The corporation from the Middle Ages to intellectual monopoly capitalism

Ugo Pagano

Journal of Institutional Economics, 2026, vol. 22, -

Abstract: The modern business corporation emerged from the medieval and chartered corporations. The medieval tradition of legal pluralism was replaced by two ‘pure’ disciplines – Law and Economics – that left no conceptual space to understand its hybrid nature, decentralizing law-making and centralizing market transactions, or to frame its person-thing duality. Under intellectual monopoly capitalism, this hybrid nature has degenerated: corporations have monopolized knowledge, outsourced production to dependent peripheral firms, and become deeply intertwined with financial markets and geopolitical rivalries – lending substance to notions of techno-feudalism, while marking a profound break with the medieval tradition of open science that first made competitive markets possible.

Date: 2026
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