An Empire Without An Emperor

The nation-state has undergone immense change due to scalar sociopolitics. In their millennial philosophies, Hegel, Gierke and Marx argued that the development of the state was intricately tied with the development of corporations. From Communism to Fascism to the New Deal, the 20th Century was a vindication of their beliefs. We have seen the rise of the administrative state, where the central government delegates parts of its almost unlimited authority to various corporate agencies who carry out the core telic imperatives of the state. Corporatism is not, however, exclusive to state-founded agencies, for a fragmented civil society itself “generates institutions that... take on many attributes... associated with public bodies” (Unger, 2000, p. 93). The “co-existence of two circuits” (Offe, 2000, p. 109) where civil society reaches into the state, and the state penetrates civil society, results in an arrangement where “the distinction between the law of the state and the... normative order” is blurred. (Unger, op. cit) Corporatism, as a dual link between civil society and the state is necessary to solve the “problems of governability” over a fragmented civil society (Triado, 2000, p. 103). In the modern corporate state, the “distinction between governmental and non-governmental [is] rather tenuous and artificial — particularly with regard to the management of large-scale economic enterprise” (Nadel, 1975, p. 107). The nation-state itself has been eroded — we no longer think of countries as bodies politic which generate their own normative orders (‘a way of life’) but rather as part of interdependent system of capital accumulation and redistribution. (Miller, 1976).

-- Me! in An Empire Without An Emperor: The Sociopolitics of Scale, the Fragmentation of Civil Society & the Rise (and Rise) of the Business Corporation.

The above is an extract from another article I wrote some time ago (2003) for my Corporate Governance class. Its highly academic - and tries to draw strong parallels between corporate governance and the wider problems of governability. At the time (and probably still), it was a real milestone in the development of my WorldView (yup, one of those). I haven't even cleaned up the typos in this one yet and there's at least one sentence which makes no sense :) e.g.

"To be active in civil society as a national citizen is irrational — as the costs of such participation will not be met by a benefit which will be diluted through a wide and often passive population. "

Should be:

"To be active in civil society as a national citizen is irrational — as the costs of such participation will not be met by a benefit which has been diluted through a wide and often passive population. "


FWIW, my father taught economics for 40 years (he calls himself a professional economist) and even though I never actively took up the subject, I must have some kind of genetic predisposition to being interested in it :) This essay can get pretty hardcore with the corporate governance / finance theory. Whoa.