A genealogy of the corporation: Articulating sovereign power and capitalism

This dissertation argues that both the Anglo-American corporation and modern political sovereignty are founded in and bound together through a principle of legally-sanctioned immunity from law. By studying legal discourses and popular struggles around corporate power from the late 18th to the early 20th century, my dissertation explains how the law's ability to suspend itself enabled the corporation to exercise prerogatives of sovereignty that we conventionally associate with nation-states. These prerogatives include territorial control, a claim to legitimate violence, and what Giorgio Agamben terms the power to decide "the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law"---in other words, the power to make live and let die. I demonstrate the way that legally granted immunities have structured corporate power by tracing a genealogy of the corporation. Chapter one chronicles the emergence of corporate legal immunities as central to both European state formation and early modern corporations. Chapters two, three and four examine transformations around the corporation as it became a principal vehicle for capital accumulation. The privatization and diffusion of the corporation in the nineteenth century United States did not sever the relation between the corporation and sovereignty. Rather, the corporation, which in the nineteenth century became figured as the legal embodiment of capital, remained a legally established limit to the law in the form of private rights.;By showing the relation between the corporation and sovereignty, this dissertation makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates how the corporation has repeatedly served as the double body of the state whose privileges, immunities, and abuses are legitimated in the name of the salus publica---the health, welfare, and security of the public. Second, by focusing on the articulation of the corporation to capitalist social relations, the dissertation explains how capital, in a specifically corporate form, is able to claim legal immunities, or, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, spaces of exception and abandonment.