Corporate Commonwealth
Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651
"The Corporate Commonwealth" traces the evolution of corporations during the English Renaissance period and explores the many types of corporations that once flourished. Along the way, the book offers important insights into our own definitions of fiction, politics, and value. Henry S. Turner uses the resources of economic and political history, literary analysis, and political philosophy to demonstrate how a number of English institutions with corporate associations – including universities, guilds, towns and cities, and religious groups – were gradually narrowed to the commercial, for-profit corporation we know today, and how the joint-stock corporation, in turn, became both a template for the modern state and a political force that the state could no longer contain. Through innovative readings of works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among others, Turner tracks the corporation from the courts to the stage, from commonwealth to colony, and from the object of utopian fiction to the subject of tragic violence. A provocative look at the corporation's peculiar character as both an institution and a person, "The Corporate Commonwealth" uses the past to suggest ways in which today's corporations might be refashioned into a source of progressive and collective public action.
About the Author
Henry S. Turner is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of "Shakespeare's Double Helix" and "The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630".
Reviews
"This is a major book by a major scholar. Turner takes up the corporate concept as an artifact of law, science, and literature and studies its transformations and deep impact in the early modern period with an eye to the continued prevalence of corporate thinking and corporate functions today. Breathtakingly ambitious, 'The Corporate Commonwealth' addresses a huge spectrum of English intellectual history with great learning and insight and reminds us that corporations and corporate-like forms take many shapes. A must-read" – Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of "Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life"
"'The Corporate Commonwealth' is an excellent work, one that stands in a present moment that has seen a tremendous increase in the power and scope of corporate forms. Turner devotes extraordinarily careful and nuanced attention to the relationship between individuals and collectivities in the century and a half between More's 'Utopia' and Hobbes's 'Leviathan'. This book is truly exhilarating in the way that it makes familiar texts seem fresh and new" – John O'Brien, author of "Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850"
