European Hobbes Society

Fitzmaurice, Andrew (2021): The early modern corporation as nursery of democratic thought: the case of the Virginia Company and Thomas Hobbes, in: History of European Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2021.1925901

Description
This paper examines early modern discussions of democracy in the context of a chartered company: namely, the Virginia Company. It examines descriptions of the Company’s constitution and politics as democratic. It focuses, in particular, upon a petition that William Cavendish (later the Second Earl of Devonshire) presented to the Virginia Company assembly defending the democratic constitution of the Company. Cavendish’s secretary, Thomas Hobbes, may or may not have assisted with drafting that petition, but he was closely involved in the debates to which it contributed. The discussion, therefore, provides a broader context for debates about the role of democratic ideas in Hobbes’ works. More importantly, however, it shows that sub-state bodies politic in early modern England, such as chartered companies, provided an environment in which political thought, including democracy, could flourish removed from the dangers of national politics.

Claassen, R.J.G. (2020): Hobbes Meets the Modern Business Corporation, in: Polity, https://doi.org/10.1086/712231

Abstract

Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. This theory is widely judged to be anachronistic for contemporary business corporations, because these can now be freely formed, on the basis of private initiative. However, a close reading of the crucial passages in Hobbes’s work reveals a more subtle view, which rejects this private/public dualism. Hobbes’s reflections on the companies of merchants of his day provide room for business corporations’ pursuit of private purposes, while keeping them embedded in a public framework of authority. Moreover, by criticizing the monopoly status of these companies, he opens up a way to integrate market failure arguments from modern economics into concession theory. The “neo-Hobbesian concession theory” emerging from this analysis shows how concession theory can accommodate private initiative and economic analysis, and thus be a relevant position in the debate about the modern business corporation.