Classifying the corporation: the role of naturalizing analogies in American corporate development, 1870–1930

Abstract

Abstract Although the American corporation is now taken for granted as a private market actor, the corporation was once just as readily accepted as a quasi-public ‘creature of the state.’ This conceptual shift marks one of the most historically consequential instances of conceptual reclassification in American economic history. How was an understanding of the corporation as subordinate to the state replaced with an understanding of the corporation as prior to the state? In this article, I demonstrate that the symbolic privatization of the corporation was the joint product of both liberal and progressive legal theorizing. Further, I show that ‘naturalizing analogies’ are key to understanding this conceptual transformation. In tracing the legal theorization of the corporation, I show how the instability of naturalizing analogies, and their ability to entail associations beyond those intended by their proponents, played a role in corporate reclassification and are therefore critical to understanding the symbolic structure of corporate capitalism.