Kant Corporations and Political Change

Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals only mentions forms of multilateral association in passing, the main exception being marriage and the household. Kant was obviously aware of other institutions, such as churches and universities. But he does not consider their legal foundations or place within public right, or the variety of forms they may take. From the point of view of political change, it is noteworthy that there are several corporate forms that Kant did not anticipate, such as business corporations and cooperatives, political parties, trade unions and NGOs. All have proved crucial to modern democracy and globalisation; they are both agents and subjects of political change. Kant’s category of status relations enables us to understand the general structure of these bodies, as the basis for employment, offices and governance structures. But status relations are inherently problematic: one person (or a corporate body, as it will emerge) gains rights over another person ‘akin to rights over a thing.’ For most corporate forms, we cannot invoke the essential conditions of life (the dependency of childhood and domestic life), so another justification is needed. I will follow Arthur Ripstein’s idea that acquired rights are to be justified on the basis that their denial would represent an arbitrary limitation of freedom. Not to permit the status relations that are essential to corporate bodies would also represent an arbitrary limitation of freedom, so long as those status relations can be rendered rightful. To do this, we need to develop proxies for reciprocity, so to speak, e.g. in terms of accountability and safeguards against domination. The same idea provides a clue for a broader, Kantian justification of corporations and the development of various corporate forms. Only corporations, with their independent legal personality, governance structures, command of their own resources, and power to employ, afford the stable pursuit of important purposes – from the accountability of states to capital-intensive production. Most of these purposes cannot be read off analytically from the formal demands of private or public right. Yet public right cannot avoid the matter. In the first place, corporate bodies depend on specific grants of public authority – the charter of a university, for example, or the generic charters for business organisations provided by corporate law. Second, the formal aim of public right – a republican order – seems materially dependant on all manner of complex organisations, commercial and political and otherwise; I suggest that much (desirable) political change can be interpreted in these terms. In turn, the status relations on which these organisations rest have often turned out to require other corporate forms in order to solve the problems of reciprocity that they pose. Corporate employment, for example, often proves deeply problematic without workers’ incorporation into unions, just as representative democracy requires political parties and organised pressure groups. Overall, the paper argues that Kantian insights can illuminate the role of corporate form in meaningful political change, and that many such changes are rightly pursued through deliberate modifications of particular corporate bodies and wider corporate structures.