The Train Robbery that Made Corporations Persons
Posted on Feb 19th, 2008
by 
L'el
L'el
Yep, I'm excerpting this article yet again. But this passage was really helpful to me in understanding how the intellectual foundations for corporatocracy came about.
The defense... of wealth must find a legal manifestation.
...Jacksonian and abolitionist ideas before the Civil War produced a constitutional vision of free labor and free contract. This constitutional vision celebrated the right of ordinary individuals to own their labor. Laissez-faire was defended as a means of keeping government from giving special benefits to the wealthy.
...In what Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of Intellectual History,” laissez-faire conservatives appropriated the words and symbols of early nineteenth-century liberalism— liberty, opportunity, progress, and individualism—and gave them an economic reinterpretation that served corporate interests. They massaged and refitted the existing rhetoric of free labor and the right of ordinary citizens to pursue a calling into a sophisticated defense of corporate power and privilege that smashed labor unions, protected sweatshops, and eviscerated health and safety laws. By the turn of the twentieth century, the best legal minds that money could buy had reshaped the liberal rights rhetoric of the 1830s into a powerful conservative defense of property that they claimed was the rightful heir to the best American traditions of individualism and personal freedom.
Of course, I said to myself while reading this, much of this flows from the idea that corporations have "personhood"-- but wait, this was BEFORE that decision. This revisionism was what made corporate personhood possible.
A similar transvaluation of values is overtaking the free speech principle today. The right to speak has been recast as a right to be free from business regulation.
...We are living through a Second Gilded Age, which, like the first Gilded Age, comes complete with its own reconstruction of the meaning of liberty and property. Freedom of speech is becoming a generalized right against economic regulation of the information industries. Property is becoming the right of the information industries to control how ordinary people use digital content. We can no more capitulate to the Second Gilded Age’s construction of these ideas than to the constructions offered in the first Gilded Age. We must offer a critical alternative to this construction, much as progressive thinkers did a century ago.
The defense... of wealth must find a legal manifestation.
...Jacksonian and abolitionist ideas before the Civil War produced a constitutional vision of free labor and free contract. This constitutional vision celebrated the right of ordinary individuals to own their labor. Laissez-faire was defended as a means of keeping government from giving special benefits to the wealthy.
...In what Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of Intellectual History,” laissez-faire conservatives appropriated the words and symbols of early nineteenth-century liberalism— liberty, opportunity, progress, and individualism—and gave them an economic reinterpretation that served corporate interests. They massaged and refitted the existing rhetoric of free labor and the right of ordinary citizens to pursue a calling into a sophisticated defense of corporate power and privilege that smashed labor unions, protected sweatshops, and eviscerated health and safety laws. By the turn of the twentieth century, the best legal minds that money could buy had reshaped the liberal rights rhetoric of the 1830s into a powerful conservative defense of property that they claimed was the rightful heir to the best American traditions of individualism and personal freedom.
Of course, I said to myself while reading this, much of this flows from the idea that corporations have "personhood"-- but wait, this was BEFORE that decision. This revisionism was what made corporate personhood possible.
A similar transvaluation of values is overtaking the free speech principle today. The right to speak has been recast as a right to be free from business regulation.
...We are living through a Second Gilded Age, which, like the first Gilded Age, comes complete with its own reconstruction of the meaning of liberty and property. Freedom of speech is becoming a generalized right against economic regulation of the information industries. Property is becoming the right of the information industries to control how ordinary people use digital content. We can no more capitulate to the Second Gilded Age’s construction of these ideas than to the constructions offered in the first Gilded Age. We must offer a critical alternative to this construction, much as progressive thinkers did a century ago.
Access: Public
corporations
April 2008