Conrad’s novels engage in a critique of imperialism, but the precise nature of that critique persists as a source of debate among scholars. This chapter argues that three of Conrad’s novels – Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory – level an increasingly sharp critique at a system of capitalism and imperialism based on the modern corporation. In the novels, an opposition develops between an idealized British model of family-based capitalism and a corporate capitalism corrupted by investor ownership. In this dichotomy, the novels associate the family-based system of capitalism with the positivity of material value, meaning, character, and emotion that stands in contrast to the utter waste – the “nothing” of Victory’s end – left in the wake of an invisible and ever-changing network of social relations temporarily connected within the speculative structure of investor ownership and the new imperialism.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing a semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. This chapter argues that The Waste Land is mimetic of affect insofar as the effect of reading The Waste Land is a constantly shifting landscape of affective intensities that refuse narrative containment and prevent the emotional complacency that was the source of social stability in the world of industrial capital and the value form of character. The poem thereby functions as a kind of training ground for an emerging corporate capitalism that orients consumers around the affective intensities of constant novelty through branding and rebranding campaigns as well as the volatile ups and downs of a financialized economy whose health is measured by corporate stock indexes rather than the productivity of labor.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.

This chapter argues that Imagist poetry participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing the semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. Pound’s and H. D.’s Imagist poetry renders the raw moment of impact between bodies, which provides the foundation for affective experience, as an object of poetic study, literary representation, and semiotic problem to be solved. Therefore, Imagism, along with philosophical and commercial endeavors during this time period, lays the groundwork for affect to emerge as a value form in literature and as a site of social, economic, and cultural struggle under twentieth-century capitalist structures of power.

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

The chapter discusses the history of the Berlin housing system, the Kantian roots of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz) and the events leading to the emergence of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE). It explains the origins of the liberal notion of property and how corporate property is premised on ‘blasting the atom of property open’, that is, destroying the links between person and a thing that constitute classical liberal understanding of property.

This chapter examines the corporations power. Section 51(xx) of the Australian Constitution grants the Commonwealth Parliament power to make laws with respect to three types of corporations: foreign corporations, Australian trading corporations and Australian financial corporations. The umbrella term ‘constitutional corporations’ is sometimes used to refer to all three types of corporation.

Every Islamic waqf that adhered to its deed eventually became dysfunctional because of unanticipated changes in conditions. But not all waqfs were managed rigidly. Relaxed legal interpretations enabled waqf caretakers to depart, albeit within limits, from the founder’s instructions. But courts had the final say on whether a caretaker was complying with the deed and, insofar as he was not, whether his exceptions were justified. A judge could rule that the founder, were he alive, would have authorized certain changes that the deed did not explicitly allow. Alternatively, he could treat them as incompatible with the waqf’s spirit. He was thus the arbiter of what resource reallocations were legal. Unsurprisingly, this judicial privilege was abused. Judges commonly withheld permission for a managerial or financial adjustment until they were bribed. So central was the waqf to the region’s premodern economy that efforts to transgress its rules promoted a culture of corruption. Our primary interest here lies in the political consequences. In societies with rampant corruption, individuals tend to solve their problems with the state through bribery and reciprocal favors. They find personal solutions easier than trying to form coalitions with others facing similar challenges. Civil society suffers.

Among the requirements of a liberal order is the ability to pursue collective goals through enduring private organizations. Such organizations contribute to political checks and balances, which sustain individual freedoms. In the Islamic Middle East, a possible starting point for autonomous nonstate organizations was the Islamic waqf, a trust that an individual formed under Islamic law to provide designated social services in perpetuity. Waqfs came to control vast resources. They might have used their enormous wealth to constrain the state and advance the freedoms of their constituents. The resulting decentralization of power could have placed the Middle East on the road to liberalization and perhaps also democratization. However, despite their immense wealth, waqfs remained politically powerless. A key reason is that they were governed according to their deeds, not the preferences of their caretakers or beneficiaries. In these respects, Islamic waqfs differed from European corporations, which were self-governing organizations enjoying legal personhood. In the Middle East, waqfs supplied services that the corporation provided in Western Europe. For instance, whereas churches and universities operated as corporations, mosques and madrasas (Islamic colleges) were financed by waqfs. This institutional difference contributed to the interregional divergence in political patterns.

Though the Islamic waqf is defunct, the Middle East now features modern organizations known also as waqfs. The modern waqf is essentially a philanthropic or charitable corporation. It is self-governing and has a perpetual existence. Along with other autonomous nongovernmental organizations known under different names, the modern waqf provides the institutional basis for a vigorous civil society. Yet across the Middle East civil society remains weak. This is due to two factors, both legacies of the Islamic waqf. First, a century is a short time to develop the civic skills that the Islamic waqf left uncultivated for a millennium. The region is still learning how to build politically effective NGOs. And second, the anemic civic life engendered by the Islamic waqf provided fertile ground for the repressive regimes of modern times. The region’s autocracies try systematically to keep civil society politically weak. From the standpoint of liberalization, a hopeful sign is that the region’s current NGOs, unless captured by the state, are serving as founts of civic education. Promoting a culture of bargaining and compromise, they are teaching how to communicate ideas and form coalitions.

Islamic waqfs did not produce a vigorous civil society. On the contrary, they inhibited mass political participation and collective civic action through several channels. Firstly, a waqf’s beneficiaries had no say over its activities. Second, each waqf was required to provide services on its own, which kept it from participating in political coalitions. Third, the waqf’s beneficiaries played no formal role in appointing its officers. Such organizational features constitute key reasons why, as the West developed political checks and balances, no such tendency emerged in the Middle East. The West liberalized and democratized through epic struggles involving universities, cities, religious orders, and guilds, all organized as corporations. Challenging power structures, such corporations developed ideologies supportive of personal and associational rights. A virtuous circle thus emerged. As civil society strengthened, it took steps to bolster private organizations, which then strengthened civil society further. In the Middle East, by contrast, the waqf created a vicious circle. By keeping civil society weak, it limited freedoms and perpetuated autocracy. The absence of strong nongovernmental organizations made it hard to challenge rulers through organized collective action from outside the state. Tellingly, over more than a millennium, waqfs fostered no political movements or ideologies.

The chapter provides an overview of the infrastucture concept and argues that it is both an economic and a political concept. It provides an overview of the interdisciplinary literature on infrastructure since the 1990s and situates the book in the debate about laissez-faire and the literature on the American state, taking the side of those who have argued in favor of deeper roots of the American state in the nineteenth century. It also provides chapter summaries and overviews.

Chapter 5, in parallel to the preceding one, focuses on the other, elected chamber of the Estates Assembly (or Parliament) and discusses Hegel’s characteristic notion of a representation of interests, along with the broader societal conditions for successful representation. The chapter first reconstructs and contextualises the electoral mechanism as envisioned by Hegel and elucidates the political significance of corporation membership, which connects Hegel’s civil society and state. In this context, special attention is paid to the exclusion of women, while Hegel’s purported negligence of farmers is refuted. The chapter then sets out the conditions Hegel considered necessary for the successful representation of societal interests, which include freedom of the press and trials by jury, notwithstanding his ambivalent attitude towards public opinion. The final section shows that these very preconditions were under siege at the time Hegel was writing, following the politically motivated murder of Kotzebue and the institution of the so-called Karlsbad decrees. The direct bearing of these circumstances on the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right rounds off this contextual study.

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).