the entire responsibility for ameliorating today's global system not on international organisations, political parties, trade unions and pressure groups working to change the rules, but on people acting individually. He recommends that we become Properly Selfish. This entails accepting "a responsibility for making the most of oneself by, ultimately, finding a purpose bigger and better than oneself".
Part of Proper Selfishness is the Doctrine of Enough, which involves saying no when one's needs have been met. "My wife and I, since we became self-employed portfolio people, have regularly sat down each year and worked out what we need to live on. Since our standards of comfort and future financial security are quite high so are our levels of `enough'," he writes. "The simple act of doing this removes the temptation to maximise our income by working around the clock and the calendar, which is the dilemma of every self-employed person . . ."
He explains how the doctrine can be applied in the corporate world by telling the story of Camellia plc, which runs tea estates in India and East Africa. A foundation holds a controlling interest in the company and decides how much of the annual profit is "enough" for reinvestment if the firm is to survive for at least the next hundred years. The rest is distributed to the minority shareholders or used by the foundation for good works .
What Handy has clearly failed to grasp is how exceptional both these cases are and, consequently, how weak a basis they provide for a solving one of the key problems of our times. How many companies are under so little pressure from shareholders for higher dividend pay-outs as Camellia?
Similarly, how many couples ever get so well established in their careers as the Handys that they can stop seizing every opportunity that comes along? Or have such good pensions plans and such attractive homes in London, Tuscany and Norfolk that they feel that they can limit their earnings? Prestige positions and properties are inevitably the preserve of the few.
A drawing of an empty raincoat appeared on the cover of Handy's previous book. It represented the lack of self-realisation many of us feel. His new book has a raincoat on its cover, too, but this time Handy fills it himself. Unfortunately, however, the approaches he suggests for doing so, while admirable, will only help a minority of his readers fill their own.
Richard Douthwaite's most recent book, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, appeared last year; he is working on a study, The Economics of Enough