THE STATE ON THE COUCH Dr. Keir Martin ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow, 2017–18 Keir is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
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n 2003, Canadian law professor Joel Bakan created something of a storm with the publication of his best-seller The Corporation.1 In it, Bakan attempted to explain to a wider audience what a corporation would look like if one thought of it as a person. This was not so much of a stretch of the imagination, legally speaking, as in the US and the UK, corporations are considered to be ‘persons under law’; non-human entities with many of the rights and obligations that they hold in common with, but separately from, the human persons that created them. Bakan’s real impact came not with his careful explanation of the otherwise obscure legal principle of ‘corporate personhood’ however, but with his characterisation of the kind of person that the corporation would be if it actually were human. ‘Do you work for a psychopath?’, screamed the advertising tag for the book and the festival-winning documentary that it inspired. Focusing on how corporations are legally mandated to pursue their own self-interest in the form of profit above any other form of ethical responsibility to others, Bakan argues that this is exactly the kind of pathological personality that we would instantly recognise as psychopathic in a human person; the relentless drive to secure one’s own interest at the expense of others who one is only capable of seeing as objects in the service of those desires. Bakan’s critique was so effective because it placed a seemingly technical problem in very human terms; a move that paradoxically enough was enabled by the very principle of corporate personhood upon which modern corporate entities are based. By putting the corporation on the couch, Bakan managed to put a face to a sense that a growing number of people had: that the entities that governed their lives increasingly did not have their best interests at heart. 1. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004). 23
