Source: https://legalform.blog/2019/01/15/populism-pluralism-and-corporate-personality-anton-jager/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 02:13:35+00:00

Document:
Such a diagnosis of populism’s opposition to intermediary bodies has also been applied to the nineteenth-century big bang of populist politics: the 1891 foundation of the American People’s Party, the first self-declared “populist” movement in modern history. Gathered in organizations such as the Greenbackers, the Farmers’ Alliances, the Grange, and, finally, the 1891 People’s Party, the American Populist movement is here cast as an example of a “naturalist democracy” composed of white settlers who expound a vision of “the people” as a geographically rooted community of producers opposed to the mediating activity of middlemen and merchants.
Most prominently, American Populism pitted itself against the most revolutionary mediator of the nineteenth century: the newly conceived capitalist business corporation. In the 1950s scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Irwin Unger, and Oscar Handlin drew connections between “small p” populism’s opposition to the intermediary (a tendency they saw at work in the McCarthyite movement) with “big p” Populist rejections of the business corporation, focusing especially on its acquisition of corporate personality. In the late nineteenth century, corporations became increasingly prevalent in the banking and railroad sectors, two spheres classically castigated by agrarian radicals.
The connection between this anti-mediational ethos and anti-corporate feeling is not surprising. As purported proponents of settler communities of “natural individuals”, the farmers in the People’s Party objected to the existence of corporations precisely because of the forms of mediation they entailed, and how they constituted a violation of a “pre-representative” people. Corporations were an inevitable scourge on populism since they were units that could only achieve “concrete” agency through an act of abstraction (a charter that summons a group of individuals into an aggregate entity capable of acting in concert), and also since they mediated an individual’s relationship to the state and weakened the latter’s claim to exclusive sovereignty. If there are any bodies Populists opposed, it must have been corporate bodies existing besides the state.
The question here is whether contemporary theorists’ habit of juxtaposing populism and the intermediary does justice to the real nature of the late nineteenth-century Populist movement. In the 1880s, for instance, Populist thinkers eagerly deployed corporate bodies in their own visions of American statecraft when they sought recognition from states for their organizations (mainly co-operatives) qua corporations. This usage reflected an interesting ambiguity at the heart of Populism. Although historically wedded to a Jeffersonian individualism, it also saw the logistical possibilities offered by new corporate creatures. In the areas of co-operative farm organizing and legislative reform, Populists sought to recuperate elements of corporate organizing (including notions of corporate personality) as mediating organs between the state and the individual, while seeking to preserve democratic accountability.
In the tremendous oppressiveness of our System, the chief factor of cruelty, greed, corruption and robbery is the Corporation. … Whenever half a dozen men made up their minds to swindle somebody, they always went and incorporated themselves.
From the 1850s onwards, this causality came to be reversed. Corporations were now able to gain legal privileges and concessions that allowed them to untangle themselves from the grip of the state. These privileges and concessions included granting them statutory rights such as legal immortality, attenuation of the rules governing the conduct of corporate executives, offers of limited liability to directors and shareholders in the event of bankruptcy, and subsidies and land leases to corporate contractors.
Courts quickly followed suit. In a series of landmark Supreme Court cases in the late 1800s, judges ruled that corporations were private entities (e.g. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 1819), that they were entitled to representation in courts and could hold property (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet, 1823), and that they enjoyed full constitutional rights as “citizens” in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted freedmen the right to vote in several Southern states (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 1886). Such allowances, Chief Justice John Marshall stated in 1819, enabled “a corporation to manage its own affairs, and to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand”, while, “by these means”, “a perpetual succession of individuals” became “capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object like one immortal being”. The most enduring consequence of this development was that corporations were now “conceived as being pre-State and pre-law natural persons”, spontaneously created by “the mere association of individuals” and not brought to life by governmental fiat. Although this story was reasonably self-congratulatory–corporations continued to rely heavily on state aid in order to function–it constituted a handy narrative for managers to justify corporate expansion. Most of all, it naturalized a process that was in fact intrinsically political.
Artificiality was not only noxious on a societal level, however. Weaver also claimed that a state that turned itself into a corporate body, chiefly by issuing bonds and accepting the procurement of public debt, negated its primary bond with the propertied people. Public banks, for instance, turned the government into a “corporation [which] may be regarded as existing in perpetuity”, while those banks themselves had “grown to be … a very important part of the Government itself”. “Surely we should expect strong reasons to authorize”, he concluded, “the continuance and increase of such a gigantic manpower, with soulless existence, moving, acting and dealing in the walks of men”.  It was to this problem of how corporations acted as intermediary bodies between individual farmers, markets, and the state that Populism saw itself providing an answer.
Two issues were at stake here for Populist theorists. The first concerned the status of corporations as organizational forms. Could their logistical features–limited liability, managerial authority, legal personality–be recuperated, even though corporations themselves were regarded as unreliable as “soulless monsters”, unable to take oaths and form bonds? The second issue concerned the nature of the relationship between corporations and the state, and how the former’s existence affected the latter. Could corporate bodies count as valid bodies besides the state, potentially mediating and even splitting the latter’s sovereignty; and if yes, what exact role were states to fulfil? Both of these problematics became visible in the organizational sequences undergone by Populist organizations in the 1880s and 1890s: from society to state, from association to legislation, or, as they themselves put it, from “counter-monopoly” to state monopoly.
Since 1886 at least, figures in the orbit of the Midwestern Populist movement had sought to counter the corporate problem with greater institutional specificity. The Texas lawyer and autodidact economist Charles Macune, for instance, sought to construct a parallel system of distribution and circulation to the one set up by corporate actors, which allowed a group of wealthy conglomerates to control railroads, telegraphs, and capital stock. Macune was also seen as one of the prime theorists of the so-called “Alliance exchanges”, which offered farmers the possibility of stocking grain at convenient rates and bypassing large transportation hubs and extortionate freight costs.
Macune and other Populists’ ideal-typical vision of the Alliance was as a “business organization for business purposes”. As they saw it, the Alliance should stay out of party politics and focus instead on fighting corporate actors on their own terrain. The farmer’s main task, Macune thought, was to form his own “combinations”, preferably in co-operatives and brotherhoods that could sidestep railroads and banks and obtain better deals for products in Atlantic markets. This, again, could be achieved through Alliance exchanges in which farmers stocked grain, bought inexpensive equipment, and used cheaper transportation facilities. Macune here opposed the Alliance’s “agricultural collectivism” to the “fiduciary trusteeship” of corporate administrators, in which producers were separated from their product and absentee landlords could cull the fruits of their labour.  As the Midwestern Populist William Peffer put it, railroad companies had “united their forces years ago for the purpose of making money”, even as “their individual and local interests are separate and distinct from one another”. Farmers, he suggested, should do the same.
In this sense, the anti-corporate ethos of the Populists was deeply equivocal. Although they technically counted as trusts, Alliance exchanges could not serve as monopolistic cartels. Since corporations were “soulless”, they were unable to take oaths and were unreliable as political and economic agents. The Alliances, in turn, were “brotherhoods”–legal entities modelled as a “community of people linked by a common interest, religion, or trade”, more akin to trade unions and churches than business syndicates. Initiation into an Alliance, for example, was often a highly ritualized process, with members taking oaths in ceremonial settings to create a sense of cohesion beyond the merely contractual. Hybridity was in the genetic code of the Alliance.
The question of “corporations and democracy” has been a constant in debates about the relationship between pluralism and corporate personality, particularly in the context of the question of how the latter can be said to provide legitimating cover for entrenched economic interests. Despite the undeniable strangeness of the corporate form, corporations have survived as some of late capitalism’s most prominent actors, now bringing a large chunk of the world economy under their supervision. Grietje Baars has drawn attention to the corporation as capitalism’s “masterpiece of legal technology” from “city-states and colonial times to the present multinational” age. “The symbiosis between law and capital” exemplified by the corporation, she claims, has become ever more pertinent in the context of ongoing debates about corporate accountability (Elizabeth Warren), campaign finance (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010), and directorial and managerial prerogative, and has thrown up questions about how radicals should position themselves vis-à-vis the corporate form.
American Populism was no species of Marxism–despite the ultimate political destinations of some of its members, most famously Eugene V. Debs. What the Populist debate on corporate personality does reveal, however, is how deeply this debate was intertwined with a debate about the social power of law, and how far we have digressed from the vitality of such populist critiques. Rather than adopting an identity-based, descriptive vision of representation, Populists insisted on the necessary separation between the people and its agents through the creation of intermediary bodies in which interest-aggregation could take place. Although Populism in no way offered a unique answer to corporate discipline, their plan does stand in striking contrast to current accounts of populism as a simple “revolt against intermediary bodies”.  Rather than a blunt preference for direct democracy, nineteenth-century American populism offers a candid assessment of the promises of maximalism and the intermediary, in the spheres of economics and politics alike.
In the late nineteenth century, Neumann’s lessons were not lost on the likes of Macune and other Populists, who recognized the doctrine of corporate personality for what it was: economic power hidden under the mask of free association. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of contemporary populist theory.
 See Nadia Urbinati, “Antiestablishment”, in Carlos de la Torre (ed), The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (London: Routledge, 2018), 46; Jan-Werner Müller, “‘The People Must be Extracted from Within the People’: Reflections on Populism”, 21 (2014) Constellations 482; Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Paul Taggart, “Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics”, in Yves Mény and Yves Surel (eds), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 62.
 Thomas E. Watson, “The Dartmouth College Decision”, in Thomas E. Watson, Sketches: Historical, Literary, Biographical, Economic, Etc. (Thomson, GA: Jeffersonian Publishing Company, 1916), 200, 223, 307.
 Watson, “The Dartmouth College Decision”, 200.
 See, e.g., William Novak and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Corporations and American Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Katharine V. Jackson, “Towards a Stakeholder-Shareholder Theory of Corporate Governance: A Comparative Analysis”, 7 (2011) Hastings Business Law Journal 309; Philip Pettit, “Two Fallacies About Corporations”, in Subramanian Rangan (ed), Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 379; Ewald Engelen, “Corporate Governance, Property and Democracy: A Conceptual Critique of Shareholder Ideology”, 31 (2002) Economy and Society 391.
 James Weaver, A Call to Action (Kansas: People’s Party Press, 1892), 107.
 Weaver, A Call to Action, 107.
 Jeffrey Sklansky, Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 180.
 Cited in Sidney A. Rothstein, “Macune’s Monopoly: Economic Law and the Legacy of Populism”, 28 (2014) Studies in American Development 89.
 See Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 121.
 See Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 192.
 Quoted in Norman Pollack, The Just Polity: Populism, Law and Human Welfare (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 205.
 Grietje Baars, The Corporation, Law and Capitalism (London: Brill, forthcoming).
 Urbinati, “Revolt Against Intermediary Bodies”.
 See Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009 ), 448–49.
Anton Jäger is a PhD student working on populism and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis, titled “Populism and the Democracy of Producers in the United States, 1877–c.1922”, seeks to provide a new, revisionist intellectual history of the Populist movement in the late nineteenth-century United States.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 V. 
 V.