Liberal economic theory starts from a simple premise: economic wealth, liberalism, and happiness are closely linked.

In this paradigm, the pursuit of private interests by each individual inexorably serves the interests of others and, by extension, leads to collective happiness. Several centuries have undermined this premise. Neither the economy nor companies, in the way they are structured today, lead to collective happiness. On the contrary, they actively participate in worsening the social and environmental crises of the 21st century.

And yet, the intuition of the founding fathers of economics is not unfounded. Companies, as social and material organizations working to produce goods and services, have a fundamental role to play in what Aristotle calls the "happy life." For him, happiness originates in the social and political organization of the city-state (cité), and the city-state, in all its components, has the responsibility to bring about this "happy life."

While companies are not solely responsible for making people happy, they are struggling to fulfill their part in this collective task. This should not discourage them. But to do their part, they must shed a certain vision of happiness and progress that prevents them from contributing to collective well-being.

The vision of happiness that underpins the current economic system reduces happiness to economic enrichment, material possession, and a one-dimensional form of success that is always situated "elsewhere." John Dewey perfectly summarizes the spirit of this vision:

"[Liberals] thought that social progress could only come from economically private enterprise, socially undirected, with the sacredness of private property as its foundation and its outcome, i.e., the absence of social control. They attribute to this single factor all the social progress that has taken place, such as increased productivity and improved living conditions. [...] They tried to make progress follow a single trajectory that they wanted to make unchangeable" (J. Dewey, 1935).

In such a vision, the purpose of a company is confined to producing an ever-increasing number of goods and services, with the sole objective of generating economic value, which is supposed to "trickle down" to "create the happiness" of the greatest number. Other forms of value, whether social or environmental, are treated as positive or negative externalities, viewed through the simple lens of impact (and more recently, of responsibility). They therefore remain outside the system: outside the model and thus outside the measurement of its success or failure. Any non-financial value becomes an "extra" value: extra-financial, extra-economic, extra-commercial.

The liberal paradigm can survive on two conditions: a viable social and environmental framework and an equitable sharing of economic wealth among all stakeholders. However, neither of these conditions is met in the current system. The paradigm is exhausted. The numerous social, political, and environmental crises of our time are proof of this. They all call on companies to fulfill their founding objective: to help create and maintain the economic, physical, and social conditions for the happy life to become possible and to come into being. A company can no longer be content with producing only economic value; through its activity, it must work to preserve a viable, just, and safe social and ecological framework by protecting or even regenerating social and ecological ecosystems.

This profound change is not a matter of Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility, which is perceived (rightly so) as an additional burden. Companies must engage in a deep reflection on their very purpose and on the forms of value they produce through their activity. To do this, they must reconnect with a holistic vision of their operations, which is the only way to give meaning to their existence and create commitment around their project. The gap is wide: they must accept that they are "industries of life"—simultaneously creators of connections inside and outside the organization, producers of economic wealth, and regulators of natural ecosystems. Without any one of these pillars, the company risks losing its integrity.

Value is at the heart of the economy because it allows it to exist. In its theoretical conception, it is the moral or intellectual appreciation of the quality of a material or immaterial "thing" that makes it worthy of esteem in the eyes of a person or a group.

Our model of value creation is quite simple. Value is produced by responding to a single type of need: that of the consumer. Human beings, citizens, and natural environments are excluded from its scope. This truncated vision of the human being, reduced to their purchasing power and disconnected from their social and natural environments, produces counterfeit and incomplete value, and contributes to the "desolation of the world" extensively documented by Hannah Arendt. This desolation destabilizes the system. The crises and upheavals of the 21st century are merely the echo of this painful evolution, incompatible with the dimensions of the globe and with individual happiness.

The companies that will create value tomorrow will be those that manage to develop a deep understanding of their equal participation in social, economic, and environmental value, and to narrate this contribution to happiness, to create a new agreement between themselves and consumers, and to advance the history of ideas. In a word, to provide just responses to the needs of human beings (= social value), the Planet (= environmental value), and consumers (= economic value).

This is ambitious, but entrepreneurs are ambitious. The exercise requires neither perfection nor the pursuit of virtue. Intentionality and experimentation are the keywords of this approach. Many companies are already trying (some for a long time, such as the mutualist model) to produce new forms of value, like Nexans with E3 or Léa Nature today. The example of the company Léa Nature is particularly telling. For the company, profitability is no longer an end in itself but a constraint to be managed among a series of other equally important social, economic, and ecological constraints and objectives, such as preserving biodiversity, paying attention to "gross domestic happiness," or supporting non-profit associations. The key is therefore to find the right balance, to put profit back in its proper place, and to position the company as a contributor to something greater than itself, in the service of the economy, society, and the environment. The paths forward are numerous: reinventing its products and production methods; organizing differently by relying on fairer operating mechanisms that dissipate power relations harmful to all; preferring cooperation to competition; opting for sub-optimality rather than performance; and breaking down the logic of closed and locked-in companies that see themselves as disconnected from the world. It's up to companies to decide where to start!