Despite all that has been written about business and its role in American life, contemporary theories about the modern corporation as a social and political institution have failed to explain adequately the pervasiveness and complexity of corporate power in the twentieth century. Through an analysis of history, law, ideology, and economics that spans two centuries, Scott R. Bowman attempts to offer a complete interpretation of the way corporate power has achieved its dominant position in American society today. In The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought, Bowman demonstrates how judge-made and statutory laws have structured and regulated the growth of corporate power while preserving corporate autonomy. The argument unfolds within a historical framework that reconstructs the evolution of the corporation with reference to its two dimensions of power: internal (within the enterprise) and external (in society at large). Bowman examines and revises Marxist, pluralist, and managerial theories to develop his own political theory about class conflict and corporate power and offers fresh interpretations of the political thought of Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, Thorstein Veblen, Peter F. Drucker, Adolph A. Berle, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Ultimately, this book sets forth the first political theory that adequately accounts for the power of the modern corporation in all its dimensions.

This collection of primary sources from the founding period covers the unique combination of theoretical influences in American political thought.

Recent Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked disagreement about the role of corporations in American democracy. Bringing together scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides essential grounding for today’s policy debates.

Taking corporate personhood as a starting point, Persons of the Market observes the complex historical entanglement of Christian theology and liberal capitalism to shed new light on their seemingly odd marriage in contemporary American politics. Author Kevin Musgrave highlights the ways that theories of corporate and human personhood have long been and remain bound together by examining four case studies: the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1886 Santa Clara decision, the role of early twentieth-century advertisers in endowing corporations with souls, Justice Lewis Powell Jr.’s eponymous memo of 1971, and the arc of the conservative movement from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Tracing this rhetorical history of the extension and attribution of personhood to the corporate form illustrates how the corporation has for many increasingly become a normative model or ideal to which human persons should aspire. In closing, the book offers preliminary ideas about how we might fashion a more democratic and humane understanding of what it means to be a person.

A History of American Political Theories is a comprehensive attempt to understand the full sweep of American political thought since the founding. Working within the liberal-progressive tradition, Merriam reviewed American political history in its entirety, from the founding down to his own day. He was not out to reduce political thought to a single element such as economics alone; his aim was to encompass the whole of modern social science. The political science of the liberal-progressive tradition has roots and assumptions that were born in this period and nurtured by scholars such as Merriam. The progressive tradition in general and Merriam in particular interpreted the rise of a new science of politics that would be required for the liberal-progressive world view he represented. His work stands at a momentous fork in the road; two great traditions of how American democracy should be understood, interpreted, and analyzed parted company and afterward each went their separate ways. These traditions are represented, respectively, by the founders and the liberal-progressives. There was much at stake in these academic debates, though the consequences were not entirely foreseen at the time. An overview of the authors, works, and general source material covered in History of American Political Theories is impressive. Merriam viewed the study of American democracy as an eclectic activity embracing the broadest definition of the social sciences, with particular emphasis on psychology. Such a transformation required that the social sciences be grouped as a whole rather than fragmented into separate and distinct academic departments.