The other contributions in this section provide the reader with much useful information about corporations and their dynamism from robust historical perspectives. This chapter offers something different. For doubts about corporations and enterprises were long ago, as now, rife in England even before the advent of mass literacy and financial journalism in the nineteenth century. Sir Richard Steele and the more humble Samuel Weale were painfully aware of this public scepticism. While remembered chiefly as a contributor to the two literary enterprises, Tatler and Spectator, Steele was also known during his lifetime as a promoter of the ‘fish-pool’, an invention for transporting fish alive; Weale was appealing to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel after having gone bankrupt and kept in a debtors’ prison due to his involvement in several short-lived companies. As their frustrations reveal, such promoters of corporations were derided as being little better than imposters and mountebanks. Note that promoters were dubbed ‘projectors’ – a term perhaps unfamiliar to most modern readers. In the absence of economic and management studies as intellectual disciplines, early modern commentators drew upon concepts like ‘projector’ to make sense of corporations and their ambitions (or pretensions) to achieve ‘general Benefit’, as Steele put it.

In this chapter, then, I want to broaden the keywords of this Handbook to include the early modern notions of the ‘project’, and its promoter the ‘projector’, in order to survey a forgotten pre-history of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Business ethics, social entrepreneurship and CSR have become important parts of business and management studies; they are among key agendas for non-governmental organisations, think tanks and political institutions concerned with corporations and their role in the transforming of society in which we now find ourselves. Moral justification is also an important theme in a branch of French sociology concerned with contemporary capitalism.