Through redistribution, or perhaps a scheme cooperative ownership, we can mitigate inequality while still harnessing the power of markets. This is, at least, the promise of market socialism. Yet all markets, even socialist markets, require its participants to act with a certain set of motives if they are to produce efficient outcomes. And it is these motives that inhibit us from caring about one another in our productive activities. To avoid such alienation, we must decommodify the means of production and reallocate control of capital from private corporations to local workers and municipalities.

In a recent post, Carly Knight argues that resuscitating the vision of the corporation as a “creation of the state” is an important part of reclaiming the progressive argument for increased corporate accountability. In this response, Dan Rohde suggests that, rather than subscribe to one unified theory of “the corporation,” progressives would be better served by attending to the roles and purposes that the huge variety of legal entities play in our society, and determining their rights, protections, and powers accordingly.

Previously recognized as quasi-public institutions whose shareholders received corporate privileges in exchange for the fulfillment of public goods, corporations are today primarily understood to be private economic actors. This conceptual shift is in some ways quite puzzling. Despite the changing nature of the relationship between states and corporations throughout the 19th century, corporate business entities always, in practice, remained embedded in state and political institutions. How, then, did the image of the corporation as a “creature” or a “creation” of the state come to be replaced with an understanding of the corporation as a “pure creature of the market”?

If one spends too much time around mainstream economists, one might be inclined to think the whole idea of a state enforcing norms of fair price is either redundant or perverse. But we know better than that.