State, Corporation, and Community: Some Disanalogies

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

Abstract

What, if anything, distinguishes the state from a corporation (a term which, understood in the broad sense, includes churches, universities, trade unions, charities, as well as for-profit firms)? Its territorial form? Its functions? The nature of its authority? The extent of its power? What gives the state the prerogative to define the contours of corporate autonomy? These perennial questions of political theory have received renewed attention in the wake of assertive constitutional rights claims by religious entities, firms, and political advocacy organizations in the US and beyond. This paper defends the state’s status as the rightful arbiter of corporate rights claims by developing and defending a particular analytical distinction between corporations on the one hand, and polities such as cities, states, federations (and the political communities that they constitute and represent). Drawing on Michael Oakeshott’s work, I argue that the purposive nature of corporations distinguishes them from polities whose members relate to each other in terms of practices rather than in terms of instrumental ends. My claim here is not historical or ontological but rather normative: while corporations are purposive, on broadly liberal democratic grounds I argue that states should not be thought of as purposive entities. Treating the state as a purposive association can have exclusionary, stultifying, and anti-democratic consequences. It also puts states into competition with partial associations and undermines their claim to adjudicate their autonomy claims. In conceptualizing corporations as vehicles for advancing partial values and ends (rather than either as mini-states or individuals writ-large), my account justifies the authority of public institutions to govern them in line with liberal democratic norms and challenges the homology that many pluralist thinkers have drawn between corporations and states.

Author

• Turkuler Isiksel, Columbia University