The Ungovernable Society. Grégoire Chamayou

able to determine independently the public interest that they are to implement’ (Roberta Romano, ‘Metapolitics and Corporate Law Reform’, Stanford Law Review, vol. 36, no. 4, 1984, pp. 923–1016 [p. 938]).

      18 18. Bowen, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, p. 49.

      19 19. Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 4. A 1956 study of the new business creed in America concluded that ‘managers are assigned a more important and more autonomous role than that of agents for the owners. Theirs is the statesman’s function of mediating among the groups dependent on the enterprise, satisfying just claims and preserving the continuity of the organization’ (Francis X. Sutton et al., The American Business Creed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 57.

      20 20. Bazelon, ‘The Scarcity Makers’, p. 304.

      21 21. Quoted in Maurice Zeitlin, ‘Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79, no. 5, March 1974, pp. 1073–119 (p. 1074). The following references are quoted in Zeitlin.

      22 22. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1971), p. 19.

      23 23. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 46.

      24 24. David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd; a Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 236).

      25 25. Berle, paraphrased by Zeitlin, ‘Corporate Ownership and Control’, p. 1076.

      26 26. Carl Kaysen, ‘The Social Significance of the Modern Corporation’, The American Economic Review, vol. 47, no. 2, May 1957, pp. 311–19 (p. 312).

      27 27. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 44.

      28 28. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict, p. 47. What the thesis of the separation of ownership and control made possible in political terms was a questioning of control apart from that of ownership: as the capitalist was dead, all that now needed to be settled, here as elsewhere, was the case of the bureaucrat. We can find the trace of this reformulation in the programmatic aggiornamento of European social democracy, starting, at a very early date, with the Labour Party. In Great Britain, the managerialist thesis of the separation of ownership and control, said Mason in 1958, had apparently become a flagship argument against any additional wave of nationalization: ‘if big enterprises tend to “socialize” themselves, why should the government bother to nationalize them?’ (Mason, ‘The Apologetics of “Managerialism”‘, p. 4). In 1957, the leadership of the British Labour Party had published a programme that consecrated the triumph of its right wing. This document was not placed under the auspices of Marx or Ruskin, or even Bernstein, but of Adolf Berle and Peter Drucker. The architect of this ‘revisionist metamorphosis’ of the Labour Party, Anthony Crosland, had laid out the groundwork of this programme in a book-length manifesto: ‘ownership has less and less relevance to the question of control […]: first, because the alienation of the workers is an inevitable fact whether ownership is “capitalist” or collectivist, and secondly because even “capitalist” ownership is increasingly divorced from effective control’ (Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (Cape: London, 1956), p. 70). Consequently, the outmoded idea of social appropriation could now be forgotten. The American economist Rostow saw the situation clearly: ‘In England, socialists say that the managers have already socialized capitalism, so that it is no longer necessary to invoke the cumbersome formality of public ownership of the means of production’ (quoted by Hal Draper, ‘Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformers’, p. 106). This was the political correlate of the managerialist theme of the self-management of capitalism, which Draper critiqued: ‘Public ownership is no longer necessary for the gradual reform of capitalism into socialism because capitalism is socializing itself in other forms. The transference of power in the corporations to socially responsible managers means that the forms of private property are no longer incompatible with our ends. Socialization will now go forward with the inevitability of gradualism in these new corporate forms. Public ownership can now be stored away in the cellar of our program because the development of the new corporate collectivism is adequately doing the job which the socialist movement once thought it was called on to perform’. The road to socialism, concludes Draper, is none other, in this schema, than a process of bureaucratic collectivization of the capitalist world (Draper, ‘Neo-Corporatists and Neo-Reformers’, pp. 105–6).

      29 29. Daniel Bell, ‘The Coming of Post-Industrial Society’, Business Society Review/Innovation, Spring 1973, no. 5, pp. 5–23 (p. 23).

      30 30. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 492.

      31 31. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 248.

      32 32. In this type of treatise, addressed to a sovereign or future sovereign, the moral qualities of an ideal monarch were set out. By dangling a flattering double in front of him, the hope was that, seduced by this potential projection of himself, he would try to resemble his reflection. Seneca, whom tradition considers as one of the founders of this literary genre, had addressed his De Clementia to Nero: may this book, he wrote, ‘stand in the place of a mirror that places you face to face with yourself, and makes you see the sublime enjoyment that it has been granted you to attain’. The advice failed. As we know, the emperor, not much inclined to leniency, finally ordered the philosopher to open his own veins. See Seneca, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1860), p. 281.

      33 33. Adolf Berle, The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), p. 178.

      34 34. Ibid., p. 67.

      35 35. When some people objected that this guarantee was quite insubstantial, Berle replied that one needed to trust the powers of the mind: ‘priests have usually been able to intimidate the policemen, and […] the philosopher can usually check the politicians. There is a fair historical ground to anticipate that moral and intellectual leadership will appear capable of balancing our Frankenstein creations’ (ibid., p. 187).

      36 36. Ibid., p. 180.

      37 37. William W. Bratton and Michael L. Wachter, ‘Shareholder Primacy’s Corporatist Origins: Adolf Berle and the Modern Corporation’, Journal of Corporation Law, vol. 34, 2008, pp. 99–152 (p. 131). As the political theorist Earl Latham wrote: ‘it has been suggested that corporations – anthropomorphic corporations, endowed with intelligence, will, personality, and other human attributes – will develop that final testimonial to St. Augustine and Freud, a conscience, the operation of which will curb and control the excesses of corporate power and establish a benevolent regimen: the new “City of God”, no less. But one of the lessons of politics is that it is power that checks and controls power and that this is not done automatically and without human hands. […] If the legislative power of the corporation is to be curbed and controlled, the checks will have to be built into the structure of corporate enterprise, and not just merely laid on from without, nor entrusted to the subjective bias of the hierarchs within’ (Earl Latham, ‘The Body Politic of the Corporation’, in Edward S. Mason (ed.), The Corporation in Modern Society (New York: Atheneum, 1972; first published in 1959), pp. 218–36 [p. 228]).

      38 38. Arthur S. Miller, ‘The Corporation as a Private Government in the World Community’, Virginia Law Review, vol. 46, December 1960, pp. 1539–72 (p. 1569).

      39 39. Eells, The Government of Corporations, p. 16 (my emphasis).

      40 40. Ibid., p. 20.

      41 41. Ibid., p. 17. Earl Latham also proposed, at the start of the 1960s, ‘the reconstruction of corporations in the image of the public government’, reorganizing those ‘private oligarchies’ into republics. A juridical instrument already existed to this end: the charter of incorporation in which the state sets out the conditions under which the creation of a business is authorized (Earl Latham, ‘The Commonwealth