Bad Company: The Corporate Appropriation of Nature, Divinity, and Personhood in U.S. Culture

AuthorRichard Hardack
PositionReceived his doctorate in English and J.D. from UC Berkeley, and has taught English and American Studies, Law, and Public Health Law at UC Berkeley, and Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges
Pages249-288




In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of
corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also

the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god
and Nature.
The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter
   
regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states,
 
But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that
created them, but displaced the individual person.
Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves,
in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the
corporation’s inhuman attributes. However, corporations don’t just mimic human
behaviors; at best simulacra, or imitations of human life, corporations challenge and
destabilize the status of personhood, and what it means to be a person.
In the process, corporations have amassed not just wealth, but personhood (for
example, in perhaps surprising ways, the personhood of African Americans). In many
ways, the ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood

privatization, is to dehumanize people, turning them into things that have no rights.
Created to encourage entrepreneurial (or reckless and socially irresponsible) risk-
taking and minimize personal liability, the corporation evolved into an entity that
dynamically diminishes the personal.
The corporation represents a collective, transcendental body that has taken on the
role of a deity, and, in U.S. ontology, of nature. The relationships between human and
corporate personhood and identity implicate fantasies of the supernal; the super-
human; immortality; and the transcendence of individuality. For these reasons, I
treat the corporation not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural
phantasm, a kind of black hole that draws in more and more cultural phenomena

© 2019 Richard Hardack, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
  
           
     

 
Not Altogether Human”: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance
         
 Coming Between Africa and America: Transcendentalism and
the Transcendence of Race, from Emerson to MorrisonNew and Improved: The
Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood

8 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2019)



 
 



 

 


into its orbit. The modern corporation has come to guarantee certain rights at a
price, in much the way the Hobbesian state once did. People barter their attributes
to corporations; but they are no longer trading liberty for security, but “souls” for
identity. As the corporation comes to serve as the de facto guarantor and distributor of
culture, it remains amoral at best, and in practice serves as a dominant pathological
personality that helps reduce all human endeavor to commercial interest.

Corporate Personhood, Thomas Hobbes, Critical Legal Theory, Race, Citizens
United case
250



    


            
  
     



     
       
        

  
        
         

            
        



             
     


        
 
           
   

            
           
          
            
         
       
        

 

 See New and Improved: The Zero-Sum Game of Corporate Personhood
    
   

251

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT