Table Of Contentcorporate sovereignty
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Corporate Sovereignty
law and government under capitalism
Joshua Barkan
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
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A different version of chapter 3 previously appeared as “Liberal Government and the
Corporate Person,” Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 1 (2010): 53–68, reprinted
by permission of Taylor & Francis. A portion of chapter 5 previously appeared in
“Roberto Esposito’s Political Biology and Corporate Forms of Life,” Law, Culture,
and the Humanities 8, no. 1 (2012): 84–101, reprinted with permission of SAGE
Publications.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barkan, Joshua
Corporate sovereignty : law and government under capitalism / Joshua Barkan.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7426-8 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7427-5 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Corporation law. 2. Corporate power. 3. Corporate governance—Law and
legislation. 4. Corporate state. 5. Sovereignty. 6. Capitalism. I. Title.
K1315.B36 2013
346'.066—dc23
2013010385
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Frieda Koren Barkan (1919–2007)
and for Susan and Sasha, with love
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contents
Introduction 1
1 The Sovereign Gift 19
2 Property 41
3 Personhood 65
4 Territory 87
5 Responsibility 111
6 The Corporate University 139
Conclusion 161
Acknowledgments 167
Notes 171
Index 223
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introduction
Even a cursory glance at recent headlines indicates the social, political, and
economic importance of corporations, along with major problems con-
cerning their regulation. In the United States, events such as the 2008 finan-
cial crisis and the 2001–2 accounting scandals highlighted, in spectacular
fashion, the dramatic impacts of corporate decisions on local, national,
and global economies. Likewise, the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
or the controversies over the actions of corporate military contractors in
the Iraq War are only the most recent in a growing list of corporate abuses
of the environment and human life. That severe problems in corporate
regulation are a fixture of the daily news cycle underscores the centrality
of corporations in contemporary models of governance. From urban re-
development projects coordinated through public–private partnerships to
the subcontracting of military, prison, and security functions, corporations
play a fundamental role in providing public goods and exercise powers
customarily associated with formal state institutions.
Although each of these events—from large-scale corporate abuses to the
more mundane aspects of privatized government—is geographically local-
izable and emerges out of specific historical trajectories, the problems of
corporate power are global in scope. As the geographer Peter Dicken notes,
“more than any other single institution the transnational corporation has
come to be regarded as the primary shaper of the contemporary global
economy and a major threat to the economic autonomy of the nation-
state.”1 Corporations are intimately intertwined with projects of national
economic development across the so-called third world. Structural adjust-
ment programs associated with the Washington Consensus have equated
corporate-led privatization, deregulation, foreign direct investment, and
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