Corporate Persons, Collective Responsibility, and the Literary Imagination

Abstract

This essay examines the contributions of Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2021) to our understanding of the historical development and philosophical underpinning of United States corporate law as well as to broader studies of law and literature. The first part of the essay considers Siraganian’s analysis of problems related to corporate agency, intention, and responsibility. The second part considers the book’s implications for other types of collective social entities. In particular, the essay reads Ida Fink’s The Table (1970) and Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975) through the lens of Siraganian’s study, examining their treatment of the challenges posed by the collective nature of the Nazi genocide. The essay suggests that Siraganian’s book not only offers strikingly new insights about modern literature, thought, and culture but also gives us the resources to think better about corporate accountability broadly conceived.