The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651

The Corporate Commonwealth

The Corporate Commonwealth

Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651

Henry S. Turner

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

HENRY S. TURNER is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36335-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36349-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226363493.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Rutgers University toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Turner, Henry S., author.

Title: The corporate commonwealth : pluralism and political fictions in England, 1516–1651 / Henry S. Turner.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCC 2015041265 | ISBN 9780226363356 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226363493 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Corporations—Political aspects—England. | Corporations—England—History—16th century. | Corporations—England—History—17th century. | State, The—Philosophy. Classification: LCC JC478.T87 2016 | DDC 322/.3094209031—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041265

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Rebecca Walkowitz

and

Lucy Turner-Walkowitz

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Corporation as Common Constitution

What Is a Corporation?

Persona Ficta

Pluralism, Corporations, and the State

Toward a Compositional Ontology of Corporations

2 The Political Economy of Sir Thomas Smith

A New Philosophy of Value

The Society of Commonwealth

The Law of Commonwealth

3 Richard Hooker’s Corporate Christians

Discipline as Constitution: Calvin in Geneva

The Nature of the Ecclesiastical Polity

The Corporate Personality of the Society Supernatural

The King’s Two Publics

From the Laws to Leviathan: Temporalities of the Corporation

4 The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Corporation

Fine, Try Out, Alter, Change, Reduce, Turn and Transmute: Smith’s Society of the New Art

Planting the Commonwealth: Smith’s Ulster Project

To Buy, Sel, Trucke, Change and Permute Al: Hakluyt’s Corporate Imaginary

In a Joint and Corporate Voice

Translating Value

Free Liberty, Power, and Authority; or . . .

5 Dekker and Company

The Companies and Their Art

Sharing the Company

Dekker’s Corporate Theater: The Shoemaker’s Holiday

The Character of the Corporate Person

6 Shakespeare’s Thing of Nothing

Shares, Parts, and Personation: Hamlet

Incorporate in Rome: Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar

The Plague of Company in the Body o’th’ Weal: Timon of Athens and Coriolanus

7 Francis Bacon’s Political Ecology

Collecting the Notion

Common Forms: Axioms and Words

Incorporate Form and Corporate Spirit

The Politics of Nature

The State of Nature: New Atlantis

8 Leviathan, Incorporated

Aristotelity

Persons Natural, Artificial, and Fictional

Persons Mechanical, Theatrical, and Real

Coda: Universitas, 1216–2016

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Friends in a garden (1518)

2. Utopia (1518): title page

3. Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527)

4. Orders set owt by S[i]r Thomas Smyth knight (1573)

5. Principal Navigations: commodities and their origins

6, 7. Principal Navigations: Edward Wright’s world map (1598–1600)

8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Preface

Among the laws that rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America

It will be obvious to all readers, whatever their profession or convictions, that we are living in a moment when corporations have assumed an unparalleled cultural and political influence, along with the wealth to ensure that this influence is widely felt—so widely, in fact, as to be almost beneath notice. Wherever we turn—international conflicts, environmental disasters, health care, agribusiness, campaign finance law, higher education—the fingerprints of the corporation extend far beyond market transactions to touch almost all aspects of daily life, giving a new and more insidious meaning to Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand. The corporation stands before us as an uncanny presence: on the one hand, it has the status of a legal person, but on the other it is a collective association made up of many different living individuals. The corporation has a personality, but it is also a group; in short, it manifests what Otto von Gierke, the great nineteenth-century historian of corporations, called Gessemtpersönlichkeit: the peculiar idea of group personality.¹

All of us are familiar with groups made up of individual persons: families, teams, crowds, classes, and societies. Many readers would also accept the notion that the individual person can be said to contain multitudes, a core insight of both psychoanalysis and of sociology, in their own ways. But it is harder to think about the group person as a coincidental form—about the person who is also a group and the group that is also a person—and our ongoing debates about the definition and power of corporations today is a symptom of this difficulty. The notion of a group person often seems like a confusion of categories, if not a grotesque distortion of common sense and natural fact, with the result that we struggle to attribute to group persons characteristics that we have derived from the study of individuals: will, agency, and action, moral ideas of freedom, responsibility and justice, expectations about voice, affect, and identity.

More abstractly, many people shrink before the proposition that corporations have an ontological status that is distinct from the members that compose them—that they are somehow real beings with their own distinctive characteristics and qualities. Despite the fact that the natural and social sciences can offer many examples of complex systems, both organic and inorganic, that exhibit features that cannot be attributed to any one of their constituent parts (the problem of emergent properties), and despite our own intuitive grasp of the notion that many aggregate things in everyday life have a distinctive status and even a kind of character (families, schools, neighborhoods), we balk at the notion that group persons like corporations could somehow have real personalities and real rights. If we consider the idea at all seriously, we do so either because we view corporations as representative forms on the model of larger political groups (a view that entails its own questionable presuppositions) or with a vague sense that we are contemplating something slightly irrational, or even genuinely terrifying: a creature of science fiction, or of conspiracy theory, or of totalitarianism.

The history of how the corporation became such a ubiquitous feature of our contemporary world is less familiar to us than it should be, nor do most people realize how many different kinds of corporation used to flourish in earlier centuries as an organizing principle for public, everyday life.² The most familiar type of corporation today—the joint-stock, limited-liability, for-profit type—is, historically speaking, a relative latecomer to the Western world, appearing in its modern form in England only as of the 1550s. It joined a host of long-standing corporate groups: the international church, the national kingdom or realm, Parliament, individual towns and cities, guilds and religious confraternities, universities, hospitals, even individual parish churches. All were corporations, and all enjoyed rights, powers, and freedoms whose limits could be difficult to determine, both in relation to one another and in relation to the sovereign who putatively authorized them. Even the vocabulary of the period can surprise us: the most important term for corporation in early modern law, for instance, was not corpus or corporatus but universitas, the root of our university: literally a turning into one comparable to that iconic signature of eighteenth-century American politics, e pluribus unum, but an idea that looked back to the medieval and classical ideas about political community rather than forward to the contractual and liberal models of later centuries.

The conceptual and historical fold between these two signature concepts of group life opens the space of inquiry for the book that follows. It has been motivated by an unexpected premise: 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. We suffer, in short, from a corporate monoculture of the for-profit, commercial form, and we have forgotten how diverse and how significant corporations could be as a mode of organizing our collective purposes and our systems of value. How did early modern writers make sense of a collectivity that was at once imaginary and material, coherent but unbounded, many but at the same time also one? What can the history of the corporation tell us about our own moment, when public goods are increasingly privatized and citizens seek new models of association and meaningful political action? Could a future for the commons be written inside a corporate form? For the corporation turns out to be a remarkably flexible and long-lived person: in it we find a figure for group identity and group purpose that, while obviously changing according to historical circumstance, nevertheless has some claim to a special transhistorical importance.

The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 finds its inspiration in a period that was decisive in the life of corporations: extending from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), it traces how corporate ideas and institutions were used by English writers to confront problems that were fundamental to their political thought and their lived political experience. But it also aims to show how unexpected their political imagination can appear to modern eyes. Ever since Richard Helgerson’s influential Forms of Nationhood, for instance, students of early modern culture have regarded the late sixteenth century as a generational moment when national ideas became newly prominent for English writers in many different domains of activity, from law and commerce to history writing and religious polemic to epic poetry and the public theater.³ But The Corporate Commonwealth recovers how this national imaginary was itself composed out of many overlapping and often competing corporate bodies, each with its own rights and jurisdictions, its own purposes and affective characteristics, its demands for allegiance and its powers of exclusion.

Indeed, corporations were fundamental to the development of many institutions that are taken to be typical of modernity: The rise of the state as a supreme political authority over national territory, and its differentiation as a secular institution from the international body of the church. The emergence of a public dimension to collective life, and with it the associated notion of civil society. A general transformation in modes of production, exchange, and consumption that was typical of a capitalist system, and the colonization efforts that extended this system so that it eventually became a global one. The development of new scientific methods for understanding the natural world, and the collaborative institutions in which these methods were debated and made truthful. Not least, the flowering of English letters and the rise of the writer who remains the most recognizable figure of the English Renaissance, if not of all English literature, William Shakespeare. Unless they are specialists in Renaissance drama, many people are surprised to learn that Shakespeare’s theater company was also one of the most successful joint-stock companies of his period, enduring for nearly fifty years and generating profits for him and his fellows on a scale that other actors could only dream about. But even Shakespeareans can be surprised to learn how common joint-stock structures were becoming in Shakespeare’s moment, how many other kinds of corporations flourished alongside them, and how significant corporate institutions and corporate ideas were to almost every aspect of early modern life.

Because the chapters that follow cover a long chronological span, and since each chapter introduces a different stage in the conceptual architecture of the book as a whole, it will be helpful to provide a brief sketch of the book’s overall arguments and the structure of their exposition. Each chapter takes up a cluster of closely related corporate figures: commonwealth, society, and Parliament; Christ, church, and public; joint-stock company and colony; city, guild, and play company; actor, part, and character; philosophical notion, animating spirit, and natural body; people, sovereign, and state. Several of these types also appear across chapters, notably society, person, company, and, of course, commonwealth. I have arranged the chapters chronologically in order to capture the broad shift in corporate thinking that in my view characterizes the period covered by the book as a whole. This arrangement has allowed me to juxtapose different types of corporate figures and the problems they raise somewhat more sharply, while also preserving some sense of continuity among different writers. By setting More’s Utopia at one end of a long historical development and at the other the work of Hobbes as a defining horizon for our own moment, we can see a transition in political thought and in political life that the history of the corporation can help us understand. It is a movement from a world in which church, guild, city, university, or trading company together provided the zones of activity in which to forge a political identity and test its capacities to one in which the state as a whole provides that field of definition; a movement from a political subject defined through his or her many overlapping affiliations, privileges, and duties to the citizen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who owes his or her primary allegiance to a state defined abstractly as the sovereign legal authority over a national territory.

At the same time, however, 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, an account first developed by Gierke and extended in the early twentieth century by a group of historians and political theorists loosely known as the English pluralists: Frederick William Maitland (1850–1906), John Neville Figgis (1866–1919), Ernest Barker (1874–1960), George Douglas Howard Cole (1889–1959), and Harold Laski (1893–1950).⁴ At a moment when the definition of the political has become one of the signature theoretical problems of scholarship across the academy—whether in reference to the traditions of republicanism and ideas of citizenship; to theories of contract and liberalism; or to the more recent problematics of biopolitics, aesthetics, and phenomenology—it is surprising to find that the ubiquity of corporatist arguments in the early modern period has generally gone unremarked.⁵ But the analytical value of the corporation as both practical institution and philosophical ideal, as legal fact and as fictional figure, is revealed above all in moments when it brings into view the prior question of what constitutes the political domain in the first place. For this reason, the history of corporations opens a window onto the way the several traditions of political thought that are characteristic of the early modern period come to constitute themselves as traditions, whether by borrowing from intellectual domains that have their own distinct vocabularies and problems but intersect with political philosophy’s preoccupations, or by finding a new theoretical justification for activities that ultimately have profound political implications but are not exclusively or even primarily political in their purposes. The point has been especially well demonstrated by recent scholarship in the area of political theology, for instance, where we see that it is impossible to separate political ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, or political representation from their entanglement in centuries of theological argument and ritual, in which corporate forms play a central role. But the resources for thinking about the problems raised by the corporation derive from many other areas besides: from theology, certainly, and from law and economy, of course, but also from philosophy, including natural philosophy, or what will come to be called science, and from literature, especially the fictions of utopian writing and of theater—the history of the corporation reveals how each domain regularly overlaps with and borrows from all the others.

Over the book’s historicist impulse, therefore, sits a broader philosophical interest in how the corporation sheds light on different definitions for a political idea, from legal arguments about sovereignty and obedience, Parliament and office, and theories of contract and representation, to more abstract problems concerning the place of value in the definition of political ideas, and the nature of group life in general—including, most broadly, ways of understanding relationships between parts and whole, and of imagining the whole itself as a form that nevertheless always remains open to new structures of relations with new kinds of entities. Chapter 1 opens these problems by centering on the example of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. The chapter serves as an introduction to the book and uses More’s work as an emblem in order to establish some of the guiding theoretical issues that are implied in the corporation as a constitutional form of order for a political community. The chapter then surveys the rich legal history of the corporation as both person and group, taking up the nature of fiction as a resource for thinking about corporations and exploring the relationship between fiction and other areas of thought, such as philosophy, that have long been a source for political ideas. For the corporation finally suggests to us that fiction is best understood as a collection of formal techniques that extend across literature and law, literature and philosophy, even across literature and science.⁶ I introduce arguments that were typical of the English pluralists and then offer a new approach to corporate identity that emphasizes its mediated and formal qualities. The chapter outlines four dominant ontologies for the corporation that are characteristic of the early modern period and may guide us in our own attempts to make sense of this most perplexing institution.

Chapter 2 turns to the work of the Elizabethan jurist and statesman Sir Thomas Smith to show how the problems that More’s Utopia had introduced were taken up by the next generation of humanist writers, who found their ethical, philosophical, and political categories under pressure from commercial notions of value and who sought both a new vocabulary and a new method for introducing economic concerns into their accounts of public life. More’s work had revealed the distorting effect that economic practices such as enclosure and a legal system of private property were exerting on humanist discussions of De optimo reipublicae statu, as he put it, or the best state of the commonwealth; for this reason, it is possible to read Utopia not simply as a work of political philosophy but as a study of what a later historical period would come to call political economy—a succinct way of characterizing Utopia, in fact, would be to say that it shows the phrase political economy to be a special kind of tautology. Through a discussion of Smith’s A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (ca. 1549, pub. 1581) and De Republica Anglorum (1565, pub. 1583), the chapter tracks the emergence of a mid-sixteenth-century discourse of political economy, showing how categories inherited from Aristotle and Cicero came to be understood either as species of corporate ideas, on the one hand, or in need of displacement by new ideas of commercial interaction and governance.

Chapter 3 then follows Smith into the tumultuous debates over the Eucharist and the Book of Common Prayer that preceded the so-called Elizabethan settlement of religion in 1559, continuing the book’s discussion of Elizabethan political philosophy by turning to the period’s most powerful defense of the English church and English Commonwealth as corporations on a grand scale: Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593). At every moment in Hooker’s Laws, one is reminded of how Elizabethan political thought passes through the doors of church history. For in addition to many points of contention that surrounded specific rituals of the church—baptism, public prayer, the nature of the Eucharist and of transubstantiation—the main arguments between Hooker and the nonconformist writers he opposed concerned nothing less than the constitutional arrangement and jurisdictional authority of politique societie and specifically of that politique societie which is the Church, as Hooker defines it. By wielding corporatist arguments with great subtlety, Hooker formulates a philosophy of law that is without parallel among his contemporaries, including the relation between divine, natural, and human or positive law. He offers a far-reaching discussion of what we are apt today to describe somewhat neutrally as the relation between the principles of church and state, a relation that the Laws explores in all its topological difficulty and paradox by means of the category of the person. Hooker forges a nascent theory of the public as a corporate body that unites theological and civil life, and he articulates a major statement about the nature of sovereignty that is grounded in a detailed defense of the monarch’s ultimate jurisdiction over ecclesiastical order. Finally, Hooker’s theory of commonwealth illuminates several theoretical problems implied in the very nature of a political unity that are relevant to a more general theory of corporations, and his detailed responses to Presbyterian arguments point up misunderstandings of such a theory that remain current today.

Chapter 4 marks a turning point in the book by introducing for the first time the early modern ancestors of the commercial corporations that loom so large over our own moment: the joint-stock companies organized for colonization and international trade through a combination of royal sponsorship and private enterprise. The joint-stock companies illustrate especially clearly the practical limits of the period’s philosophical arguments concerning the nature of sovereignty, and they raise a series of problems concerning corporate membership, speech, and action that are vital to understanding the long history of the corporation as a form of body politic. The chapter opens by returning to the problem of Elizabethan political economy by way of two corporate ventures founded by Sir Thomas Smith at the end of his life: the Society for the New Art (1573–75), one of several projects designed to foster industry on behalf of the nascent Elizabethan state, and a separate joint-stock company organized by Smith and his son to support the Crown’s colonization efforts in Ireland (1571–77). Both ventures failed spectacularly, but they show how important corporate forms were becoming to early modern statesmen as they sought to fill a perceived gap in political concepts by experimenting with new models of collective association, technological innovation, and mercantile exchange.

The chapter then tracks the political fortunes of these corporate ventures from Ireland to Russia and Virginia, as recounted in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, pub. 1598–1600). Hakluyt’s work vividly displays the salient formal features of the joint-stock company and the challenges of what I refer to as its compositional nature: it shows the corporation as a system of administration with distinctive modes of gathering, recording, preserving, disseminating, and archiving information as a form of capital; the corporation as a technological project, to borrow a term from the commonwealth discourse of the later sixteenth century, that aims to assemble people and things; the corporation as a group person whose head can emerge at any point and who employs the hands, eyes, and mouths of its representatives, who begin to move on its behalf and speak in its name. Over the course of Hakluyt’s sprawling history, the joint-stock corporation appears as an apostrophic, heroic subjectivity endowed with fully political rights of self-governance, freedom of action, and self-regulation, answerable in theory only to the Crown but in practice often operating outside it. Confronting the history of the joint-stock corporation, we realize that the problem of early modern political sovereignty cannot simply be stated as one of royal power, state law, or nation formation but must be addressed as a problem that is simultaneously intra- and transnational: the commercial corporation is less a bounded political entity with an inside and an outside than a cluster of sovereignties and powers, freedoms and wills, a rhizomatic extension taking its shape from a series of territorial drives that perpetually press against the limits of their own horizons.

Chapter 5 is the first of two chapters on the Elizabethan theater at the turn of the seventeenth century: on the regulation of the play companies within an urban world defined by many different corporate bodies, each with its own authorities and jurisdictions; on the status of the actor and his art; and on the companies’ systems of economic management. The focus of chapter 5 is on the guild and livery company as a corporate form, on the place of guilds and livery companies within the body politic of the City of London, and the relation of guilds, companies, and city to the commercial institution of the theater. The chapter explores the legal, economic, and symbolic intersections among these urban corporate forms through a reading of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), a play that affirms long-standing and increasingly anachronistic modes of corporate affiliation over new ones, including the long-distance trading companies and the theater itself. By means of characterization and other mimetic techniques, Dekker uses the resources of theater to intervene in an ongoing struggle over the right to assemble publicly in theaters, and to defend both actor and theater as a way of giving a symbolic structure to conflict among social groups and to produce a distinctive system of values for civic life. In this way Dekker’s play affirms a corporate theater modeled on the guild as one of many sites in a pluralistic public space—a space composed of multiple publics and associations rather than as a single virtual public sphere.

Chapter 6 then turns to the example of the Shakespeare Company, as the theatrical historian Andrew Gurr has named it, one of the most successful joint-stock companies of the Renaissance period. Drawing on the transformational work of Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey on actors’ parts, the chapter considers the implications of the fact that the drama we often encounter today through the printed book was, theatrically considered, an assemblage of part-scripts and cues that recycled bits and pieces from across the repertory of the commercial theaters. Through a reading of Hamlet (1603) and the Roman tragedies—notably Titus Andronicus (1594), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1608)—the chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare takes up this technical aspect of theatrical performance to launch a series of meditations on the nature of theatrical personation and of the gaps opened in his period’s political imaginary by the demystification, dissolution, or withdrawal of traditional corporate bodies politic. Whereas Dekker had sought to contain conflict among social groups by aligning a romanticizing, comic image of the guild with the commercial and formal logic of theater, using this imaginative alignment to produce an distinctive identity and system of values for civic life, Shakespeare leaves this space of conflict unresolved and follows it to a tragic conclusion: rather than a ground for constitutional order, we find only murder, mutilation, invasion, assassination, exile, and civil war.

Chapter 7 carries the book further into the seventeenth century and continues its account of the strains placed on a corporatist political imaginary, this time not through theater but through the newly empirical and inductive methods of the New Science. Through a detailed account of the natural philosophy of Francis Bacon as explicated in the Novum Organum (1620), the chapter shows how an immanent and mystical idea of the corporate body, sourced in a metaphysics that can be broadly but coherently described as Aristotelian—the political imaginary of Smith and Hooker, in different ways—is gradually replaced by arguments that view the corporate body in externalist and mechanical terms and thus anticipates the arguments of Hobbes. Peering into the world of nature, Bacon discovers a world of bodies as micropolities, each characterized by distinctive constitutions, affects, and laws of action. The chapter shows how Bacon attempts to resolve the pluralism of this political ecology by turning to a political principle of sovereignty. It then turns to his late work of utopian fiction, the New Atlantis (ca. 1624, pub. 1627), where we find the plurality of nature isolated and instrumentalized by the Society of Salomon’s House—a political imaginary in which the topological relationship that had once characterized Hooker’s civil and ecclesiastical polities has been reproduced by the relationship of state to science.

Chapter 8 then draws the book’s many themes to a close with a detailed exposition of Hobbes’s theory of Leviathan (1651): the myth of the modern state in the guise of a corporate, artificial person. In attempting to found political science as a form of knowledge that is compatible with natural philosophy, Hobbes’s arguments often resemble those of Bacon, for whom Hobbes had acted as personal secretary; by locating his theory of the state within a defense of the supremacy of civil power over ecclesiastical—especially Presbyterian—claims to authority, Hobbes produces a theory of sovereignty that can be strongly reminiscent of Hooker’s. His emphasis on contracts and on the subordination of independent corporate bodies to the state extends the protoliberalism of Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal, and the theory of the state of nature that we find in Leviathan derives partly from Hobbes’s own knowledge of English colonial policy in the New World and Ireland, as undertaken by Smith and promoted by writers like Hakluyt. Finally, one of the most innovative aspects of Hobbes’s argument is its premise that fictions can be real, a premise that is only apparently paradoxical and that he derives not from a theory of legal fiction, as we might imagine, but rather from the theater and the notion of personation and mediation it makes available to him.

For this reason, Hobbes’s theory also holds valuable lessons about the nature of corporate ontology in general that have only become more important in today’s political environment. In the coda, I conclude the book by looking at what Hobbes has left us and at where a new pluralist political theory might begin. Drawing on the history of the corporation, I explore a definition of the political that moves us away from current theories of sovereignty and toward the twofold problem of translating among competing systems of value, on the one hand, and, on the other, of giving form to the different associations that undertake this process of value translation. I propose the importance of the corporation as both a historical and a theoretical concept that can ground such a theory, and I sketch out a possible place within it for the universitas—a utopian figure for the modern university as an open unity that can serve as both an instrument of critique and a guiding idea.

Acknowledgments

In light of this book’s subject, it seems especially appropriate to begin by thanking the many institutions, groups, colleges, and universities that offered support to me during its writing, above all by creating the circumstances in which so many memorable conversations could flourish. It gives me great pleasure to thank the National Humanities Center, where I held the M. H. Abrams Fellowship (2010–11), and its welcoming staff and director, Geoffrey Galt Harpham; the American Council of Learned Societies, for a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (2012–13); and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, guided with warmth and acuity by Lizabeth Cohen, Judith Vichniac, Sharon Bromberg-Lim, and Rebecca Haley, where I spent a year in residence during the Burkhardt. Rutgers University provided generous support throughout the period of the book’s writing, including a yearlong sabbatical, which made it possible to accept these residential fellowships and also to finish the book during an immersive and uninterrupted period. I thank Douglas Greenberg, Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, James Swenson, Dean of Humanities, and my Chair, Carolyn Williams, for their support during this period, and particularly for their contributions in support of the book’s publication. Finally, I express my appreciation for my union, the Rutgers Council of AAUP-AFT Chapters, and its tireless efforts in defending public education, academic freedom, and meaningful faculty participation in university life.

During the long process of thinking and writing, I was able to share ideas with many colleagues at their own universities, thanks to their gracious invitations, among them Arizona State University, Barnard College, Boston College, Brown University, the University of California–Davis, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Columbia University, Cornell University Law School, Dartmouth College, Florida State University, George Washington University, the Gould Law School at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Michigan, New York University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Rice University, Syracuse University, the University of Texas at Austin, Uppsala University, Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Versions of the book’s arguments were also presented at conferences organized by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the BABEL Working Group, the Modern Language Association, the Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature, the Renaissance Society of America, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. I would like to thank everyone who helped organize these events and those who attended them for making them into such substantive and creative occasions.

Many colleagues have enriched my work on the book and made our professional life a pleasure to share; in particular, I thank Avram Alpert, Ronda Arab, Emily Bartels, Alastair Bellany, Mary Bly, Jim Bono, Courtney Borack, Matthew Buckley, Jeffrey Cohen, Ann Coiro, Mary Thomas Crane, Drew Daniel, James Delbourgo, Stephen Deng, Allison Deutermann, Elin Diamond, Michelle Dowd, Curtis Dunn, Katherine Eggert, Stephen Foley, Mary Fuller, Tom Fulton, Erika Gaffney, William Galperin, Jean Howard, Wendy Hyman, Derek Jablonski, Titsi Jaji, Eileen Joy, Romuald Karmakar, András Kiséry, Aaron Kunin, Rebecca Lemon, Ron Levao, Jenny Mann, Quionne Matchett, Michael McKeon, Jacqueline Miller, Karen Newman, Adrianne Peterpaul, Angela Piggee, Zelda Ralph, Kelly Robertson, Cheryl Robinson, Bradley Ryner, Neil Saccamano, Laurie Shannon, Jonah Siegel, Valerie Traub, Daniel Vitkus, Carolyn Williams, Michael Witmore, and Adam Zucker.

I am especially grateful for the extraordinary intellectual work that has taken place at the Center for Cultural Analysis over the past several years, with particular regard for the members of the Public Knowledge: Institutions, Networks, Collectives seminar, especially for my co-convener Meredith McGill; for the members of the Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences seminar, especially for Jonathan Kramnick, who led the seminar with me; and for the members of the Objects and Environments seminar, in particular Colin Jager, Jorge Marcone, Sean Tanner, and Eric Sarmiento. During the course of writing, I met two superb historians of early modern corporations, Philip Stern and Phil Withington, both of whom generously listened to arguments and responded with suggestions and arguments of their own.

Time and again, the graduate students at Rutgers and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been some of my very best and most enjoyable interlocutors, both in seminar and outside it; for their intellectual companionship I especially thank Anupam Basu, Marcie Bianco, Liza Blake, Jason Cohen, Amy Cooper, Miriam Diller, Greg Ellerman, Stephanie Hunt, Ereck Jarvis, Erin Kelly, Justin Kolb, Alexander Paulsson Lash, Bryan Lowrance, Alex Mazzaferro, Cody Reis, Colleen Rosenfeld, Debapriya Sarkar, William Tanner, Scott Trudell, and Katherine Williams. Along with several of the students named above, Alyssa Coltrain, Sezen Unluonen, and Sarah Hopkinson acted as research assistants on the book at various points, and it is better for their efforts. The readers for the University of Chicago Press have my thanks for their lucid, detailed, and pointed responses to the book, which helped me to see its ambiguities and largest claims more clearly. At the Press, Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos helped the book become a better version of itself.

Several colleagues and friends deserve special mention for their sustained engagement with the book’s ideas, both in conversation and on paper, on single occasions or over several years: David Baker, Crystal Bartolovich, Amanda Claybaugh, Bradin Cormack, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Lynn Festa, Will Fisher, Valerie Foreman, David Glimp, Jeffrey Gonzalez, Devin Griffiths, Gil Harris, Katherine Ibbett, Natasha Korda, David Kurnick, Joseph Litvak, David Loewenstein, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Éric Méchoulan, Madhavi Menon, Bernadette Meyler, Mark Netzloff, Scott Newstok, Lena Cowen Orlin, Martin Puchner, Doug Rogers, Hilary Schor, Matthew Smith, Miguel Tamen, Carl Wennerlind, and Will West. Many other friends have also made the process of thinking and writing a happy one: for all their keen insights, humor, and generosity of spirit, I thank Gina Bloom, Guillermina De Ferrari, Jeff Dolven, Anthony Farley, Maria Grahn-Farley, Marjorie Garber, Stephen Guy-Bray, Sara Guyer, John Kucich, Michael Lemahieu, Caroline Levine, Jacques Lezra, Margot Livesey, Laurie Maguire, Scott Maisano, Jon McKenzie, Steve Mentz, Steven Meyer, Monica Miller, Radhika Nagpal, Robert Oaks, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Feryal Ozel, Jerry Passannante, Doug Pfeiffer, Renée Poznanski, Dimitrios Psaltis, Bryan Reynolds, Elizabeth Rivlin, Dianne Sadoff, Arielle Saiber, Richard Schoch, Scott Straus, Ayanna Thompson, and Susanne Wofford.

Daniel Walkowitz and Judith Walkowitz, Harriet S. Turner, my mother, and Sarah Turner, my sister, have seen at firsthand the long efforts and spontaneous enthusiasms that accompanied the writing of this book, and they know the satisfaction that accompanies its completion. Rebecca Walkowitz and Lucy Turner-Walkowitz bring me happiness beyond words: this book is dedicated to them as a small measure of everything we have shared together during the time of its composition.

Portions of chapters 2 and 4 and the coda first appeared as Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy, in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153–76. Portions of chapter 4 have also appeared as Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt, in The Future of the Human, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Warren Montag, a special issue of differences 20.2–3 (2009): 103–47. Other portions of chapter 4 have appeared as Book, List, Word: Forms of Translation in the Work of Richard Hakluyt, in Formal Matters: Reading the Forms of Early Modern Texts, ed. Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 202–36. Portions of chapter 5, with minor differences, appeared as "Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday," in Affective Economies on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker (New York: Routledge, 2015), 182–97. And portions of chapter 7 appeared as Francis Bacon’s Common Notion, in Commons and Collectivities: Renaissance Political Ecologies, ed. Emily Shortslef and Bryan Lowrance, a special issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.3 (Summer 2013): 7–32, © 2013 by The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

CHAPTER ONE

Corporation as Common Constitution

Then if we should watch a polis come to be in discourse, I replied, we would also see the justice and the injustice of it come to be?

Perhaps, he replied.

So if that happened, there is hope that what we seek would be easier to see?

Yes, much easier.

Do you think we should try to go through with it? For I suspect it is no small task. Think about it.

I have, Adeimantus replied. Please continue.

—Republic, 369b

The year is 1516, on a day. We don’t know when precisely, but it is after lunch. Two friends sit rapt in a garden as a stranger tells a story too fantastic to be believed (figure 1). He has just returned from the other side of the world, he says, where he lived among a people whom no traveler has seen before. These people have existed for a long time, and yet they remain completely unknown. They live in fabulous cities with great gardens and temples. They share all things in common, and so they know no poverty. They live a life of pleasure and learning, and yet they work more diligently and are more pious than any other community. Their sense of justice is unparalleled, the stranger claims, warming to his subject:

I would gladly hear any man compare the justice that is among them with that of all other nations; among whom, may I perish, if I see anything that looks either like justice or equity. For what justice is there in this: that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing at all, or, at best, is employed in things that are of no use to the commonwealth [Reipublicae], should live in great luxury and splendor upon what is so ill acquired, and a mean man, a carter, a smith, or a plowman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labors so necessary, that no commonwealth [Reipublicae] could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs?¹

FIGURE 1. Friends in a Garden. From St. Thomas More, Utopia (1518), d1r. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In 1516, arguments like these are almost unimaginable. And now, after several hours of speaking, the stranger offers a final judgment rooted in his personal experience as a traveler but also in principles gleaned from authorities that he and his friends recognize and respect. Because of this threefold grounding—in experience, in principle, and in common agreement—the stranger’s judgment does not rest as an opinion; it urges a general definition that would stand beyond any individual conviction:

Now I have described to you, as exactly as I could, the form of that commonwealth [Reipublicae] which I judge not merely the best but the only one which can rightly claim the name of a commonwealth.²

The stranger makes a strong claim, and his audience is understandably skeptical. Like a signature for the story that has produced it, Respublica describes not a particular place but a form of association that should characterize all political groups. In short, the stranger has described not a particular community but an idea, and in so doing he has also demonstrated something else: the way ideas in general are created from the movements of a special kind of imaginative discourse.

Many readers will recognize the speaker as Raphael Hythloday, literary creation and sometime mouthpiece of Sir Thomas More, and they will know the other name for the political community here called by its proper name, Respublica: its name is Utopia. The difference between the two names is the difference between philosophy and fiction, a difference that had already been measured by Socrates, Plato’s counterpart to Hythloday, in his own Republic, the most obvious inspiration for More’s own work. Like Plato, More was concerned with how philosophy might relate to the domain of politics, and like Plato he turns finally to a type of hypothetical imagination in order to accomplish his project. And as in Plato, a certain level of irony renders the result difficult to characterize. As a work of philosophy, Utopia seeks fundamental definitions for ideas, including a definition for philosophy itself; as a work of fiction, it explores how an act of hypothetical imagination might produce legitimate definitions of political ideas in ways that are complementary to philosophy but nonetheless distinct from it. Its philosophical and formal projects run concurrently, and then run together. For all these reasons, Utopia has persistently captured the attention of later writers who seek a definition for politics, or who wish to imagine an alternative to the political forms in which they live. And yet for this reason there as many interpretations of Utopia as there are writers to voice them. "Almost everything about More’s Utopia is debatable, the historian Quentin Skinner has written, but at least the general subject-matter of the book is not in doubt. . . . His concern . . . is with ‘the best state of a