As the company grew, Charles Koch developed a corporate philosophy to ensure that its various divisions could focus on their ultimate purpose: to generate profits. He settled on a name for his vision, a set of rules that he codified in a pamphlet for employees and later enshrined in a book. That name — Market-Based Management — didn’t sound all that imaginative, but then neither did the theory itself, which boiled down to treating employees like entrepreneurs and exposing them to market discipline.

For a while, this entrepreneurial risk-taking resulted in a slew of criminal charges and complaints. Leonard recounts the company’s most ignominious hits, including a Senate investigation into whether it had been stealing oil from Native American tribal land. (Charles Koch said the company “got more money than we paid for oil,” but insisted it was only because his employees had mismeasured the oil they took — which they happened to do consistently in the company’s favor.) In 1999, Koch Industries pleaded guilty to dumping contaminated wastewater near its Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota.

The company learned that violating regulations could put a dent in its profit margins, and responded accordingly. It now imprints upon employees the need for “10,000 percent compliance”: obeying 100 percent of the laws 100 percent of the time. But it has also looked for ways to transform the regulatory regime — hence the vociferous lobbying by a division blandly called Koch Companies Public Sector and the “dark money” chronicled in Mayer’s book.

Since the election of Donald Trump, who was the only Republican presidential candidate that the Kochs refused to support, the company has pursued a strategy that Leonard helpfully calls “block-and-tackle”: Block Trump when he tries anything anathema to the company’s interest, and help him tackle the things that Koch wants — deregulation, tax cuts, conservative judicial appointments. Charles Koch has apparently learned to treat the Trump presidency like a natural disaster: an eruption of volatility to prepare for and exploit.

But it’s Leonard’s depictions of Market-Based Management in action that are most illuminating here, and the light they give off is chilling. “Kochland” includes a chapter on warehouse operations that tracked workers’ activity down to the minute (each conversation and bathroom trip had to be accounted for) and posted their performance rankings on a bulletin board. It was an antiseptic, ruthless system that pitted the workers against one another. They were unionized, but they felt so exhausted and degraded at the end of the work day that any solidarity began to fade — to the detriment of their negotiating power and to the benefit of the company’s bottom line.

In his book “The Science of Success,” Charles Koch calls Market-Based Management “a way for business to create a harmony of interest with society.” The question “Kochland” raises is whether this “harmony of interest” results in a place where anyone without a few billion to spare would actually want to live.