 LIBERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE CORPORATE PERSONJoshua Barkan Journal of Cultural Economy, 2010, vol. 3, issue 1, 53-68 Abstract: This article focuses on corporate personhood, the controversial argument, advanced particularly in the United States, that corporations are persons within the scope of the law and are therefore endowed with rights. Though often examined as a causal factor in the development of modern corporate power, in this article I argue that corporate personhood is more useful as a tool for understanding the problematic of liberalism and the transformations associated with the definition of persons under the liberal rule of law. To explain why, I focus on debates about corporate personhood in prominent legal and philosophical texts from the turn of the twentieth century. Highlighting the contingent production of ideas about corporate personhood, I show the ways that writers within the U.S. context rethought corporate personhood, which was traditionally a discourse about sovereign power, in terms of liberal rights as a way of promoting economic forms of government. By focusing on the problematic, we see the ways that corporate capitalism was never simply a set of economic relations, but also a way of organizing, ordering and intervening in life. Date: 2010 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:3:y:2010:i:1:p:53-68 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/17530351003617578 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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