Joel Bakan (2004), Free Press, New York (ISBN 978-0-7432-4744-3) — repository record
Key takeaways
Registered, not read. What follows is what two descriptions say.
- The thesis. The publisher: Bakan “contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality whose destructive behavior, if left unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin”. Publishers Weekly calls it a book “characterizing the modern corporation as an “institutional psychopath"".
- Why: the legal mandate. The review quotes Bakan: “the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others”, and “Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.”
- The remedy. The review says the book is “prescriptive as well as critical”, and quotes it: corporations “have no lives, no powers, and no capacities beyond what we, through our governments, give them.”
- It was the basis of the documentary The Corporation (2003).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, as the source of the thesis the record asks about: is “psychopathic” a category error for a corporation, or a fair functional description? The record does not take the thesis from this book, which it has not read. Its own reading is a CLAIM with an objection, filed the same day, built from French (LIT-727, THEORY-131), Pettit (LIT-718, THEORY-139), Huebner (NOTE-553) and List (NOTE-340).
Two things in the descriptions bear on that reading. First, the mechanism they give is legal and structural (“created by law”; in the review, a legal mandate to pursue self-interest), not a claim about the character of any member, which is the narrower reading the record’s claim takes. Second, the quoted sentence “can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons” is a claim about capacity: it is the claim the record’s question asks whether to accept, since Pettit (THEORY-139) holds that a corporation can judge its options normatively.
What a reading should check. How the book uses Hare’s checklist of psychopathic traits (the review does not say), whether it treats the corporation as an agent or as a legal device through which members act, and whether “compelled to cause harm” is argued from corporate law (the shareholder-primacy reading of directors’ duties) or from markets.