โ Scribed by Walter Robert Goedecke
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In the field of philosophy of law, both in its supposed current revival and in most of the classic and foundational works, there is a remarkable absence of discussion of corporations. It is perhaps tedious and invidious to detail this with regard to contemporary thinkers who are courageously redelineating a field neglected in the decades before Austin and Hart, but in actual fact a major area of modern life and modern law is neglected by the philosophers. Austin did not deal with corporations, nor has H. L. A. Hart in his works.
John Rawls has nothing on corporations in his momumental Theory of Justice. Dworkin discusses the problems of social justice without reference to corporations. Hans Kelsen, in Pure Theory of Law, has two pages on corporations, which deal with the rights to sue and be sued in the courts, an area which stems from his scholarship in problems of Roman Law and procedure.
In current texts, Martin P. Golding's Philosophy of Law has much on the limits of law and criminal law, but nothing on corporation law. A set of readings compiled by Edward Allen Kent, Law and Philosophy, actually begins with a quote from Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom on the changed conditions of life and property brought about by "great stock companies,"
i.e., corporations, but there is not one word more in the entire collection on that subject?
In the history of philosophy of law, there is a similar hiatus. Although Edward Coke, in his Institutes, discusses corporations and monopolies, 2 there is nothing in Locke's writings on corporations. Rousseau has nothing on the subject, nor Kant. Discussion is absent in Hume. Similarly with Bentham, for all his interest in revising the Common Law. Mill, despite the fact that he worked for a public corporation, the East India Company, 3 1 Law andPhilosophy, Readings in LegalPhilosophy, ed. by Edward Allen Kent. (Prentice- Hall, 1970).
2 Edward Coke, Institutes of the Laws of England~ Third Part, Cap. 85.
3 John Stuart Mill not only worked for what was probably the most total monopoly in history, the British East India Company, (controlling the military, political and educational aspects of Indian life as well as all trade and commerce,) he was in fact in charge of that company, since the nobility treated the executive offices as sinecures, and Mill, as Chief Clerk, as was his father before him, was left with all executive decisions. In this capacity, despite the objections of Macaulay, he parochialized Indian education, so that even today Indians who can, send their children to British schools in India and then to England (or now Russia) for a decent education. He also was in fact responsible for the decisions which led to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1858, and that in turn led to a Parliamentary
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