For a start, in an age in which information and processing power are ubiquitous, they will have to become less like guilds, whose reflexes are to regulate supply and restrict competition, and more like mass-market businesses, whose instinct is to maximise the customer base.
Heads of pre-industrial guilds or champions of one of America's most successful industries?
But as Fiat's example shows, even the largest companies sometimes seem to consist of lots of little guilds.
If the recently formed guilds will devote their energies towards attaining these objects, there will be no question as to the career which the banking profession can hold out, and no call for the British trader to seek from the foreign bank the facilities and trained assistance which he is entitled to receive from his own home banker.
The initial intention was in fact to make inventions available to the public as well.Before the 18th century, innovations were mainly kept secret through trade guilds.
It's easy to paint unions with too broad a brush, but labour unions and guilds and professional associations are fundamentally rent-seeking.
Yet guilds spend too little time forming connections with other guilds, let alone with the public at large.
In some cases entire guilds of weavers or leather-workers in particular towns declared themselves supporters of the Reformation, indicating that Luther's ideas were being propagated in the workplace.
The Swiss model of vocational training goes back to the 14th century, when guilds introduced apprenticeships in order to define what makes a master craftsman.
The Wren churches were paid for by guilds of merchants competing for prominence; the Gothic-revival spires of the 19th century by wealthy Anglicans who profited from industrialisation but hated the look of it.
The supposedly free-market opposition has attacked government plans to loosen laws protecting guilds of architects and craftsmen from competition.The language of officialdom hardly helps.
