Property Rights and Corporations: A Revised View of the East-West Distinction

• In Event: Property Rights and Corporations: Bringing the State Back in History and Theory

Abstract

“Corporate rights” are seeing a resurgence in both theoretical work and empirical developments; they are often perceived as central to the emergence of constitutional and representative governance.This is a major assumption even in classic sociological theory of the state (Thomas Pogge), but also recent work on the European state (Doucette-Møller; Grzymala-Busse). A comparative study of fifteen cases across the premodern period suggests, rather, that where corporations were strongest, both constitutionalism and state capacity were weakest. Continental Europe was permeated by corporations, but those polities did not have a smooth, lineal evolution to the modern constitutional state. Instead, representation (and liberal constitutionalism) was strongest where corporate rights were weakest: in England, not only was the aristocracy not exempt from taxation, their legal status was equalized to that of commoners since the twelfth century. It was the higher capacity of the state to limit the power of groups that enabled the outcomes often ascribed to spontaneous self-organization.

Author

• Deborah A. Boucoyannis, George Washington University