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

At a time when the standing and status of corporations is much in the news, this study of the early modern history of the concept of the corporation” is particularly timely. Henry S. Turner provides a new account of early modern political institutions and political concepts by turning to the history of the corporation as a type of notional person and as a way of organizing collective life. Universities, guilds, towns and cities, religious confraternities, joint-stock companies: all were legal corporations, and all enjoyed rights and freedoms that sometimes exceeded the authority of the State. Drawing on the resources of economic and colonial history, literary criticism, law, political philosophy, and the history of science, Turner reads works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among many others, to find the resources for a new account of corporations as fictional bodies” and persons” endowed with identities, rights, and the capacity for action. Turner tackles a number of fascinating questions: How did early modern writers make sense of the paradoxical essence of the corporationa collectivity at once imaginary and material, coherent but unbounded, many and at the same time one? And what can the history of the corporation tell us about the history of our own moment, when public goods are increasingly privatized and citizens seek new models of association and meaningful political action? His answers will be of compelling interest to historians, political theorists, literary scholars, and others.

Henry S. Turner is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author ofShakespeare’s Double Helix and The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630.