What is the purpose of a firm?

Today, I read again after a long silence the contribution by Nobel Laureate @Milton Friedman on his doctrine of the objective of the firm--he argued in his @New York Times contribution dated September 13, 1970 that the 'Social responsibility of the firm is to make profit'. Last semester, when I visited a graduate degree class in Advanced Economics as a visiting lecturer, I initiated my opening lecture with this thought with due respect for the diversity of political ideology prevalent in the class.

I facilitated the class discussion as guided by the principles of 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' by @Paulo Freire—a dialogical, experiential classroom. My operationalization was inspired by the democratic principles--class is for the students, to the students, by the students--and a miniaturized version of the parliamentary system. Key issues emerged in this classroom inspired me to review the following literature:

• Does Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) poison democracy, as hinted by prominent politicians recently? Is Friedman truly visionary in seeing this happening in 1970's?
• While institutions matter—especially Nobel Laureate Robinson et al.'s approach of proactive institutions—I am just wondering whether it is a narrow conceptualization as Mark Granovetter's economic sociology goes further than this simplistic view.
• Have both economists and sociologists built simplistic models in understanding the relationship between economy and society, while it demands a system dynamics approach and a network analysis approach to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon under study?
• Another stream of questions triggering further exploration is the intricate relationship between the ESG-Democracy-Economic Freedom-Nationalism nexus.
• What are the vital economic signs in Argentina after libertarian Javier Milei's leadership? How this will be played when the world is heading in a similar direction—perhaps a decade from now on?

I would like to invite all thinkers from left to right and centrists to the approach suggested by @Henry Mintzberg as he is arguing for ''Rebalancing Society," and I have contributed a course on the same.