Corporate Subjects: Separating State and Corporation Through Individualization

This paper concerns of a particular subset of the separation between the economic and the political, namely that between the state and the corporation. Corporations are powerful political and economic entities whose actions have in recent years spurred increasing debate and critique. However, most critiques perpetuate the distinction between state and corporation positing corporations as economic behemoths unduly encroaching upon state and politics. This misrecognizes the fundamentally political nature of corporations, their political constitution and their role in governing social life. Separating the state and corporation is central to the rise and spread – historically and actually – of corporate power and constitutes one of its central defence and legitimation mechanisms. This paper shows how the corporation historically has been emptied of its social and political content by assimilating it to a liberal imaginary or frame by analogizing it to a natural human individual. The paper traces the separation of state and corporation in three different periods: As a body subject to the state in the early-modern period; as a rights-bearing person in 19th century Anglo-American corporate law; and reducing it to individual market transactions in 20th century neoliberal economic thought. Through individualization, all three periods in various ways empty the corporation of political content, origin and authority in its own right, thereby insulating the corporation from state intervention and public oversight, worker influence or participation, and posits the shareholder and the drive for profit as its central aim.