Neoliberalism has been variously described as a political ideology, a set of policy prescriptions, or a new form of governmental rationality. In each case, however, neoliberalism has been closely associated with attacks on the robust role of states and public rights in private markets. Given this definition, the corporation provides a unique lens on neoliberalism. On the one hand, neoliberalism and associated models of globalization have aggressively promoted the interests of corporations as part of economic liberalization. Because neoliberalism has been understood as extending market relations and economic forms of calculation into ostensibly non-economic domains of social life, the terms ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘corporatization’ have often been used synonymously. In fields such as education, health care and media, the interchangeable references to neoliberalism and corporatization highlight the ways these social spheres have been subjected to market logics, but also transformed from objects of state investment governed by notions of public welfare to areas managed by large companies with the primary aim of profitability.
The rub is that corporations have long been considered antithetical to markets. Corporations, of course, engage in numerous market activities – making and selling goods in commodity markets, purchasing and deploying labor power in the production process, issuing stock in financial markets, etc. – yet economic analysis has traditionally distinguished corporate institutions from markets. In the words of noted business historian Alfred Chandler (1977), corporations represented ‘the visible hand’ of the economy, organizing production bureaucratically. This notion was also central to the analysis of the corporation offered by transaction costs economists from Ronald Coase (1937) to Oliver Williamson (1975). For these scholars, the competitive advantage of corporations resides in their ability to internalize market exchanges within the structure of the firm, making them, in Williamson's terms, ‘hierarchies’ as distinct from markets. Related arguments appear in contemporary work on global value chains (Gereffi et al., 2005), suggesting that not only individual corporations but also entire corporate networks and supply chains generate value through mechanisms that are quite different from those characterizing traditional market exchanges. One could even go as far back as the classical political economists, including Adam Smith (1978), who viewed corporations, with their state-backed charters, as government-created entities that disrupted the invisible hand of the price mechanism.
This suggests some problems with analyzing contemporary issues in political economy through today's dominant ideological tropes. Although privatization is routinely invoked by champions of what have come to be understood as neoliberal reforms in ways that benefit corporations, the corporation does not fit neatly into divisions of public and private. Contemporary policies promoting corporate capitalism could be seen as an instance where the reality of neoliberalism belies its rhetoric (see, for instance, Crouch, 2011; Birch, 2015). But, analytically, the contradictory role of the corporation in today's politics and economy is more usefully understood as an effect of the strange role the corporation has played within the genealogy of liberal-capitalist government itself. This is because, throughout its history, the corporation has provided a legal-institutional form where new modes of government have been developed. With the advent of liberal-capitalist empires and nation-states, corporations became vital institutions for organizing capitalist socio-economic and political relations. Part of the reason they were so useful as a tool or technique of government was the way they exploited and transformed the central conceptual divisions undergirding liberalism, including not only the aforementioned distinction between public and private, but also those between state and market, politics and economy, individual and collective, persons and things, dominion and imperium, and citizen and sovereign, each of which has been essential to liberal forms of power.
Understanding the relations between the corporation and liberalism (whether neo- or otherwise) requires historical or, more accurately, genealogical study. In the pages that follow, I outline some elements of this genealogy, with particular attention to the roles of corporations as not just economic institutions, but entities that have profoundly shaped the social and spatial organization of power in liberal capitalist societies. Part one begins with a brief discussion of how critiques of neoliberalism frame the corporation as an object of study. My aim here is not to provide a robust empirical description of corporate power today, but rather to show that the critique of neoliberalism relies on and deploys a conceptual division between the proper spheres of public power, on one side, and private right, on the other, in order to expose the growing power of corporations. The corporation is particularly troublesome in these critiques of neoliberalism because of the way it is always out of place, exceeding the spatial and conceptual boundaries in which it is presumed to properly reside.
As is well established, these conceptual distinctions are crucial to liberal political and economic thought. In part two, however, I show how uneasily the corporation has fit within this framework. As a medieval legal institution linked with the images and figurations of sovereign power, corporations survived within liberal regimes for their usefulness in managing, governing and disciplining what Foucault (2007: 96) called ‘the complex of men and things'. As such, they have straddled and transgressed idealized notions of ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’ throughout the modern period. Consequently, writing on the corporation has long been marked by the tensions between the utility of the corporate legal form and fundamental principles and justifications of liberalism.
I suggest that this is the same tension we see today in contemporary writing about the corporation and neoliberalism. Part three thus brings the argument forward and explains what this genealogy of the corporation means for understanding the current debates discussed in part one. First and foremost, the genealogy of the corporation shows the fundamental incoherence and wrong-headedness of a host of related arguments that have come to be characterized as neoliberal and support various projects of deregulation, privatization, and private governance. More troubling, however, this genealogy also complicates common notions of neoliberalism that are used to critique today's rapacious forms of corporate capitalism. Specifically, it challenges what has become a standardized historical narrative of neoliberalism. After all, the use of legal and state power to constitute markets, commodity relations, modes of accumulation, and forms of economic government and subjectivity are not new or unique to post-1970s transitions in capitalism. More prosaically, to locate the origins of contemporary capitalist social relations and paradigms of governmental reason in events such as the twentieth-century ideologies of the German ordoliberals, the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economics, the politics of Thatcherism and Reaganism, or even the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the norms associated with the Washington Consensus is to miss the way that the present emerges out of a far more diverse and chaotic past. Attention to the ways the long dynamics of capitalism, discipline, and government come together in historically specific moments and institutional forms might open alternative lines of political contestation than those suggested by the dominant renderings of neoliberalism.
Although there are different types of corporations, current debates associated with the critiqueof neoliberalism focus primarily on business corporations, entities with limited liability organized to make profits for their owners.1 In this regard, political concerns over the corporation and corporatization have come to designate a variety of troubling relations between businesses and society, which we can broadly categorize as falling in two primary groups: one treating neoliberalism as a set of ideas and policies structuring contemporary political economies; the other viewing neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality shaping basic notions of society and subjectivity, with grave portents for citizenship and democracy.
In terms of the first group, concerns about the growing power of corporations converge on the ways that neoliberal policies marshal state power to promote specific industries, sectors, or companies. Such arguments take a number of forms, including discussions of state-backed projects of privatization and financialization, along with legal changes promoting corporate consolidation and monopoly power. David Harvey's (2005) work on neoliberalism provides an exemplary case of this line of reasoning that touches on each of these areas. For Harvey, neoliberalism represents both a set of theoretical ideas and institutionalized policy proscriptions that began to take hold in the mid-1970s amid the collapse of the post-Second World War political and economic compromise, which had led to sustained economic growth in core capitalist economies through the 1950s and 1960s. As with most other accounts, Harvey locates the origins of neoliberal theory in the mid-twentieth-century writings of scholars associated with the Mont Pèlerin Society and, later, with the University of Chicago's economics department. These thinkers are linked in their critiques of state planning and economic regulation in not only its communist and socialist forms, but also in terms of New Deal Keynesianism. The crux of Harvey's sweeping global account, however, is the uneven ways those ideas were institutionalized in a series of concrete events beginning in the 1970s. Here, too, we see the familiar list of events associated with neoliberalism, including Reagan and Thatcher's attack on labor unions; the privatization and deregulation of key aspects of the US and UK telecommunications, transportation, finance and energy industries; the 1979 Volker shock and promotion of anti-inflationary policies over those pursuing full employment; the proliferation of IMF structural adjustment programs; and the recurrent financial crises, along with subsequent projects of liberalization and shock therapy, in places such as Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, South Korea, and China, to name only a few.
By distinguishing neoliberal theory from the practices of states and capitalist enterprises, Harvey is able to show that neoliberalism is much less about the utopian project to produce truly free markets than it is a project of restoring accumulation for particular classes and class fragments (see also Cahill, 2014). Corporations appear as an important component of the capitalist class and Harvey demonstrates that neoliberalism has entailed the use of state power to benefit corporations and their executives in a number of ways. First, for Harvey, neoliberalism has been coincident with the shift from manufacturing to finance in core capitalist economies. Aided by monetarist government policies and the deregulation of the financial industry, neoliberalism has not only been a boon to traditional finance companies, such as banks, but also to large manufacturing and consumer corporations that have expanded into financial services. This also has entailed the rise of executive compensation through stock options and the related shift to shareholder value as a measure of corporate success (see also Ho, 2009). But Harvey's most important point is that financial expansion occurred within an international context dominated by the ‘Washington Consensus', in which ‘US and UK models of neoliberalism were … defined as the answer to global problems’ (Harvey, 2005: 93). Harvey chronicles the ways developing states liberalized their economies in order to attract global capital, while also facing heightened competition from other places and territories following similar trajectories. For the classes orchestrating this form of neoliberal globalization, the ‘primary objective, however, was to open up as much of the world as possible to unhindered capital flow’ (Harvey, 2005: 93).
In addition to financial globalization, Harvey gives other examples of the way state power has benefited corporate sectors of the capitalist class. As a geographer with long-standing interest in urbanization, Harvey connects neoliberalism with the restructuring of urban space through the use of public-private partnerships (see also Harvey, 1989). Harvey notes that many of these partnerships are unique in that ‘the state assumes much of the risk while the private sector takes most of the profits’ (Harvey, 2005: 77). Relatedly, Harvey chronicles a shift from government, what he terms ‘state power on its own', to governance, in which corporations are involved in ‘writing legislation, determining public policies, and setting regulatory frameworks (which are mainly advantageous to themselves)’ (Harvey, 2005: 76–77). For Harvey, these techniques are just part of broader processes of ‘corporatization, commodification, and privatization of hitherto public assets’ which constitute a ‘signal feature of the neoliberal project’ and have been opening up ‘new fields for capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitability’ (Harvey, 2005: 160). Harvey goes on to list a number of areas of government and policy that have either been directly put under the administration of private enterprises or have been restructured to function like private business, including public utilities, social welfare agencies, public institutions like universities and prisons, the military, agriculture, creative, cultural and artistic endeavors, and the global intellectual property and trade regimes. Harvey argues that privatization is central to the class-based accumulation strategies of neoliberalism, as assets are transferred from ‘the public and popular realms to the private and class-privileged domains’ (Harvey, 2005: 161).
Harvey's broad account of neoliberalism as a class-based project in which corporations have profited through either direct benefits of state largess or by using corporate money and power to reshape politics resounds with the arguments of numerous other scholars. For instance, the essays collected in Neoliberal Environments (Heynen et al., 2007) build directly on Harvey's conceptualization of neoliberalism, tightly linking neoliberal environmental governance with the privatization and enclosure of land, labor, and resources in ways that dispossess people and communities, while benefiting corporations and capitalist elites. Duménil and Lévy (2004, 2011) emphasize the importance of finance and explain the role of financial interests as drivers of neoliberal policies based on their responses to post-1970s declines in corporate profitability. Like Harvey, Duménil and Lévy focus on the international strategies of finance, as the deregulation of developing economies in the 1980s and 1990s provided new sources of income for the uppermost reaches of the capitalist class. They also describe the way this process has been abetted by managers, whose ‘main field of activity … is the organization of corporations’ (Duménil and Lévy, 2011: 76), as their incomes have become intertwined with the financial interests of firms.
Colin Crouch (2011) provides probably the most explicit consideration of the role of the corporation in contemporary neoliberalism. Although Crouch echoes the concerns about financialization, his primary interest is in the ways corporations disrupt both market activities and political processes. The size of corporations, their efficiencies in lowering transaction costs, and their ability to hierarchically coordinate complex undertakings allows them to exercise monopoly power in markets. Corporations also actively pursue their interests in democratic politics via lobbying. Furthermore, because neoliberalism lacks a specific theory of the corporation – treating it simply as any other market participant – neoliberal policies are particularly inept in reining in corporations. Working-class organizations and social welfare states were once able to do this within the national corporatist frameworks of mid-twentieth-century regulated capitalism. As with Duménil and Lévy, Crouch argues that at least one potential path out of neoliberalism entails a shift in the actions of corporate managers away from financial interests and toward a pluralistic concept of social responsibility.
Although these brief summaries fail to do justice to the complexity and nuance of these arguments, they point to one of the key ways corporate power is framed in relation to discussions of neoliberalism. These accounts, centrally concerned with the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, present the corporation as a particular type of capitalist firm that is able to secure profits through their power to shape both policy, on one hand, and market dynamics and competition, on the other. Moreover, because of the particular relationship within corporations between owners, managers, and workers – most notably the separation of management and ownership that has become a defining characteristic of the modern corporation (see Berle and Means, 1932) – firms themselves become, at least potentially, an arena of struggles over the direction of capitalism.
These political economy-oriented approaches contrast with those less focused on corporations themselves than on corporatization as a dominant logic or style of management under neoliberalism. This line of reasoning is accentuated in those studies, many of which building on Foucault's (2008) lectures from the 1970s, that view neoliberalism as a form of governmental reason (Larner, 2000; Ong, 2006; Brown, 2015). Aihwa Ong (2006: 3) argues that neoliberalism marks ‘a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions'. A form of technical reason, Ong argues that neoliberalism is ruthlessly directed at ‘optimizing’ practices of self-government – making us ever more efficient regulators of our bodies – and populations – differentiating social groups through practices of inclusion and exclusion. Wendy Brown (2015) echoes this approach, treating neoliberalism as ‘a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a “conduct of conduct,” and a scheme of valuation’ and connecting it primarily with ‘a historically specific economic and political reaction against Keynesianism and democratic socialism'. Yet Brown insists on the paradoxical nature of neoliberalism, as other processes, traditions, discourses, and norms always condition neoliberalism's various spatio-temporal instantiations, rendering it ‘disunified and nonidentical with itself in space and over time’ (Brown, 2015: 21).
Thus, the analysis here begins from the premise that the political-economic explanation of neoliberalism is correct but also insufficient for charting the full impact of neoliberalism as a transformative force. In addition to consolidating circuits of capital accumulation that benefit particular classes, neoliberalism has also produced new schemas of evaluation and management, as well as corresponding forms of veridiction that support those governing practices. These new practices have restructured not just the fields of politics and economics proper, but also the broad range of social spheres by which we are governed, including the institutionalized domains of education, punishment, medicine, genetics, law, urbanization, and environmental government, as well as the processes that shape our subjectivity, identities, and desires. It was in this sense that Foucault (2008: 243) characterized neoliberalism as the ‘the generalization of the economic form of the market'. On this reading, neoliberalism is more than simply the growth of new markets, say, for previously unpriced commodities; it also entails the generalization of the market as a way of knowing and, thus, acting on the world.
This form of knowing, managing, and governing has, at times, been connected with the figure of the corporation under the term ‘corporatization'. As such, it refers to the intertwining of states and corporations in regulating populations, but also to the deployment of corporate managerial techniques into areas of social practice once thought to be organized via different means and toward other ends. Wendy Brown clarifies the point, stressing that within neoliberal government ‘both persons and states are constructed on the model of the contemporary firm’ (Brown, 2015: 22). Elaborating on Sheldon Wolin's (2008) notion of a corporately managed democracy, she argues that ‘it is not simply a matter of corporate wealth buying (or being) politicians and overtly contouring domestic and foreign policy, nor of a corporatized media that makes a mockery of informed publics or accountable power. More than intersecting, major democracies today feature a merging of corporate and state power’ (Brown, 2011: 46).
This general argument is fleshed out as scholars show how corporatization shapes not only the actions of individuals, states, or industries, but the fundamental thought and practice – essentially, the entire habitus – of whole social spheres. For instance, much of the literature analyzing problems in the contemporary university focuses on issues of neoliberalism and corporatization (see, for instance, Aronowitz, 2000; Bousquet, 2008; Donoghue, 2008; Schrecker, 2010). The now well-known story chronicles the ‘ruining’ of the institution, as universities once charged with educating citizens into national cultures, and western civilization more broadly, have now become tasked with creating workers that can compete for jobs in global markets (Readings, 1996). Marc Bousquet usefully notes that the term ‘corporate’ in this discussion refers to two things. First, there is the political economy of higher education – as Bousquet puts it, ‘the way campuses actually relate to business and industry in quest of revenue enhancement and cost containment’ (Bousquet, 2008: 9). Concomitant with the changing social function of universities has been the growth of a global higher education industry that is increasingly privatized. As states have decreased support for public universities, many universities have responded with economizing strategies, including the increased use of adjunct and graduate student labor in teaching, rapidly rising tuition costs, the marketing and branding of universities (particularly through the growth of college athletics), the expansion of online and distance learning and, like global capital itself, the attempt to capture new revenue sources through international satellite campuses. This is to say nothing of the intensifying development of for-profit and online institutions, which now compete with some traditional universities and colleges.
At the same time, these political and economic changes go hand in hand with new norms and values, or what Bousquet (2008: 10) describes as a shift in the ‘organizational culture’ governing universities. For Bousquet, corporatization thus also indexes how cultures of administration and management have redirected the institution itself, along with its constituent groups of faculty and students, toward market-based logics of commercialization and capitalist investment. As he laments, ‘higher education administration pervasively and self-consciously seeks control of the institution by seeking to retool the values, practices, and sense of institutional reality that comprise faculty and student culture. And they have succeeded wildly’ (Bousquet, 2008: 12). Wendy Brown (2015) concurs, noting that the traditional norms, goals, and values that governed the public university's mid-twentieth century's extension and democratization of the liberal arts have now been supplanted by neoliberal administration dedicated to fostering ‘human capital'. The result has been a dramatic proliferation in metrics and assessments, which direct both students and scholars alike toward increasingly specialized and professionalized forms of scholarship. This undermines the central relationships within public universities between research, teaching, and public service. Although individuals can profit in such a system, Brown demonstrates the disastrous consequences such changes hold for democracy and self-government.
Higher education's corporatization mirrors developments in other fields. Recognizing as much, some scholars have extended the argument to suggest that the corporation provides a model of reasoning that composes the basic form of global subjectivity today. Thus, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval argue in the grandest possible terms that ‘neo-liberalism defines a certain existential norm in western societies and, far beyond them, in all those societies that follow them on the path of ‘modernity'’ (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 3). The end point of this ‘new global rationality’ or form of ‘world-reason’ is the transformation of both individual subjectivity and the basic model of society and social interaction to mirror the form and practices of the enterprise. As they suggest, ‘the neo-liberal moment is characterized by a homogenization of the discourse of man around the figure of the enterprise’ (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 259). It is as if to say that, at least for Dardot and Laval, we are all nothing but corporations now.
Such an argument could be critiqued for its overblown rhetoric, yet my point is to show the taken-for-granted nature of our understandings of the corporation in critiques of neoliberalism. Whether carefully focused and contextualized or totalizing and general, the ways corporations figure in studies of neoliberalism is remarkably consistent. As with the political economic approaches discussed previously, in accounts focused on governmental reason the corporation continues to appear as a capitalist firm, with neoliberal policies and ideologies benefiting specific corporations and sectors of the economy. But these approaches go beyond the political economic analysis to suggest that the corporation provides models for human subjectivity and the organization of institutions more broadly.
At least two important implications follow from this argument. First, although they differ in their causal explanations, both the political economy and governmental rationality approaches agree that one of the crucial problems with the corporation is the way its power has expanded into realms and domains beyond its originally circumscribed purview. For both approaches, the central concern is that corporations have privatized previously public goods and intervened directly in domains of politics that are (or at least should be) governed by other logics. Wendy Brown (2015: 96) provides the most explicit rendering of this division in her claim that neoliberalism is marked by the assent of homo oeconomicus – closely connected with the rationality of the firm – over and against homo politicus, the subject of politics who both represents the best antidote to neoliberal rationality and ‘the most important casualty of the ascendance of neoliberal reason'. Second, this declensionist narrative of how the public has been overtaken by corporate-economic reason is situated within an historical account that locates key transitions in post-1970s shifts in ideology, political economy, and the thought and practice of government. When taken together, it suggests that the last forty years mark nothing short of an epochal transition in human history, or, as Brown (2015: 45) puts it, ‘neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity'.
Of course, the scholars limning the contours of neoliberalism recognize that broad claims can be difficult to sustain. One response has been to emphasize the geographic variability of neoliberalism and the ways it intertwines with other types of political and economic projects. Jamie Peck has used the term ‘neoliberalization’ to describe neoliberalism as a variegated process in which ‘each experiment [in neoliberalization] should be seen as a form of reconstruction, representing a conjunctural episode or moment in the contradictory evolution of neoliberal practice’ (Peck, 2010: 6). Others, interested in neoliberalism as a political and economic response to declining profitability for core capitalist economies and classes during the 1970s, have compared today's neoliberal policies with other moments of capitalist crisis and restructuring (Duménil and Lévy, 2004). Receiving far less attention, however, are the continuities, traces, and survivals (cf. Althusser, 1969: 114–116) that persist in today's forms of governmental reason. When we turn toward the genealogy of the corporation, however, we can see that many of the techniques of policing, disciplining, and governing that are associated with neoliberal corporatization are neither unprecedented nor solely linked with the people and projects that have come to define the standard history of neoliberalism. Thus, considering the corporation, the issue is not only that the practice of neoliberalism runs counter to the ideals offered by free-market fundamentalists, as scholars have claimed (Harvey, 2005; Crouch, 2011; Cahill, 2014; Birch, 2015). The issue is rather that there are other, much older origins for the practices constituting corporate power obscured by the narratives of neoliberalism, including the more nuanced and flexible notion of neoliberalization.
Genealogies, with their attention to the diverse lines of development constituting objects of knowledge, are particularly well suited to grasping these submerged formations. Take, for instance, an admittedly ‘modest’ text like Joseph Stancliff Davis's two-volume Essays on the Earlier History of American Corporations (1917: vii). Published in 1917 as part of the Harvard Economic Studies series, Davis's Essays focused on the evolution of the corporation in the United States. Written during the period that historian Martin Sklar (1988) termed ‘the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism', Davis, a Harvard professor and future president of the American Economic Association, was one of many scholars interested in the development of corporations. In conjunction with the growth of a national corporate economy in the United States, the turn of the twentieth century saw a torrent of books, articles, and government studies addressing problems such as industrial combinations and trusts, the nature of corporate personhood, the internal management of companies, and the dynamics of corporate finance. Davis's Essays contributed an historical approach to these discussions, aiming to ‘illuminate the shadowy background of the modern corporation’ (Davis, 1917: vii). Even though the essays primarily focused on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries corporations, Davis's point was to draw a line between the modern corporation of 1917, with its unique competitive advantages but also its extensive political liabilities, and this ‘ancient lineage’ (Davis, 1917: 3).
Davis began by clarifying the different types of corporations, separating public from private corporations, as well as those chartered in England from those in the colonies. For Davis, the distinction between public and private corporations concerned both the control and ends of different institutions. What made corporations such as towns, cities, and corporate colonies public was that they were designed as the structure of government and public authority. Corporations such as religious groups, societies and businesses were private because they were controlled by individuals and designed to allow them to pursue some specific ends that were, at least in Davis's estimation, not of public concern. Though the distinctions would be clear to his readers, and is equally so today, Davis also admitted that ‘such a classification, however, is difficult to make’ because ‘the law of the period, even as presented by Blackstone on the eve of the Revolution, did not differentiate the various types; and the charters do not admit of ready grouping in all cases, even when they are accessible'. Davis, nevertheless, affected such distinctions ‘for convenience', stating that ‘we may somewhat arbitrarily set off the public corporations from the private ones, applying a distinction then unrecognized’ (Davis, 1917: 49).
Admittedly a minor point in the history of writings on corporations and one far-removed from the concerns of contemporary politics, yet Davis's arbitrary distinction also opens up alternative paths of inquiry into the trajectories of corporate power. If earlier corporations were not simply private embodiments of capital, what were they? Relatedly, what was the relationship of the corporation to public power? And if the distinction between the public and private aspects of corporations was unclear up to the nineteenth century, what happened to make that division a simple convenience by the early twentieth century?
Trace Davis's statements back to Blackstone and a different set of relations are brought into focus. Indeed, William Blackstone, the famed eighteenth-century English jurist, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England (1790) exercised a profound influence on nineteenth-century US legal thought, also described and classified the various types of corporations. Blackstone differentiated aggregate corporations with many members from sole corporations made up of a single person. He also distinguished between ecclesiastical and lay corporations and, as a subdivision of lay corporations, civil and eleemosynary corporations. In this regard, the towns and cities, which Davis would call public corporations, and the manufacturing and commercial corporations, which Davis would consider private, were all simply civil corporations, part of the larger group of lay corporations. More interesting, however, is that the classes of lay corporations were vast. In addition to towns, created for ‘good government', and commercial corporations, raised for ‘the advancement and regulation of manufactures and commerce', lay corporations included civil corporations such as ‘churchwardens, for conservation of the goods of the parish; the college of physicians and company of surgeons in London, for the improvement of the medical science; the royal society, for the advancement of natural knowledge; and the society of antiquaries, for promoting the study of the past’ (Blackstone, 1790: 470–471), as well as the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. The other class of lay corporations was made up of eleemosynary institutions ‘constituted for the perpetual distribution of the free alms or bounty', and included ‘all hospitals for the maintenance of the poor, sick, and impotent; and all colleges, both in our universities and out’ (Blackstone, 1790: 471). None other than the king himself was ‘made a corporation to prevent in general the possibility of an interregnum or vacancy of the throne, and to preserve the possessions of the crown entire’ (Blackstone, 1790: 470).
What becomes clear, then, when we examine this longer history is that corporations – including corporations for commerce, manufacturing and trade – were integral to the very structure and practice of public authority, to be sure, but also government in the particular sense that Foucault articulated concerning the ‘right disposition of things’ (Foucault, 2007: 96). Early modern corporations, which Blackstone (1790: 467–468) refers to as ‘bodies politic', ‘political constitutions', or a ‘little republick', were created to give or recognize rights that associations used to pursue some end, such as ‘the advancement of religion, of learning, and of commerce'. The corporation's status as an ‘artificial person’ allowed it to ‘preserve entire and for ever those rights and immunities, which, if they were granted only to those individuals of which the body corporate is composed, would upon their death be utterly lost and extinct’ (Blackstone, 1790: 467). As Blackstone explained, these rights, privileges, and immunities were conferred by the crown in the form of charters of incorporation or letters patent. The rights they established included perpetual succession, the rights to sue and be sued and otherwise appear in court, the ability to purchase and hold lands, the recognition of a common seal for transacting business, and the ability to make rules governing the internal affairs of the corporate undertaking.
I have argued elsewhere (Barkan, 2013) that, in doing so, corporations became an important institutional form – a ‘tactic’ as Foucault (2007: 99) might put it – for the early mode of economic government called ‘police'. By granting rights, privileges, and immunities to corporations in perpetuity – what we might think of as delegations of sovereignty – the crown encouraged individuals to undertake much of the management, regulation, supervision, and policing of social life. Indeed, almost the entire range of disciplinary institutions charged with the ‘conduct of conducts’ (Foucault, 2000: 341) – including hospitals, prisons, asylums, schools, churches, alms houses, cities and towns, the factory and the colony itself – were, first in England but also later in the United States, chartered as corporations (Barkan, 2012). Far from being private, much less antithetical to state power, chartering corporations was the mechanism of economic government by which the crown promoted diffuse projects of spiritual, intellectual or material development.
Given these relations, it should come as little surprise that later historians of the period, like Davis, should find it difficult to draw a bright line between the public and private dimensions of corporations. Nonetheless, such classifications could be arbitrarily assumed by Davis's time because, through the course of the nineteenth century, discourses of popular sovereignty interlinked with liberal conceptions of property and contract to recast the legal basis of corporate power in Anglo-American law. This, of course, occurred in relation to the creation and growth of a corporate capitalist economy in the nineteenth-century United States, although we should carefully parse the relations of causality and motivation between changing dynamics of law, government, and capitalism.
For instance, in the North American colonies, corporations were chartered for projects of government and internal development, including providing the governance structures of many of the colonies themselves. The practice of chartering corporations continued after the American Revolution with state legislatures granting special acts of incorporation to individuals, at times with monopoly powers. As with the range of corporations discussed by Blackstone, early US corporations were similarly chartered for churches, hospitals, literary and educational institutions, and poor relief. They were also a tool of state legislatures used to promote infrastructure development, at times offering monopolies to groups of individuals in order to encourage them to construct roads, highways, turnpikes, and canals (Hartz, 1948). Such uses of public power could be controversial for benefiting the members of corporations over the public at large (Maier, 1993), and, similar to today, corporations were often assailed as anti-democratic and represented as monstrous throughout the nineteenth century (see Barkan, 2013).
The 1819 US Supreme Court case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward is correctly held as recasting the corporation as a private entity. The case considered the status of Dartmouth College's corporate charter, originally issued by King George III before the war. The court famously ruled that the charter constituted a contract between the king and trustees of the college and thus was instrumental in establishing a class of private corporations. The eminent legal historian Morton Horwitz (1977: 111–112) has argued that ‘the change in the conception of the corporation marks one of the fundamental transitions from the legal assumptions of the eighteenth century to those of the nineteenth', in which the archetypical corporation became ‘the modern business corporation, organized to pursue private ends for individual gain'. But note also that the case concerned the status, not of a business, manufacturing, or commercial corporation, but a college. Moreover, even in the Dartmouth College (1819: 636) decision, Chief Justice Marshall maintained the dominance of law and the state over the corporation, holding that ‘a corporation is an artificial being … existing only in contemplation of law'. Thus, while the notion that the corporation was a private entity produced through contract would certainly benefit the capitalist who would come to use incorporation as a powerful tool for organizing the production and distribution of commodities, it is also clear that these legal changes stemmed from new understandings of government and sovereignty in the wake of the American Revolution. Moreover, Dartmouth College concerned the political authority of an ousted regime; the need for a new political conception of incorporation would become more pronounced as state legislatures intensified the practice of chartering corporations. Working against the impression that such special acts of the legislature were corruptions of the public welfare, state legislatures further privatized corporations by creating general incorporation laws that made the privileges of incorporating widely available.
Other examples could certainly be brought to bear, but the critical point is that the privatization of the corporation was primarily an attempt to maintain an institution that was defined by its exceptional powers under a monarchical regime within the new language of popular sovereignty and associated legal concepts of contract and property (cf. Barkan, 2013). In light of this history, Davis's difficulties classifying corporations appear less arbitrary and convenient than symptomatic of the general development of corporate power. Neither entirely private nor public, incorporation was a legal technique by which states empowered groups of people to govern, manage, police and discipline individuals, things, territories and their interrelations toward some ends that were optimal for the things and people in question, as well as for the state. Furthermore, questions concerning how corporate power related to public authority, on the one hand, and private rights, on the other, were always fraught. Although discourses of the private corporation suggested that the state was simply recognizing an association created by individuals, the long history of charter policy indicated that the state was more active in constituting these powers. Yet corporations remained politically contentious because, once legally constituted, charters established rights and liberties that benefited members of the corporate bodies against not only other individuals but, at times, the public at large.
This brief excursus can only gesture to some of the sinuous paths in the history of corporate politics and power. Yet what I hope to make clear is that elements of contemporary politics that are taken today as the telltale signs of neoliberalism – including privatization, the personification of the corporation as a subject of rights, privileges and immunities, public-private partnerships, and even the corporate person as a model subject of economic government – emerge from and reiterate other, less heralded moments in the historical development of the corporation. Recognizing as much has implications for a range of debates over neoliberalism. First, it provides additional support, albeit with a different emphasis, for the argument that the rhetoric of free markets, privatization and deregulation has little relation to the reality of today's political economy. Commentators have demonstrated that making ‘free markets’ requires all sorts of state intervention (Peck and Tickell, 2002), implying that free markets are never really that free. Understanding the genealogy of the corporation also suggests that today's corporate-led privatization is not really so private. Libertarian and free market advocates for the types of reforms that have come to be characterized as neoliberal turn toward privatization and privatized government on the argument that private institutions existing in competitive markets voluntarily produce effective and efficient regulations (see, for example, Stringham, 2015). But this simple substitution of state regulation with corporate governance misconstrues the ways corporations blur distinctions between public and private, as well as the exceptional powers of nominally private entities to police and coerce (cf. Hale, 1923; Cohen, 1927; Ferguson, 2005). From an analytical standpoint, William Novak's (2009: 27) understanding of US law and politics, ‘in which power has long been distributed along an exceedingly complex array of persons, associations, and institutions that are not easily categorized as fundamentally either public or private', is far more useful to understanding the corporation than the more simplistic forms of analysis emphasizing state or market as the locus of power in society.
Novak's nod to the historical dimensions of this intertwining of public and private power is also, however, instructive for those seeking to critique contemporary politics in terms of neoliberalism. Because our understanding of neoliberalism has focused on the ways a specific set of ideologies, policies, and dispositions have become dominant forms of social regulation and subjectivity in the wake of a systemic crisis of capitalist accumulation in the 1970s, we have failed to recognize that there are other points of origin for the practices of government and economic regulation that we today think of as neoliberalism. There are, of course, novel developments within what we might think of as the particular history of neoliberalism – the well-trod account of Friedman and Hayek, Thatcher and Reagan, shock therapy and structural adjustment. Yet, as ‘neoliberalism’ is used to characterize and critique an ever-widening set of policies, ideas and social processes, the relations between this particular history and such diverse empirical phenomena is increasingly tenuous. The ubiquity of neoliberalism as an analytical framework thus not only eclipses other histories, but also the ways those histories shape phenomena in the present. In this sense, the issue is not about how neoliberal ideas conjoin with others in an ongoing experiment of neoliberalization, as much as a contention that the ideas we term ‘neoliberal’ have alternative histories far afield from those we have considered.
This is certainly true of corporate power. Although commentators are correct to note recent changes in the corporate economy, such as the growth of finance (which we should recognize as having its own historical predecessors – see Arrighi, 1994), there are also important continuities in the historical development of corporations. Corporations have been used at various times as governmental and disciplinary institutions, as well as important institutions for managing the production and distribution of commodities and inter-capitalist competition. Whether it is the monstrous British and Dutch imperial trading companies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the infamous cartels and trusts of the early twentieth century, there is a well-documented history of corporate power whose timeline differs from the comparatively recent story of neoliberalism and, thus, offers us different lessons and points of entry into today's political events (see for instance Birla, 2009; Stern, 2011). In particular, it suggests that the problems with the corporation are not unique to the contemporary moment and, similarly, many of the proposed solutions – from corporate responsibility and enlightened management to projects of shareholder or stakeholder empowerment – have been tried before. Rather than viewing corporate power as something that has increasingly contaminated the public sphere since the 1970s, we might examine the historically and geographically diverse ways corporations mobilize, exploit and manipulate liberal divisions of public and private, or the state and economy, as part of their practices of disciplining and governing populations and territories.
1. There is now a well-established literature centrally concerned with explaining neoliberalism, broadly, and, secondarily, the roles of corporations in constituting neoliberal social formations. This work includes Foucault (2008), Harvey (2005), Peck and Tickell (2002), Peck (2010), Larner (2000), Brenner and Theodore (2002), Leitner et al. (2007), Klein (2007), Duménil and Lévy (2004, 2011), Dardot and Laval (2013), Crouch (2011), Cahill (2014) and Brown (2015), much of which will be addressed below. There is also an analogous literature concerning the ways that social services are increasingly coordinated by non-profit and non-governmental agencies, which in some senses are both corporations and corporatized. For an introduction, see Ferguson and Gupta (2002) and Ferguson (2006).
I would like to thank Kate Derickson and Amy Ross for their insights and conversation. They bear no responsibility for the claims made.
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