Life was never quite the same for John le Carré after the Berlin Wall came down. Without the great symbolic barrier, the world of Smiley, Karla and the Circus disappeared as the certainties of the cold war were replaced by the triumph of liberal capitalism and the end of history. It has not really worked out that way in practice, but for le Carré it meant the start of a search for some new enemies. Now he has found some.

The villains of his latest book, The Constant Gardener, are not KGB spymasters but the bosses of a multi-national pharmaceutical company who use Africans as guinea pigs for a new anti-TB drug and suppress evidence of its lethal side-effects in the pursuit of profit. The company falsifies tests, ensures that only puffs by tame scientists appear in the prestigious medical journals and organises a contract killing to ensure that critics of the drug are silenced.

The author's note from le Carré contains the usual disclaimers about there being no drug called Dypraxa and no pharmaceutical company called KVH, but makes his own views abundantly clear. "As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard." Scion of the establishment he may be, but le Carré is as convinced as any Seattle protester that there is a dark side to multi-national capitalism.

With good reason. Poor African countries that explore the possibilities of importing cheap generic drugs to make their pitifully small health budgets stretch a little further are left in no doubt that they might see aid budgets cut and trade sanctions imposed if they prevent the big western drugs companies from exploiting their patents.

For patent read profit

The explanation wheeled out by the pharmaceutical industry for taking South Africa to court over its plans to find a low-cost drug to combat Aids is that there would be no incentive to develop new cures without strong protection. For patent read profit. As one of the characters in le Carré's book says: "Don't talk to me about research and development costs. The pharmaceutical boys wrote them off 10 years ago and a lot of their money comes from governments in the first place, so they're talking crap. What we've got here is an amoral monopoly that costs human lives every day, OK."

As far as the Institute for Economic Affairs is concerned, this is par for the course. The free-market think-tank is concerned at the way in which business - and especially big business - is portrayed in literature, fearing that the cumulative effect of three centuries in which readers have been told that "making money is a dirty game" has been to stifle enterprise.

The first part of the IEA's thesis is undoubtedly true. Writers do not like businessmen, and sympathetic portrayals are hard to find. Try it for yourself. At a recent party, the invitation to come up with a few names led to a lot of head-scratching before an English teacher produced a solitary offering: Willy Wonka. An example of a good-hearted philanthropist certainly, but somewhat outgunned by the works of Dickens, Lawrence, Galsworthy, Priestley, Martin Amis and countless others.

John Blundell, director of the IEA, finds this all depressing, noting in the foreword to his organisation's book on the subject (The Representation Of Business In English Literature) that "one is faced with a rather damning picture of prodigiously wasteful yet Scrooge-like businessmen who are abnormal and antagonistic; corrupt, cunning and cynical; dishonest, disorderly, doltish, dumb and duplicitous; inhumane, insensitive and irresponsible; ruthless, unethical and unprincipled; and villainous to boot."

Nor is this a peculiarly British trait. American culture, too, is dominated by images of grasping, greedy, mendacious big business, all the way from the westerns that have the lantern-jawed homesteader pitted against the ruthless rancher to the unpicking of 80s Wall Street in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. According to US research quoted by the IEA, more than half of all corporate chiefs depicted on TV commit illegal acts ranging from fraud to murder; 45% of all business activities are portrayed on TV as illegal; only 3% of TV businessmen engage in socially or economically productive behaviour; and hard work is usually ridiculed on TV as "workaholism" that inevitably leads to strained personal relationships.

Like the IEA, the government sees these sort of attitudes as unhelpful. Tony Blair says he is proud that businessmen want to donate a couple of million pounds to Labour party coffers, but the mood music that accompanied the recent brouhaha over who gave what suggested that Labour knows it is swimming against the tide.

Authors and film-makers are more in touch with the public mood than the politicians, which is why the message given by mass culture is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, no such thing as a "free" new laboratory supplied by a pharmaceutical company, and no such thing as a political donation given without strings - albeit invisible strings - attached.

In reality, of course, things are rather less bleak for business than the IEA and its sympathisers in government make out. Despite the best efforts of Dickens et al, the wheels of industry turn faster than ever. Of the 100 biggest economic entities in the world, 48 are countries and 52 are multi-national corporations, so there is very little evidence that corporate capitalism is being brought to its knees by the regular rubbishing it gets from the men and women of letters. Hollywood is willing to make a film like Erin Brockovich - one woman's fight against corporate malfeasance - precisely because the studios have big marketing budgets and know what the punters want. In other words, a film about the cynicism of modern capitalism becomes yet another product of modern capitalism.

According to the Economist magazine, the IEA is getting worked up about nothing. It argues that the moral of the story is that capitalist societies "consume literature and film to let off steam rather than to change the world". There is something in this. For a start, some of the criticisms - particularly of big business - are naive. There is no evidence that large firms pay less than small firms, nor that they have worse health and safety records. Quite the reverse. Multi-national companies operating in developing countries often pay higher wages than indigenous firms.

Even so, it is somewhat strange that an economic system which has produced a phenomenal rise in western living standards over the past two centuries is so routinely trashed by our great creative minds. Or perhaps not so strange. We do not especially like some of the things business gets up to in the pursuit of profit, and look to our intellectuals both to articulate that unease and adumbrate alternatives.

But it is wrong to assume that business is being singled out. Writers do not much care for politicians either, portraying them as weak, power-hungry and corrupt. It would be quite easy to construct a thesis - illustrated let us say by the works of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn - that the impression given of government is invariably negative. The fact is that our culture reflects back at us our deep-seated suspicion that power tends to be abused. Be thankful that it does.

A better employer

Dickens made a difference in the mid-19th century by contributing to the sense that the poverty and the degradation associated with rapid industrialisation had to be remedied. Given the wealth and political power of corporations, it is quixotic to expect writers and film-makers to change the world. But at the margin they make a difference and, despite what the IEA might say, for the better. Hard Times did not prevent the rise of Microsoft but it may have helped ensure Bill Gates was a better employer than Thomas Gradgrind (and probably a more successful capitalist). If you were in a balloon with Dickens and Gates and had to throw one out to survive, which would you choose?
larry.elliott@theguardian.com