«…the corporation, legally considered, is a magnificent social invention, prior in its existence to the modern nation-state. The laws governing corporations appear to go back in their origin to ancient Egyptian burial societies and, in the Christian West, to religious monasteries, towns, and universities. Such legally constituted societies possessed an Independence recognized by successive political regimes.
Their independence from the state had a legitimacy implicitly founded in primeval rights of association and common respect for the sacred. Such institutions were constituted to endure beyond the lifetimes of their founding generation. The founder of Western monasticism, St. Benedict (480–547), having learned from the early Christian hermitages in Egypt, wisely provided for regular and frequent changes of leadership in each monastery according to formal rules. He staked out unsettled and often remote lands on which the economic sustainability, however meager, of each new Foundation could be ensured for generations. Among historians, it is no longer unusual to suggest that the Benedictine (and other) monasteries sweeping north into Europe from Italy and east from Ireland, gradually beginning to sell their wines, cheeses, brandies, and breads from region to region, were the West’s first transnational corporations. The monks introduced to many formerly nomadic peoples what was, for its time, scientific agriculture, thus enabling entire regions to advance beyond subsistence living. From the surplus thus accumulated, libraries and schools, music halls and commissions for paintings grew; civilization took root. Arts and sciences such as botany, metallurgy, and architecture were nourished, and industries such as mining and engineering were furthered. As the historian Paul Johnson has described it:
A great and increasing part of the arable land of Europe passed into the hands of highly disciplined men committed to a doctrine of hard work. They were literate. They knew how to keep accounts. Above all, perhaps, they worked to a daily timetable and an accurate annual calendar—something quite alien to the farmers and landowners they replaced. Thus their cultivation of the land was organized, systematic, persistent. And, as owners, they escaped the accidents of deaths, minorities, administration by hapless widows, enforced sales, or transfer of ownership by crime, treason and folly. They brought continuity of exploitation. They produced surpluses and invested them in the form of drainage, clearances, livestock and seed . . . they determined the whole future history of Europe; they were the Foundation of its world primacy.»
«From the point of view of civil society, the business enterprise is an important social good for four reasons. First, it creates jobs. Second, it provides desirable goods and services. Third, through its profits it creates wealth that did not exist before. And fourth, it is a private social instrument, independent of the state, for the moral and material support of other activities of civil society. In recent decades, this last-mentioned Independence from the state has been more and more compromised, through “command and control” regulations and heavy-handed “guidance” from ambitious politicians, promiscuous with state and federal power. Not surprisingly, economic growth has been grinding to slow, fitful levels. And the iron of state programs is rubbing through the fabric of civil society.»
«Moreover, sources of private capital and private wealth, independent of the state, are crucial to the survival of liberty. The alternative is dependence on government, the opposite of liberty. The chief funder of the many works of civil society, from hospitals and research institutes to museums, the opera, orchestras, and universities is the business corporation. The corporation today is even a major funder of public television. Absent the financial resources of major corporations, civil society would be a poor thing, indeed.»
Michael Novak, “The Future of Corporation”
Isto em teoria é bonito. Na prática há “corporations” e “corporations”, da mais variada natureza e finalidade, visíveis e abertas ao escrutínio público ou menos visíveis e esquivas a este. E o que mais atrapalha tudo é que não se vê hoje nenhuma real “independence of the state”. É este o grande problema hoje.