Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident Due to planned maintenance there will be periods of time where the website may be unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2019
What is the relationship between the corporation and American democracy? This provocative and timely question informs the ten essays that Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak have assembled in a tightly edited volume that has attracted a good deal of attention from specialists in the history of U.S. public policy. In an age in which the political influence of big business has once again thrust itself onto the political agenda, this collection should also prove to be of great interest to the many historians, legal scholars, and jurists who are trying to understand the long and complex relationship between business, law, and the state.
1 For an unusually astute analysis of the problem of democratic governance in the 1930s that remains too little known among nonspecialists in legal history, see Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, KY, 1973).
2 Richard R. John, “Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians,” Business History Review 82, no. 2 (2008): 227–40.
3 The final sentences of Chandler's Visible Hand point toward the relevance of business history for democratic governance, while leaving it to others to figure out how this challenge might be met. “Such studies,” Chandler observed—in referring to future scholarship on the comparative history of the business enterprise that focused, as in The Visible Hand he had not, on the influence on the business enterprise of cultural attitudes, values, ideologies, political systems, and the social structure—can help us answer “a critical issue of modern times,” that is, how the “narrowly trained managers” who “must administer the processes of production and distribution in complex modern economies” could be “made responsible for their actions—actions that have far-reaching consequences.” Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 500.
4 Twentieth-century state court rulings receive much less attention, even though they remain influential in corporate law, because in the United States, corporations are chartered by the states and not by the federal government.
5 For a spirited, bracing, and morally engaged overview of the present-day debate over corporate civil rights, see Kim Phillips-Fein, “Company Men,” New Republic, Apr. 2018, 49–53. Phillips-Fein's article is a review of a recent book by Adam Winkler, one of the contributors to the Lamoreaux-Novak collection.
6 Ronald E. Seavoy, “Laissez-Faire: Business Policy, Corporations, and Capital Investment in the Early National Period,” in Encyclopedia of American Political History, vol. 2, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York, 1984), 728–37.
7 The notorious propensity of the self-professed antimonopolist telegraph promoter Jay Gould to manipulate the political process to buttress his prerogatives raises serious questions about the sweeping contention by Hennessey and Wallis that general incorporation regimes are less prone to corruption than special charter regimes. Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA, 2010), chap. 5. Indeed, their claim has a discernible affinity with the avowedly antidemocratic critique of government regulation of the “public choice” economist James M. Buchanan that is the subject of Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York, 2017).
8 On the evolution of the municipal franchise corporation, a theme neglected in this collection, see John, Network Nation, chap. 7, esp. 216–18, 267.
9 John, chap. 7, esp. 267–68.
10 For a related discussion that puts the issue of corporate personhood in its late nineteenth-century intellectual milieu, see Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54 (1987): 1441–83. For Mark's critique of the Hobby Lobby ruling, see Mark, “Hobby Lobby and Corporate Personhood: Taking the U.S. Supreme Court's Reasoning at Face Value,” DePaul Law Review 65 (Winter 2016): 535–58.
11 In their introduction, Lamoreaux and Novak rightly deplore the “persistent myths” about the “so-called ‘Gilded Age’” and the Lochner era—catchphrases that have distracted historians from exploring the continued expansion in the period from 1877 to 1920 of the “regulatory impulse to assert democratic control over newly expansive forms of corporate power and concentration” (p. 17). It is to be hoped that the journalistic hyping of Hobby Lobby and Citizens United will not lead to a similar misreading of the present moment in U.S. political history.
