The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651

Description

The Corporate Commonwealth traces the evolution of corporations during the English Renaissance and explores the many types of corporations that once flourished. Along the way, the book offers important insights into our own definitions of fiction, politics, and value. Henry S. Turner uses the resources of economic and political history, literary analysis, and political philosophy to demonstrate how a number of English institutions with corporate associations—including universities, guilds, towns and cities, and religious groups—were gradually narrowed to the commercial, for-profit corporation we know today, and how the joint-stock corporation, in turn, became both a template for the modern state and a political force that the state could no longer contain. Through innovative readings of works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among others, Turner tracks the corporation from the courts to the stage, from commonwealth to colony, and from the object of utopian fiction to the subject of tragic violence. A provocative look at the corporation’s peculiar character as both an institution and a person, The Corporate Commonwealth uses the past to suggest ways in which today’s corporations might be refashioned into a source of progressive and collective public action. Contents......Page 8 List of Figures......Page 10 Preface......Page 12 Acknowledgments......Page 24 1. Corporation as Common Constitution......Page 28 2. The Political Economy of Sir Thomas Smith......Page 60 3. Richard Hooker’s Corporate Christians......Page 86 4. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Corporation......Page 110 5. Dekker and Company......Page 144 6. Shakespeare’s Thing of Nothing......Page 172 7. Francis Bacon’s Political Ecology......Page 202 8. Leviathan, Incorporated......Page 230 Coda: Universitas, 1216–2016......Page 252 Notes......Page 264 Bibliography......Page 300 Index......Page 324