secondly because even “capitalist” ownership is increasingly divorced from effective control’ (Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (Cape: London, 1956), p. 70). Consequently, the outmoded idea of social appropriation could now be forgotten. The American economist Rostow saw the situation clearly: ‘In England, socialists say that the managers have already socialized capitalism, so that it is no longer necessary to invoke the cumbersome formality of public ownership of the means of production’ (quoted by Hal Draper, ‘Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformers’, p. 106). This was the political correlate of the managerialist theme of the self-management of capitalism, which Draper critiqued: ‘Public ownership is no longer necessary for the gradual reform of capitalism into socialism because capitalism is socializing itself in other forms. The transference of power in the corporations to socially responsible managers means that the forms of private property are no longer incompatible with our ends. Socialization will now go forward with the inevitability of gradualism in these new corporate forms. Public ownership can now be stored away in the cellar of our program because the development of the new corporate collectivism is adequately doing the job which the socialist movement once thought it was called on to perform’. The road to socialism, concludes Draper, is none other, in this schema, than a process of bureaucratic collectivization of the capitalist world (Draper, ‘Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformers’, pp. 105–6).29 29. Daniel Bell, ‘The Coming of Post-Industrial Society’, Business Society Review/Innovation, Spring 1973, no. 5, pp. 5–23 (p. 23).
30 30. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 492.
31 31. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 248.
32 32. In this type of treatise, addressed to a sovereign or future sovereign, the moral qualities of an ideal monarch were set out. By dangling a flattering double in front of him, the hope was that, seduced by this potential projection of himself, he would try to resemble his reflection. Seneca, whom tradition considers as one of the founders of this literary genre, had addressed his De Clementia to Nero: may this book, he wrote, ‘stand in the place of a mirror that places you face to face with yourself, and makes you see the sublime enjoyment that it has been granted you to attain’. The advice failed. As we know, the emperor, not much inclined to leniency, finally ordered the philosopher to open his own veins. See Seneca, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1860), p. 281.
33 33. Adolf Berle, The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), p. 178.
34 34. Ibid., p. 67.
35 35. When some people objected that this guarantee was quite insubstantial, Berle replied that one needed to trust the powers of the mind: ‘priests have usually been able to intimidate the policemen, and […] the philosopher can usually check the politicians. There is a fair historical ground to anticipate that moral and intellectual leadership will appear capable of balancing our Frankenstein creations’ (ibid., p. 187).
36 36. Ibid., p. 180.
37 37. William W. Bratton and Michael L. Wachter, ‘Shareholder Primacy’s Corporatist Origins: Adolf Berle and the Modern Corporation’, Journal of Corporation Law, vol. 34, 2008, pp. 99–152 (p. 131). As the political theorist Earl Latham wrote: ‘it has been suggested that corporations – anthropomorphic corporations, endowed with intelligence, will, personality, and other human attributes – will develop that final testimonial to St. Augustine and Freud, a conscience, the operation of which will curb and control the excesses of corporate power and establish a benevolent regimen: the new “City of God”, no less. But one of the lessons of politics is that it is power that checks and controls power and that this is not done automatically and without human hands. […] If the legislative power of the corporation is to be curbed and controlled, the checks will have to be built into the structure of corporate enterprise, and not just merely laid on from without, nor entrusted to the subjective bias of the hierarchs within’ (Earl Latham, ‘The Body Politic of the Corporation’, in Edward S. Mason (ed.), The Corporation in Modern Society (New York: Atheneum, 1972; first published in 1959), pp. 218–36 [p. 228]).
38 38. Arthur S. Miller, ‘The Corporation as a Private Government in the World Community’, Virginia Law Review, vol. 46, December 1960, pp. 1539–72 (p. 1569).
39 39. Eells, The Government of Corporations, p. 16 (my emphasis).
40 40. Ibid., p. 20.
41 41. Ibid., p. 17. Earl Latham also proposed, at the start of the 1960s, ‘the reconstruction of corporations in the image of the public government’, reorganizing those ‘private oligarchies’ into republics. A juridical instrument already existed to this end: the charter of incorporation in which the state sets out the conditions under which the creation of a business is authorized (Earl Latham, ‘The Commonwealth of the Corporation’, Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 55, 1960, pp. 25–37 [pp. 26 and 33]). According to Latham, all that would be needed to impose a reform of corporate governance would be to give this document (now a mere formality) its old force, to reformulate it and flesh out its terms. Eells, on the other hand, leans towards a process of self-constitutionalization, in which firms would equip themselves with their own corpus of fundamental laws, knowing that ‘the proper forum for working out norms of corporate constitutionalism […] is the corporation itself’ (Richard Eells, The Meaning of Modern Business: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Large Corporate Enterprise (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 324). Heald commented: ‘Essentially, the alternative he offered was corporate initiative in self-generated constitutional principles. This left the question of managerial legitimacy unanswered’ (Morrell Heald, The Social Responsibilities of Business: Company and Community, 1900–1960 (London: Transaction Publishers), p. 296). This merely created a new aporia: in what way would this managerial autocracy, whose ability to develop a conscience was in doubt, be any more credible when it came to making its law?
42 42. Richard Eells and Clarence Walton, Conceptual Foundations of Business: An Outline of the Major Ideas Sustaining Business Enterprise in the Western World (Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1961), p. 381.
43 43. The Power of the Democratic Idea. Sixth Report of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), p. 59.
44 44. Bazelon, ‘The Scarcity Makers’, p. 297.
45 45. Heald, The Social Responsibilities of Business, p. 307. See also Thomas C. Cochran, ‘Business and the Democratic Tradition’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 34, no. 2, March–April 1956, p. 39. Andrew Hacker resorted to the following analogy: ‘a zookeeper does not represent the seals because he responds to their need for fresh fish. A prison warden does not represent the inmates because he consults them on recreational activities. Similarly, the corporation community is not internally democratic’ (Andrew Hacker, Politics and the Corporation; An Occasional Paper on the Role of the Corporation in the Free Society (New York: Fund for the Republic, 1958), p. 11).
46 46. Peter Drucker, The New Society: The Anatomy of the Industrial Order (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 104.
47 47. Ibid.
48 48. Ibid. At this point, Drucker rather strangely starts to sound like the thinkers of Negritude. On the ‘immortal principles’ of 1789, so vaunted by the French colonialists, Senghor wrote: ‘Unfortunately, these principles were not applied fully, without hypocrisy; fortunately, they were partially applied, enough for their virtues […] to bear fruit. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it, we took up the colonialist’s weapons and turned them against him’ (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 399).
49 49.
