Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-f46jp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-25T00:00:07.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2013

DAVID CIEPLEY
DAVID CIEPLEY*
Affiliation:
University of Denver
*
David Ciepley is a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Denver, Sturm Hall 468, 2000 E. Asbury Avenue, Denver, CO 80208 (davidciepley@gmail.com).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article challenges the liberal, contractual theory of the corporation and argues for replacing it with a political theory of the corporation. Corporations are government-like in their powers, and government grants them both their external “personhood” and their internal governing authority. They are thus not simply private. Yet they are privately organized and financed and therefore not simply public. Corporations transgress all the basic dichotomies that structure liberal treatments of law, economics, and politics: public/private, government/market, privilege/equality, and status/contract. They are “franchise governments” that cannot be satisfactorily assimilated to liberalism. The liberal effort to assimilate them, treating them as contractually constituted associations of private property owners, endows them with rights they ought not have, exacerbates their irresponsibility, and compromises their principal public benefit of generating long-term growth. Instead, corporations need to be placed in a distinct category—neither public nor private, but “corporate”—to be regulated by distinct rules and norms.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 107 , Issue 1 , February 2013 , pp. 139 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, Henry Carter. 1886. “Economics and Jurisprudence.” Science 8 (178): 15–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Adams, Julia. 2005. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
American Law Institute. 2006. Restatement of the Law (3d) of Agency. Philadephia: American Law Institute.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Aristotle. 1988. Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Armour Packing Co. v. U.S. 209 U.S. 56 (1908).Google Scholar
Aspen Institute. 2009. “Overcoming Short-termism: A Call for a More Responsible Approach to Investment and Business Management.” http://www.Aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/pubs/overcome_short_state0909_0.Pdf (Accessed May 9, 2012).Google Scholar
Balogh, Brian. 2009. A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beal, Edwin F. 1955. “Origins of Codetermination.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 8 (4): 483–98.Google Scholar
Berle, Adolf A. 1954. The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Berle, Adolf A. and Means, Gardiner. 1932. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. New York: Macmillan Company.Google Scholar
Biber, Eric. 2004. “The Price of Admission: Causes, Effects, and Patterns of Conditions Imposed on States Entering the Union.” American Journal of Legal History 46 (2): 119–208.Google Scholar
Bilder, Mary Sarah. 2006. “The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review.” Yale Law Journal 116: 502–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackstone, William. [1753] 1893. Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books. In Two Volumes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.Google Scholar
Blair, Margaret. 2003. “Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century.” UCLA Law Review 51: 387–456.Google Scholar
Blair, Margaret M., and Stout, Lynn A.. 1999. “A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law.” Virginia Law Review 85 (2): 247–328.Google Scholar
Bluman v. FEC, 565 U.S. No. 11–275 (2012).Google Scholar
Blumberg, Phillip I. 1971. “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Employee's Duty of Loyalty and Obedience: A Preliminary Inquiry.” Oklahoma Law Review 24 (3): 279–318.Google Scholar
Borst, Nicholas. 2011. “How Should We Measure Investment in China?” Peterson Institute for International Economics, China Economic Watch. http://www.Piie.com/blogs/china/?p=188. (Accessed May 11, 2012).Google Scholar
Bovens, Mark. 1998. The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred D. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Chhotray, Vasudha, and Stoker, Gerry. 2009. Governance Theory and Practice: A Cross-disciplinary Approach. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ciepley, David. 2004. “Authority in the Firm (and the Attempt to Theorize it Away).” Critical Review 16 (1): 81–115.Google Scholar
Ciepley, David. 2006. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010).Google Scholar
Cohen, Morris R. 1927. “Property and Sovereignty.” Cornell Law Quarterly 13 (1): 8–30.Google Scholar
Corporate Laws Committee. 2005. Model Business Corporation Act. Chicago: American Bar Association.Google Scholar
Crane, Andrew, and Matten, Dick. 2010. Business Ethics: Managing Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability in the Age of Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Croly, Herbert. 1914. Progressive Democracy. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. 1959. “Business and Politics: A Critical Appraisal of Political Science.” American Political Science Review 53 (1): 1–34.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. 1977. “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States.” Political Science Quarterly 92 (1): 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Robert A. 1985. A Preface to Economic Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 510 (1819).Google Scholar
Darwall, Stephen. 2010. “Authority and Reasons: Exclusionary and Second-personal.” Ethics 120 (January): 257–78.Google Scholar
Davis, John Patterson. 1905. Corporations: A Study of the Origin and Development of Great Business Combinations and of their Relation to the Authority of the State. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Dewey, John. 1926. “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality.” Yale Law Journal 35 (6): 655–73.Google Scholar
Dodd, Edwin Merrick. 1954. American Business Corporations until 1860, with Special Reference to Massachusetts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Easterbrook, Frank, and Fischel, Daniel. 1985. “Limited Liability and the Corporation.” University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1): 89–117.Google Scholar
Easterbrook, Frank, and Fischel, Daniel. 1989. “The Corporate Contract.” Columbia Law Review 89: 1416–48.Google Scholar
Eisenach, Eldon J. 1994. The Lost Promise of Progressivism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Elizabeth, Q. [1600] 1887. “Charter Granted by Queen Elizabeth to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies.” In Charters Relating to the East India Company, 1600–1761, ed. Shaw, J.. Madras, India: R. Hill, 1–16.Google Scholar
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978).Google Scholar
Friedman, Milton. 1970. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” New York Times Magazine, September 13. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F10F11FB3E5810718EDDAA0994D1405B808BF1D3 (Accessed May 11, 2012).Google Scholar
Frug, Gerald E. 1980. “The City as a Legal Concept.” Harvard Law Review 93 (6): 1057–1154.Google Scholar
Garriga, Elisabet, and Mele, Domenec. 2004. “Corporate Social Responsibility Theories: Mapping the Territory.” Journal of Business Ethics 53 (1/2): 51–71.Google Scholar
Gourevitch, Peter Alexis, and Shinn, James J.. 2005. Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Greenfield, Kent. 2006. The Failure of Corporate Law. Chicago: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906).Google Scholar
Hansmann, Henry, and Kraakman, Reinier. 1991. “Toward Unlimited Shareholder Liability for Corporate Torts.” Yale Law Journal 100: 1879–1934.Google Scholar
Hansmann, Henry, and Kraakman, Reinier. 2000. “The Essential Role of Organizational Law.” Yale Law Journal 110 (3): 387–440.Google Scholar
Hansmann, Henry, Kraakman, Reinier, and Squire, Richard. 2006. “Law and the Rise of the Firm.” Harvard Law Review 119 (5): 1333–403.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1994. Leviathan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton. 1992. The Transformation of American Law , 1870–1960 : The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Jack B. 2011. “‘Patient Capital’: Can Delaware Corporate Law Help Revive It?” Washington and Lee Law Review 68 (4): 1645–64.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Jack B. 2012. “Remarks at “Corporate Governance and Long-Term, ‘Patient’ Capital” Panel.” Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, March 14.Google Scholar
Jefferson, T. 1825. “Thomas Jefferson to William B. Giles, December 26, 1825.” In The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1, General Correspondence, 1651–1827. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib025610 (Accessed May 12, 2012).Google Scholar
Jensen, Michael, and Meckling, William. 1976. “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” Journal of Financial Economics (3): 305–60. http://www.sfu.ca/~wainwrig/Econ400/jensen-meckling.pdf (Accessed May 12, 2012).Google Scholar
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Knight, Frank H. 1923. “The Ethics of Competition.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 37 (4): 579–624.Google Scholar
Lieber, Francis. 1830. Encyclopaedia Americana. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea.Google Scholar
Lowi, Theodore J. 1969. The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Lutz, Donald S. 1998. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Maier, Pauline. 1993. “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation.”William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1): 51–84.Google Scholar
Maine, Henry Sumner. [1861] 1873. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas. New York: Trow's.Google Scholar
Maitland, F.W. 1900. “Introduction.” In von Gierke, O.F., Political Theories of the Middle Age. Cambridge: University Press, vii–xlvi.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. [1848] 1933. Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: Arrow Editions.Google Scholar
McCurdy, Charles. 1975. “Justice Field and the Jurisprudence of Government-Business Relations: Some Parameters of Lassez-Faire Constitutionalism, 1863–1897.”Journal of American History 61 (4): 970–1005.Google Scholar
McDonnell, Brett H. 2008. “Employee Primacy, or Economics Meets Civil Republicanism at Work.” Stanford Journal of Law, Business & Finance 13 (2): 334–83.Google Scholar
Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad v. Beckwith, 129 U.S. 26 (1889).Google Scholar
Mirowski, Philip, and Van Horn, Rob. 2009. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” In The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds. Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 139–78.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Lawrence. 2001. Corporate Irresponsibility: America's Newest Export. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Lawrence. 2007. The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed over Industry. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.Google Scholar
Morawetz, Victor. 1882. A Treatise on the Law of Private Corporations Other than Charitable. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Moyo, Dambisa. 2011. How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Muthuchidambaram, S. 1979. “A Proposal for Reconsideration of Employees’ Duty of Loyalty, Confidentiality, and Obedience.” Indian Journal of Industrial Relations 15 (1): 103.Google Scholar
Noble v. Union River Logging R. Co. 147 U.S. 165 (1893).Google Scholar
Orren, Karen. 1991. Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carol. 1975. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922).Google Scholar
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).Google Scholar
Podsakoff, Philip M., MacKenzie, Scott B., Paine, Julie B., and Bachrach, Daniel G.. 2000. “Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Critical Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature and Suggestions for Future Research.” Journal of Management 26 (3): 513–63.Google Scholar
Robins, Nick. 2003. “Loot: In Search of the East India Company, the World's First Transnational Corporation.” Environment and Urbanization 14 (1): 79–88.Google Scholar
Robins, Nick. 2006. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Ross v. Bernhard, 396 U.S. 531 (1970).Google Scholar
Rothkopf, David J. 2012. Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry between Big Business and Government—and the Reckoning that Lies Ahead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886).Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. [1776] 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Stout, Lynn. 2012. The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.Google Scholar
Sunstein, Cass. 2002. “State Action is Always Present.” Chicago Journal of International Law 3 (3): 465.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Tsuk, Dalia. 2005. “From Pluralism to Individualism: Berle and Means and 20th-Century American Legal Thought.” Law and Social Inquiry 30 (1): 179–225.Google Scholar
U.S. v. Martin Linen Supply Co., 430 U.S. 564 (1977).Google Scholar
Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Counsil, 425 U.S. 748 (1976).Google Scholar
Von Mises, Ludwig. 1944. Bureaucracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Williamson, Oliver E. 1987. The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Wood v. Dummer, 30 F. Cas. 435 (C.D. Me. 1824) (No. 17944) (1824).Google Scholar
Wood, Gordon S. 1999. “The Emergence of the Public-Private Distinction in Early America.” In The Public and the Private in the United States, eds. Abe, H., Sato, H., and Otsuru, C.K.. Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies, 1–12.Google ScholarPubMed
Zingales, Luigi, and Rajan, Raghuram G.. 2001. “The Firm as a Dedicated Hierarchy: A Theory of the Origins and Growth of Firms.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116 (3): 805–51.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.