Abstract In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature. The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person. Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s inhuman attributes. However, corporations don’t just mimic human behaviors; at best simulacra, or imitations of human life, corporations challenge and destabilize the status of personhood, and what it means to be a person. In the process, corporations have amassed not just wealth, but personhood (for example, in perhaps surprising ways, the personhood of African Americans). In many ways, the ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap. The overarching effect of corporate personhood, which operates in tandem with privatization, is to dehumanize people, turning them into things that have no rights. Created to encourage entrepreneurial (or reckless and socially irresponsible) risk-taking and minimize personal liability, the corporation evolved into an entity that dynamically diminishes the personal. The corporation represents a collective, transcendental body that has taken on the role of a deity, and, in U.S. ontology, of nature. The relationships between human and corporate personhood and identity implicate fantasies of the supernal; the superhuman; immortality; and the transcendence of individuality. For these reasons, I treat the corporation not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural phantasm, a kind of black hole that draws in more and more cultural phenomena into its orbit. The modern corporation has come to guarantee certain rights at a price, in much the way the Hobbesian state once did. People barter their attributes to corporations; but they are no longer trading liberty for security, but “souls” for identity. As the corporation comes to serve as the de facto guarantor and distributor of culture, it remains amoral at best, and in practice serves as a dominant pathological personality that helps reduce all human endeavor to commercial interest.

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糟糕的公司：美国文化中自然，神圣和人格的公司占有

摘要在本文中，我提供了一些关于企业人格的关键谓词的文化历史。我追踪的是公司形式的霍布斯血统，但同时也归因于拥有众多代理机构和人格的公司如何填补了我们对神与自然的拟人化概念所超越的文化空间。公司是在主权国家同意下创建的，其章程的制定不仅反映了公司的用途，还反映了其潜在的威胁，特别是在权力集中方面。在各个州的支持下成立的美国公司最初在有限的时间内仅限于特定职能。但是公司在许多情况下不仅取代了创建它们的霍布斯国家，而且使个人流离失所。公司本身已成为超人和主权形式，部分是通过获得人权和“人格”并将其与公司的非人性属性联系在一起的。但是，公司不仅模仿人类行为，还模仿人类行为。在最好的模拟或模仿人类生活的情况下，公司挑战并破坏了人格地位以及人的身份的稳定。在此过程中，公司不仅积累了财富，而且积累了人格（例如，也许以令人惊讶的方式，非洲裔美国人的人格）。从许多方面来看，美国日益扩大的贫富差距实际上是人际差距。与私有化同时运作的公司人格的总体作用是使人们失去人性化，将他们变成没有权利的事物。为了鼓励创业（或鲁entrepreneur和对社会不负责任）冒险并最小化个人责任，公司发展成为动态减少个人利益的实体。公司代表着一个集体的，先验的机构，它已经扮演了神的角色，在美国本体论中，它也是自然界的角色。人与公司的人格和身份之间的关系暗示了超自然的幻想。超人 不朽; 和个性的超越。由于这些原因，我将公司主要不是视为商业公司，而是将其视为文化幻象，这是一种将越来越多的文化现象引入其轨道的黑洞。现代公司已经以一定的价格来保证某些权利，这与霍布斯国家曾经的做法很相似。人们以物易物给公司。但是他们不再以自由为安全而以自由为灵魂，而是以“灵魂”为身份。随着公司成为事实上的文化担保人和发行人，它充其量仍然是不道德的，实际上，它是一种占主导地位的病理性人格，有助于减少所有人为商业利益所做的努力。