Corporate Form and Modernism: A Response to My Commentators

Abstract

This article addresses four threads of analysis that emerged in the forum on my book Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. First, the book’s method, context, and framing are discussed. Second, the article explores why corporate single-mindedness, while a critical component of the corporate form, should not be conceptualized as its intention but as the cause or basic condition of a corporation. Third, the article responds to several commentators’ raising the possibilities of (and problems with) expanding corporate personhood to monsters, fetuses, and Nazis. Fourth, and finally, the article briefly considers the proposal that the book supports corporate responsibility to specific groups, and particularly a responsibility to redress racial inequality and longstanding historical inequities.