“So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.”
Just read Venkatesh Rao’s epic post A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100. The post is uneven and paraphrases patently uneven sources (especially in the last, forward looking “chapter”). But the reduction about The East India Company is worthy the attention.
At its apogee in America a corporation not only functions as an entity fused with military and political power but also as an entity endowed with the human rights. For example The Supreme Court took the constitutional right of free speech and astonishingly declared that the right by a corporation to infuse money into the political process is equivalent to the vocal freedom of an individual. And now there is a fledgling movement to reject the corporate personhood.
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