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

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Two major principles invoked to explain political and economic development, as well as the divergence between East and West, are property rights and corporations. Both principles are usually taken to denote the assumed primacy of bottom-up dynamics in the West, of systems of self-organization that emanate from economic and social forces rather than the state. This assumes that the role of the state has been a hindrance or a constraint, one that regions outside the West failed to overcome. The panel seeks to challenge these assumptions through contributions that draw both from the historical record and political theory.

Iza Ding shows how an episode of land reform in China in 356 BC challenges common Western assumptions tying property rights and development. Brendan McElroy shows that even in regions typically classified as “absolutist,” for instance Livonia under the Russian Empire, progressive reform abolishing serfdom resulted from political cleavages resolved through the central assembly, not economic factors. Boucoyannis uses evidence from across fifteen pre-modern cases to show that property rights did not differ in the West by being more secure from state predation but in the state having greater powers of enforcement. This power was inversely related to that of corporations—where corporations prevailed, constitutional outcomes suffered. Isiksel provides a normative defense of the greater powers of the state over corporations as necessary to preserve democratic liberal values—as even the non-Western empirical cases confirm.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Property Rights and China - Iza Ding, Northwestern University

• Serfowners against Serfdom: Elite Divisions and Reform in 1803 Livonia - Brendan McElroy, University of Toronto

• Property Rights and Corporations: A Revised View of the East-West Distinction - Deborah A. Boucoyannis, George Washington University

• State, Corporation, and Community: Some Disanalogies - Turkuler Isiksel, Columbia University

• Public and Private: Judicial Doctrine for Corporations in 19th Century America - Jonathan Chausovsky, SUNY, Fredonia

Chair

• Iza Ding Northwestern University

Discussants

• Loubna El Amine King's College London

• Peter A. Hall Harvard University