The corporate person and democratic politics

Abstract

This essay considers the political rights of corporations, as vested in their claim to legal personhood, and the complications such rights present to theories of democracy. While corporate personhood has generated significant debate in the field of jurisprudence, it has gone largely unnoticed in democratic theory. This article first highlights significant features in the legal theory and standing of corporate personhood. It then critically considers how well one significant current approach to democratic theory, deliberative democracy, is situated to handle corporations as entities with political rights. The essay closes by arguing that the collision between legal practices that recognize political rights of persons that may not be human individuals and political theories that presume individual human beings as the primary political subjects reveals the need for a broader conception of agency in democratic theory. Such a conception of agency would, by freeing itself of simple assumptions of human subjectivity, be more attuned to various types of inequality of power that frustrate democratic decisionmaking.