Books in Brief

In Defense of the Corporation, by Robert Hessen (Hoover Institution Press, 115 pp., $7.95). Attacking Hugo Black almost forty years ago, H. L. Mencken denounced as “completely cuckoo” the proposition that persons organized in corporations had no human rights. The real target, however, was Berle and Means’s Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), which claimed that, thanks to the fission of ownership and control, the modern corporation, a mere creature of the modern state, was running amok, overwhelming its creators and over-reaching stockholders, absorbing its competitors and defrauding consumers. Mencken, however, made not a dent in an entrenched orthodoxy of New Deal/Fair Deal ideology which persists to our own day through the fulminations of Mr. Ralph Nader. This persistence is remarkable, for Justice Black backed off from pure Berle-Means fairly early in his judicial career, and the grand panjandrum himself, Adolf Berle, produced a substantial, if little-noted, recantation in his Three Faces of Power (1967). Unhappily, neither man undertook a systematic intellectual turnabout; but no matter. The marketplace of ideas has at last produced the inevitable antithesis in Robert Hessen’s slim and unpretentious Defense, which takes on Berle-Means root and branch, probing assumptions, exposing non-sequiturs, and producing a fresh and attractive voluntarist model of the corporation in place of the statist stereotype.

Gerald T. Dunne

GD

About the Author

Gerald T. Dunne

LK

About the Author

Lawrence Klepp

In Defense of the Corporation, by Robert Hessen (Hoover Institution Press, 115 pp., $7.95). Attacking Hugo Black almost forty years ago, H. L. Mencken denounced as “completely cuckoo” the proposition that persons organized in corporations had no human rights. The real target, however, was Berle and Means’s Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), which claimed that, thanks to the fission of ownership and control, the modern corporation, a mere creature of the modern state, was running amok, overwhelming its creators and over-reaching stockholders, absorbing its competitors and defrauding consumers. Mencken, however, made not a dent in an entrenched orthodoxy of New Deal/Fair Deal ideology which persists to our own day through the fulminations of Mr. Ralph Nader. This persistence is remarkable, for Justice Black backed off from pure Berle-Means fairly early in his judicial career, and the grand panjandrum himself, Adolf Berle, produced a substantial, if little-noted, recantation in his Three Faces of Power (1967). Unhappily, neither man undertook a systematic intellectual turnabout; but no matter. The marketplace of ideas has at last produced the inevitable antithesis in Robert Hessen’s slim and unpretentious Defense, which takes on Berle-Means root and branch, probing assumptions, exposing non-sequiturs, and producing a fresh and attractive voluntarist model of the corporation in place of the statist stereotype.

Gerald T. Dunne