The Ship of State and the Abandoned Yacht

Abstract

The corporation is a fluid entity dominated by the logic of investment, a logic disjoined from the human stories that exist within corporations and which are rendered marginal to the subject of corporate law by the dominant persona of the corporate entity. It is not clear that this feature of the corporation, which naturally arises from the logic of financial markets, displaces law so much as, with growth of capital deployed in the corporation, it makes less accessible to political understanding more sectors of human experience in which law might seek a role. The corporation is a site of fleeting interconnections based on exchange, all embedded in a whirlwind of words, and defying reification. Hence, the Ship of State sails on with the cargo it can hold, but the Yacht, where human desire fed by financial exchange is gathered, sails to an unknown destination