Crafting Coalitions for Reform. Business Preferences, Political Institutions and Neoliberal Reform in Brazil. PETER KINGSTONE: University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Abstract

If you want to know the truth about a fighter, don't interview him, don't ask what he thinks about life; look at him, instead, when waging combat. I once read something like this in a piece by Norman Mailer. Now, mutatis mutandi, this maxim applies to the analysis of business politics as well. In fact, be he a financier, a trader, or an industrialist, the job of the businessman is to make money through the performance of an activity useful to someone else. His station in life depends on this particular kind of activity and the circumstances surrounding it. So, when a businessman speak his mind in the public sphere about political or economic subjects, he always has an eye on the micro-scene where, from his point of view, the decisive battles are being fought.