Two Fallacies About Corporations

One of the most important challenges for political theory is to identify the extent to which corporations should be facilitated and restricted in law. By way of background to that challenge, we need to develop a view about the nature and potential of corporations and corporate bodies in general. This chapter discusses two fallacies that we should avoid in this exercise. One, a claim popular among economists, that corporate bodies are not really agents at all. The other, a claim associated with US jurisprudence, that not only are they agents, they are persons whose rights call in the same way as the rights of individual persons for legal recognition and protection.