Business & Entrepreneurship

A company can now raise millions before having a reason to exist, print a purpose on a wall, and grow for years without anyone being able to say, precisely, what it is for.

An honest question then remains: if the purpose of an enterprise is only to grow, has it already ceased to have a purpose?

Aristotle distinguished two arts that we have since confused. Oikonomia: the administration of a household, which has a limit, because it is ordered toward a good — the life of those who compose it. Chrematistics: the art of acquiring, which has no limit, because acquisition has become its own end. A company that exists in order to grow, and invents a purpose afterwards to justify that growth, already belongs to the second. People and capital are then no longer organised around a purpose. A purpose is organised around them.

There are enterprises that heal, that house, that feed, that employ. The question is not whether one may earn. It is whether earning has replaced the reason for which people were brought together. Growth is not a purpose. It is, at most, a sign that a purpose has found the means to continue.

The end of an enterprise then becomes more modest, and more certain: people and capital, organised around a purpose — and not a purpose invented to justify their organisation.