There is a great deal of argument at the moment about the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is an important idea. The question of how money is made and how it is deployed is a crucial one. The idea has been brought into the headlines by a now familiar litany of cases: the use of sweatshop labour by Nike and Gap in Indonesia and Cambodia; the problems encountered by BP in Colombia; Nestle's aggressive marketing of baby milk in developing countries; Shell's Brent Spa oil platform in Nigeria, and Monsanto's problems with GM soya beans.

Now, the argument has moved into a new phase. The attention of campaigners has shifted from the process by which profit is made to the very product itself. The best example of this is the case against the tobacco companies and the incipient argument against junk food. These campaigns deploy a mixture of health and moral arguments, although the former usually cloak the latter. One of the components of this new set of campaigns is the demand that companies act responsibly, as the drinks industry did in funding drink-driving campaigns and as the tobacco industry did not in denying into the last ditch that there was any link between smoking and lung cancer.

These cases all have one of two characteristics. Where they involve explicit law-breaking there really is nothing further to be said. The task for government is then simply to enforce the law and punish the wrongdoers. Companies are obviously not outside the law. They exist purely through licence. They are the beneficiaries of generous laws of limited liability through incorporation and they, of course, have a duty to obey the law, as we all do. The concept of CSR is simply redundant in these cases. It is superseded and entirely enclosed by the law. This shows us that a complete separation of companies from the instruments of the state has never been plausible.