The Corporation in Anthropology

doi:10.1017/9781139681025.006

5 - The Corporation in Anthropology

from PART I - DISCIPLINARY OVERVIEWS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2017

Robert J. Foster

Edited by

Grietje Baars and

Andre Spicer

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Robert J. Foster: Affiliation:
University of Rochester
Grietje Baars: Affiliation:
City University London
Andre Spicer: Affiliation:
City University London

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Summary

I weigh my words, when I say that in my judgment the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial, or, in the long run – after we understand it and know how to use it, – by its political effects. Even steam and electricity are far less important than the limited liability corporation, and they would be reduced to comparative impotence without it.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1912: 82)

Introduction: A Mere Property Career?

How are we to understand and make use of the modern business corporation? This question is coeval with the emergence of anthropology as a distinctive scholarly pursuit at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan, an attorney whose studies of Iroquois society and culture helped to found American anthropology, published his celebrated book Ancient Society: Researches into the Lines of human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. Morgan concluded his sweeping history of ‘human progress’ with a sober warning that continues to merit quotation at length:

Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the rights of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual members, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past…. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction.

(Morgan, 1978 [1877]: 552)

Type: Chapter
Information: The Corporation
A Critical, Multi-Disciplinary Handbook
, pp. 111 - 133

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139681025.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2017

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