What is the true nature of the modern corporation? What is the history of corporations? Are thy immortal and immoral? Do they have souls?
Download: The Corporate Entity
I am sorry that I no longer have my original reference material available.
Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, and they may be responsible for human rights violations. Just as they are "born" into existence through its members obtaining a certificate of incorporation, they can "die" when they lose money into insolvency. Corporations can even be convicted of criminal offences, such as fraud and manslaughter. -Source
Corporate lawyers (acting as both attorneys and judges) subverted our Bill of Rights in the late 1800's by establishing the doctrine of "corporate personhood" -- the claim that corporations were intended to fully enjoy the legal status and protections created for human beings.
We believe that corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges we willfully grant them. Granting corporations the status of legal "persons" effectively rewrites the Constitution to serve corporate interests as though they were human interests. Ultimately, the doctrine of granting constitutional rights to corporations gives a thing illegitimate privilege and power that undermines our freedom and authority as citizens. While corporations are setting the agenda on issues in our Congress and courts, We the People are not; for we can never speak as loudly with our own voices as corporations can with the unlimited amplification of money. -Source
While the etymology of company stresses the illicit aspects of the corporation, the word corporation itself stresses the higher aspirations of the entity. Derived from the Latin corparæ, it means to make corporal, or physically embody. For the first half millennia after the fall of Rome, the world's most powerful corporations were all trying to embody the Christian God. The idea took hold so strongly that by 1534 St. Thomas More could speak of Jesus Christ as the ultimate corporation: "He [Jesus] doth...incorporate all christen folke and hys owne bodye together in one corporacyon mistical."
A century later, Roger Williams, Freethinker and founder of Rhode Island, likened the church to a "company of East India or Turkey merchants," while English philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw those same joint stock companies as lesser -- possibly parasitic -- creatures within the larger creature of the state. In Leviathan he wrote, "Corporations... are many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man."
God, demon, servant, master, parasite or provider -- what exactly is the corporation? A good starting point is probably Chief Justice John Marshall's definition in the 1819 Dartmouth College case: "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law," Marshall wrote. "Among the most important [of its qualities] are immortality, and if the expression be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons may be considered the same, and may act as a single individual..."
Some modern writers, like W. David Kubiak, have argued that corporations actually constitute an entirely new class of being. Kubiak notes that corporations "appear to fulfill all the definitional requirements of a complex 'organism.'
The main human attribute that corporations lack is a soul, as Roger Manwood, chief baron of the Exchequer, noted as early as 1592. Since the corporations themselves, and not their souls, were immortal, they were not held accountable to the moral standards that applied to individual people. "Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed," wrote the great English legalist Edward Coke, "for they have no soul." Or as English lawyer Howel Walsh put it, "a corporation cannot blush." Thus the corporations' moral inadequacy amounted to a significant legal advantage, one of many they have accrued.
In fact, special dispensations, exemptions, and privileges of every kind imaginable are the life's blood of the corporation. Corporate members enjoyed various privileges during Roman times, such as curial immunity, and organizational privileges are evident as early as 628 A.D. in the ecclesiastic orders of the Catholic Church, the first great corporations of the post-Roman era. Modern English and French law traces the secular corporation to the concept of "franchise," which is the French Norman word for privilege. -Source
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