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Written by Hank Berger

Published: 13 June 2004

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan, has already been noticed on this site. In this review, Ted Nace of the Dragonfly Review emphasizes author Joel Bakan's skill in blending an "occasional foray into legal theory" with abilities as "a first-rate storyteller," whose "tales are compelling and even hair-raising." -- If slavery was the legal fiction that persons are property, the corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person. Acceptance of this idea has roots that go back to 16th-century Britain, but it became a full-fledged legal doctrine in the late nineteenth century. -- Through the Supreme Court's extension of the rights of persons under the U.S. Constitution to corporations (see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pac. R. Co, 118 U.S. 395 (1886), the ability of society to regulate and control corporate actions has been severely limited. In the name of "freedom," the ability of the people to constrain the power of wealth was greatly curtailed. As historian Arthur S. Link said in his classic American Epoch, "the Supreme Court by 1900 had established the right to review all state attempts to regulate railroads and corporations. This power the court had assumed as a result of one of the most important revolutions in judicial theory in American history. . . . [I]n Munn v. Illinois, 1877, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite declared that determination of reasonable rates was a legislative, not a judicial function. This case was reaffirmed soon afterward in a series of so-called Granger cases and seemed to be firmly established as a basic principle of American constitutional law. Yet the Supreme Court completely reversed Waite's doctrine between 1886 [the date of Santa Clara County v. S. Pac. R. Co.] and 1898 [Smyth v. Ames] and transformed the Fourteenth Amendment into an instrument for the protection of corporations and railroads against 'unreasonable' regulation by the states." -- This attribution of personhood to corporations has had a profound effect on shaping American society, and through it, the political condition of the contemporary world. -- Joel Bakan's book asks: If corporations are "persons," what sort of persons are they? Bakan argues that, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, the psychologists' bible of diagnosis for mental illness, corporations are psychopaths: singularly self-interested, manipulative, shallow in their relationships, and incapable of remorse or empathy toward those they injure. The most powerful "persons" in our social and political universe today are psychopaths. -- This sounds frightening, and it is. But Joel Bakan's The Corporation is not a dark book. Ted Nace observes: "Bakan ends on an optimistic note: 'No social and ideological order that represses essential parts of ourselves can last -- a point as true of the corporate order as it was for the fallen Communist one.' In other words, we may be sharing Planet Earth with a psychopath that has gained superhuman powers. But as long as we retain our own humanity, there is still hope"...

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