'That Curious Freak’: Democratic Possibilities of ‘Person’

• In Event: Bodies and the Body Politic in Modern Political Thought

Abstract

Democracies have invented a wide range of persons, including corporations, firms, and even ships. These persons are often called artificial or fictional. The Eighteenth-century English jurist Frederic W. Maitland expressed some surprise at the artificial personhood of corporations, which he called, “that curious freak of English law.” These legal freaks were imaginary bodies composed of many beings who come to possess important legal rights. Ernst Kantorowicz described his own research into the personhood of the corporation as a study of, “that strange construction of a human mind which finally becomes slave to its own fictions.”

These persons exist as fictions in relation to presumed ‘real’ persons. This essay argues that ‘real’ persons are sustained by their own fictions. Conceiving of the subject as an autonomous agent occurs in relation to the king’s mystical body. Real persons are not all that different from artificial persons, in that as with a corporation they bring together a group into a mystical body. Could democracies invent less kingly and unified versions of a ‘real’ person; perhaps a model more committed to the pluralities of the ‘real’ body?

This essay examines this bestiary of persons in order to consider the democratic experimentation of a more diverse model of the ‘real’ person. ‘Real’ persons, so to speak, could be reimagined in terms of the plurality of bodies they collect together.

Author

• Char Roone Miller, George Mason University