Democracy, Corporate Personhood, and the American Rhetorical Imagination

摘要

Few institutions have been more influential in shaping the (late)modern age than the limited liability corporation. Since the earliest days of the republic, the corporation's relationship to democracy and its proper role and place in the American socio-political order has been the subject of intense debate. At the center of these debates has loomed an especially unsettling question: what is the corporation and what figuration shall it take in discourse, particularly law? Since the early 19th century, the Supreme Court has answered this question by proposing that the corporation is akin to a rights and duty bearing person, and the legacy of this choice of trope---personhood---has subsequently shaped the politics surrounding the corporation's role in American society. This dissertation seeks to explain how the corporation came to be personified both in American law and public culture. Drawing on a theoretical configuration of mythic, metaphorical, and genealogical approaches to rhetorical criticism, this dissertation locates the corporation as a discursive formation with roots in the language games of the public and legal culture of American liberalism. Guided by an attitude of inquiry that seeks to discover how the discourse of the corporation has come to be naturalized in the image of personhood in a way that erodes the agency of the citizen, as well as to map how this rhetorical formulation has been resisted over time, I argue that corporate personhood, as articulated in Citizens United v. F.C.C. , has been enabled as the discourse of liberalism has undergone epistemic reconstructions that have allowed the corporation, a collective entity comprised of a multiplicity of individuals, to be recognized in law as a liberal individual. Through an analysis of an archive that includes Supreme Court rulings, legislation, public political oratory, and technocratic discourses ranging from economists to law professors, I seek to map a rhetorical genealogy of the historical contingencies and strategic discourses that enabled corporate personhood with the intent of understanding the corporation's place in American politics and culture in new ways that can expand the imaginary for democratic participation beyond the present impasse of neoliberalism.