A Feature or a Bug? The Successive Attempts of Exempting the Corporation From Purpose, Responsibility and Accountability

Corporation stand at the very center of contemporary capitalism. They account for a dominant percentage of the world’s biggest economies, wield enormous political and economic power, and are the leading drivers of the climate crisis. In light of this – and combined with the seemingly endless unearthing of corporate scandals in recent years – a number of debates and discussions about how to manage, govern, curb, abolish or perhaps transform corporations have sprouted in recent years, both in academic and activist circles. The discussions about reforming the corporation can very generally be put into two camps: one highlighting the need for a corporate purpose (either voluntary or state-chartered) to make corporations more accountable and societally responsible, and another highlighting the need for democratizing the corporation. However, these discussions, we hold, tend to neglect the fact that the corporation is a legal technology designed to evade responsibility and to shift accountability, liability, and profit between legal and natural persons. Furthermore, they tend to miss the 3 successive political struggles over the corporate form and the (successful) successive attempts by economists, legal scholars, and philosophers of exempting the corporation from social responsibility. Transforming or abolishing the corporation, or making it more accountable and responsible, requires understanding the political struggles over the nature and purpose of the corporation.