Legitimizing Free Market Society: Rhetorical Redescriptions and the Nexus of Contracts Corporation

Political Theory Seminars with guest speaker Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, Copenhagen Business School

The paper analyzes the theories of the business corporation developed by Chicago School intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s and reconstructs how these theories not only underpin the contemporary shareholder primacy doctrine of corporate governance, but also function as a mode of legitimizing the overarching political and economic transformation of Western societies from the late 1970s and onwards known as neoliberalism. Based on an initial reconstruction of the history of the corporate form, the paper utilizes intellectual history, specifically the Cambridge School’s notion of rhetorical redescription, to analyze how Chicago School intellectuals disregarded earlier notions of the corporate, legal personhood in favour of an understanding of the corporation as a nexus of contracts between utility-maximizing individuals. This conception was not only meant to refute political adversaries such as proponents of managerial capitalism, welfare reform and socialist planning, but also to depoliticize and privatize the corporation, hereby positioning it outside the range of democratic control, state intervention and public scrutiny, and as such laying the foundation for today’s dominant shareholder value doctrine of corporate governance.

For further information about the Political Theory Seminars and to receive the paper in advance, please contact Christian Rostbøll, cr@ifs.ku.dk.