College Literature

Henry S. Turner’s ambitious new book, The Corporate Commonwealth, concludes with a call to action: incorporate! Turner proposes that what is needed in order to overcome the fragmentation of American culture is the generation of more corporations: “the crisis of twenty-first-century political life is not that we suffer from an excess of corporations but that we have too few, especially corporations of an authentically public type” (xiii). Turner admits that this proposal will sound counterintuitive to many readers who will hear the negative connotations often associated with the term today. Locutions such as “corporate mentality” and “corporate speak” paint an Orwellian picture of the corporation as an uncompromising profit-driven machine that exploits human labor while laying waste to the natural environment. One glance at the front page of any major newspaper is often enough to make us think that the “corporate person” is nothing more than a fiction devised by underhanded CEOs in order to increase returns while evading responsibility. Nowadays, the term “corporation” is used with derision, if not downright disdain. Given the present climate, corporate life hardly seems the place to find a new model of communal belonging that “could yield a more progressive form of political power” (28). Yet, surprisingly enough, this is precisely where Turner goes to look. [End Page 182]

According to Turner, it is our “corporate monoculture” that prevents us from fully recognizing the special power of incorporation to unify a large, diverse population. So, in order to grasp the practical power of incorporating, the author suggests, we need to acquire a more expansive, historically informed view of the corporate form of association itself. The Corporate Commonwealth attempts to accomplish this goal by returning to what the author sees as a critical moment, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the life of the corporation, and by examining cases in which writers, from Thomas More to Thomas Hobbes, with many in between, made use of traditional corporate ideas and practices and invented new ones as they attempted to make sense of the rapidly changing corporate climate in which they lived. This was the age in which a myriad of new institutions was born: the modern nation-state, modern natural science, as well as that form which, as Turner rightly points out, dominates today’s landscape: the joint-stock, “for-profit, commercial form” (xiii). This form, Turner reminds us, arrived relatively late on the scene (in the mid-sixteenth century), joining large-scale public institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and relatively smaller, more local associations, including town parishes and guilds.

The English Commonwealth was a large corporate body composed of smaller corporate bodies. Early modern England, as Turner portrays it, enjoyed a rich corporate life, making of the Commonwealth a political “unity-in-plurality”—a unity which is not a uniformity. This point is crucial for Turner because one of his aims, building upon Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood, is to show that reflections on corporate identity contributed to a pluralist idea of national belonging—one that goes beyond “an allegiance to a state defined abstractly as the sovereign legal authority over a national territory” (xv). Indeed, Turner’s goal in exhuming the forgotten corporate figures he sees buried in early modern England is to unearth a notion of political belonging that stretches far beyond a sovereign-citizen binary and, instead, offers a more plastic model which is able to comprehend the ever-changing interests and manifold affiliations of individuals living today: “the book aims to show the limits of a theory of the state and to argue in favor of a political theory rooted in a historical understanding of the diversity of corporate associational life” (xv).

The Corporate Commonwealth searches for images of the corporation in materials drawn from a variety of literary genres and across diverse practical domains—“from law and commerce to [End Page 183] history writing and...