Abstract This commentary on Williams’s (2002) essay “Recovering Accounting as a Worthy Endeavor” agrees with him that the “accounting academy USA” has been colonized by “the positive economic missionaries” of the informational perspective camp. Williams sees the prime motive for this as economic gain by academics, practitioners, and executives in organizations. This commentary tries to go beyond that conclusion to explore the why , the how , and the what-of-it of this state of affairs. For the why question it draws on Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the will-to-power as a way to justify, promote, and preserve a particular way of life. For the how question it likens the informational perspective’s modus operandi as a special case of Michel Foucault’s description of contemporary society that features a para-legal system which: operates outside the legal system; constitutes a juridical archipelago which performs the punitive mechanisms of justice; and functions as a quiet, unassuming economy of normative knowledge and power. And for the what-of-it question it explores the ethics of this hegemonic control from the ethical obligation of a Self to do good to an Other as argued by Emmanuel Levinas and applied by Shearer (2002) to economic theory and to the giving of accounts. The commentary goes on to argue that accounting research and theory could benefit by taking the “linguistic turn” taken by most of the humanities and social science in recent decades by most of the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. It concludes that the ultimate function of criticism, for those who share a sensibility that the present status quo of the accounting academy and its support for global capitalism at large represents a serious transgression against the vast majority of humanity, is to struggle against the institutionalization of practices, like those of the informational perspective, that shut down the free-play of opinion and individual autonomy.