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John Holbo
@jholbo.bsky.social
Professor of Philosophy, Illustrator of Philosophers
1k followers535 following2k posts
JHjholbo.bsky.social

Reading an interesting dissertation on the evolution of corporate personhood in US law. 'Corporations are people too.' We all have an intuitive sense that the legal fiction here can be problematic in its implications. knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3479?...

The American Frankenstein by Frank Bellow (1873), "When Frankenstein Beheld the Hideous Monster He Had Created He Started with Terror and Disgust."
One major fallacy underlying contemporary scholarship on corporate personhood is the assumption that legal “person” meant the same in 1800 that it does today. This scholarship takes for granted that to be a legal “person” means that one is rights-bearing – and that these rights include constitutional rights. Yet in the first half of the nineteenth century, rights, particularly constitutional rights, were not inherent to legal personhood. Rather, whole categories of legallyrecognized “persons” existed in American law whose rights were circumscribed by their status.5 During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the understanding of rights and legal personhood underwent a profound shift. Proponents of emancipation and equal rights for black Americans argued that to be a “free” person meant that one possessed certain “fundamental” or “inalienable” rights to life, liberty, due process, and equal protection under the law, a belief that Reconstruction Era Republicans inscribed ...
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JHjholbo.bsky.social

I've just finished Foner's book on Reconstruction, so I'm attuned to how the post Civil War amendments went with conceptual revisionism re: rights and citizenship. But I hadn't really thought about how corporate personhood would, formerly, have fit more with the 'family' or 'household' model.

"This is because incorporation was not just a grant of state power to private actors. Rather, incorporation bestowed legal status on the entity of the corporation, creating a reciprocal, hierarchical relationship of benevolent care and control in exchange for obedience and service, similar to that of master-servant and parent-child. This relationship was not between the corporation and the state, per se, but between the corporation and the public, via their legislative representatives. This view of corporations as existing in a familial relation with the public persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and was mobilized by lawyers and judges who favored state oversight of corporations in counterargument to the claims of corporate lawyers."
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JH
John Holbo
@jholbo.bsky.social
Professor of Philosophy, Illustrator of Philosophers
1k followers535 following2k posts
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