Visions of Corporate Politics: Intellectual Histories of the State-Firm Analogy

Can the state be run like a firm? Should the firm be run like a state? These questions structure
some of the most pressing contemporary discussions concerning political and economic
government: Is the best political leader one with private business acumen; can the model of the
firm improve state efficiency; and should political structures be extended to the firm and employees
have democratic influence over their work-life? This project holds that these discussions, implicitly
or explicitly, mobilize the state-firm analogy as a central rhetorical and discursive strategy to (re-)
describe state and firm and to reconceptualize political government and community. The project
uses intellectual history to analyze the historical mobilizations of the state-firm analogy as well as
two dominant contemporary visions of corporate politics, each mobilizing the state-firm analogy to
argue either for the extension of democracy to the firm or to model political government on the firm.