Corporations – and particularly multinational business corporations - are today some of the most powerful and influential economic and political entities, their operations spanning the globe, with revenues larger than those of states. Corporations account for a dominant percentage of the world’s largest economies and well as of global CO2-emissions, and are increasingly taking over tasks which we have come to associate with the sovereign state such as prisons, war, security, health, social services, space travel, etc. Corporations are routinely involved in scandals and crises, from the role of banks, credit rating agencies and financial institutions in the Financial Crisis of 2007-8 to the numerous whitewashing, tax evasion and tax fraud schemes uncovered in recent years which have significant consequences for national revenues and rising inequality. Corporations are at the same time seen as crucial to the functioning of the world economy, witnessed by the swift handing out of bailout- and aid-packages in the wake of the Financial Crisis, and most recently in the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, corporations are not only seen as the main agents of economic growth, but also of social development through the doctrines of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Citizenship, The UN Global Compact and Social Development Goals (SDGs), ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance)-investments, as well as the EU Green Deal and taxonomy for sustainable activities.
Corporations thus occupy a paradoxical role in our current social and political order as both the (perceived) agents of growth, development and prosperity, as well as of inequality, poverty, whitewashing, tax evasion, climate crisis and environmental disasters. Recent developments – both theoretically and practically – have thus increasingly problematised the conception of the corporation as primarily an economic entity.
"The project wishes to undertake an investigation and analysis of how corporations are legitimized through comparisons with, similarities to, as well as distinctions and delineations from, on the one hand human subjects, and on the other the state or political power."
The project holds that understanding how corporations are legitimized as subjects is central to understanding how they wield political and economic power and influence. A significant part of the power of corporations is no doubt their legal existence as corporate persons. Corporate personhood grants corporations separate (legal) existence as persons with certain rights on par with human individuals or ‘natural’ subjects, such as the right to own property, to engage in contracts and to sue and be sued. However, corporate personhood also endows corporations with legal privileges and exemptions from law that far surpass those of natural human beings, most centrally (potential) immortality, and for business corporations limited liability, capital lock-in and entity-shielding. On the one hand, the corporation is equated to an individual person with rights that must be protected against state interference, but on the other, the corporation possesses privileges that makes it a powerful political and economic entity – particularly the modern business corporation.
The project wishes to undertake an investigation and analysis of how corporations are legitimized through comparisons with, similarities to, as well as distinctions and delineations from, on the one hand human subjects, and on the other the state or political power.
“Intellectual history” is understood broadly as the study of the history and actuality of human thought, of ideas and intellectual patterns and developments over time and of intellectuals (understood as people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, concern themselves with, and fight and struggle over ideas). Intellectual history as understood here is concerned with thought not only as a way to understand and grasp the world, but as a way to act in it, focusing on ideas, concepts and and thought both understood as thought and intellectual practice in itself, but also very centrally as a practice that is hindered, made possible, structured, limited, legimitized and made legible by thought. It is important to stress that intellectual history in this sense is not only interested in uncovering the past, but also the present.