Formation/Cours

Course Description:

This course explores the hypothesis that business corporations are political entities and should be analyzed as such. Moving beyond standard economic conceptions, we will examine corporations as governing entities, private governments, ideological actors, and sites of political contestation. Through political theory, intellectual history, economics, and sociology, we will analyze the uneasy relationship between corporations and democracy.

Themes covered will include the evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), corporate lobbying and its influence on democratic institutions, anti-sweatshop activism and labor struggles, and the contentious role of corporations in moderating speech on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Throughout the course, we will assess how firms shape economic life while also structuring political discourse, social hierarchies, and global governance.

Outline

Week 1 – The (Very) Visible Hand of Management

• Key Theme: How managerialism, rather than markets alone, shapes modern political and economic life. Beyond the Smithian’ “Invisible hand”
• Readings:

  • Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (selections)
  • Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision

Week 2 – Islands of Conscious Power: The Corporation as a Locus of Power

• Key Theme: Coase’s market/firm distinction and why economists resisted the political analysis of corporations; Trump and Musk as “Coasian grotesques”?
• Readings:

  • Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm”
  • David Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation»
  • Pierre-Yves Néron, Seeing Like a Firm (Introduction: «Islands of Conscious Power»)
  • Adolf Berle & Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property

Week 3 – The Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

• Key Theme: The history and contested legitimacy of CSR; from early corporate philanthropy to neoliberal forms of «responsibility.»;
• Readings:

  • Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (NYT Magazine, 1970)
  • Shamir. “De-radicalizing Corporate Social Responsibility”

Week 4 – Workplace Democracy: Are Firms Authoritarian?

• Key Theme: The debate over democratizing firms, with a focus on whether corporations are inherently authoritarian.
• Readings:

  • Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)
  • Isabelle Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities

Week 5 – Corporate Political Power and the Crisis of Democracy

• Key Theme: How corporate lobbying, campaign financing, and regulatory capture challenge democratic governance.
• Readings:

  • Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets
  • Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt

Week 6 – Digital Capitalism I: Toward Surveillance Capitalism?

• Key Theme: The political and economic power of tech giants in the age of platform capitalism; Taking Zuboff seriously.
• Readings:

  • Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Week 7 – Digital Capitalism II: The Corporate Shaping of Public Discourse

• Key Theme: How corporations structure public speech, moderate content, and shape democratic discourse; po