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Yes. I think a better term here might be corporate personhood, where corporations have some of the rights that people have while shielding their owners from lia

Yes. I think a better term here might be corporate personhood, where corporations have some of the rights that people have while shielding their owners from liability.

cpursley 9y ago
Hum. Looks like "corporatism" is a thing: https://www.wordnik.com/words/corporatism https://www.wordnik.com/words/corporatism
- CalChris 9y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking about that but I think corporatism is an effect of corporate personhood. If we're talking about root causes, I think it's the rights we attach to corporations.
- azernik 9y ago
  That first definition is actually not the definition in political science circles; there, it refers to the view of society as a collection of associations ("bodies", corpora), which form the metaphorical organs of the "body" that is society. This is a term created by advocates to promote it, and so does not denote necessarily a system that undermines the public interest; the first definition I see of it is the Catholic Church's one in the late 19th century as a "system of social organization that has at its base the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest". If this sounds kind of creepy and dictatorial to you, you've got a good head on your shoulders. This semantic distinction is important because a lot of modern leftist rhetoric about fascism is based on a misinterpretation of the term as used in current academic literature and in Fascist ideology of the 1920s and 30s. A defining feature of fascism is corporatism, but this does not mean the unbridled power of big business corporations and certainly is not a good description of current American society. Rather, it refers to the way that undemocratic systems co-opt the organized associations that represent interest groups ("civil society" in current political science literature). See for example the way that the Chinese Communist party traditionally ran the only trade unions, women's rights organizations, etc. in the country; or the way that the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls replaced the Scouts and Wandervögel in Nazi Germany; or the way the Italian Fascist regime ran the economy through a council of hand-picked, compliant representatives of employers and workers. In essence, civil society is transformed from a way for groups to band together and advance their interests, into a transmission belt for the state to control those groups. For more on this topic, including non-Fascist uses of the term, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

Yes. I think a better term here might be corporate personhood, where corporations have some of the rights that people have while shielding their owners from liability.

cpursley 9y ago

Hum. Looks like "corporatism" is a thing: https://www.wordnik.com/words/corporatism https://www.wordnik.com/words/corporatism

CalChris 9y ago
Yeah, I was thinking about that but I think corporatism is an effect of corporate personhood. If we're talking about root causes, I think it's the rights we attach to corporations.
azernik 9y ago
That first definition is actually not the definition in political science circles; there, it refers to the view of society as a collection of associations ("bodies", corpora), which form the metaphorical organs of the "body" that is society. This is a term created by advocates to promote it, and so does not denote necessarily a system that undermines the public interest; the first definition I see of it is the Catholic Church's one in the late 19th century as a "system of social organization that has at its base the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest". If this sounds kind of creepy and dictatorial to you, you've got a good head on your shoulders. This semantic distinction is important because a lot of modern leftist rhetoric about fascism is based on a misinterpretation of the term as used in current academic literature and in Fascist ideology of the 1920s and 30s. A defining feature of fascism is corporatism, but this does not mean the unbridled power of big business corporations and certainly is not a good description of current American society. Rather, it refers to the way that undemocratic systems co-opt the organized associations that represent interest groups ("civil society" in current political science literature). See for example the way that the Chinese Communist party traditionally ran the only trade unions, women's rights organizations, etc. in the country; or the way that the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls replaced the Scouts and Wandervögel in Nazi Germany; or the way the Italian Fascist regime ran the economy through a council of hand-picked, compliant representatives of employers and workers. In essence, civil society is transformed from a way for groups to band together and advance their interests, into a transmission belt for the state to control those groups. For more on this topic, including non-Fascist uses of the term, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism