The Managerial Challenge to Liberalism

This chapter considers the “managerial” approach to the corporation by unpacking Berle and Means’s famous argument about the problems of the modern corporation. This approach is important because it has proven influential in its own right; the “separation of ownership from control” that Berle and Means famously observed, and the resulting power and discretion that managers enjoy, has been an important trope for critics of corporate capitalism. It is also important because it represents precisely the kind of analysis that the Chicago school’s theory of the corporation was meant to counter. The chapter concludes by contextualizing Berle and Means’s account within political theory more generally.

Ambiguity · Argument (complex analysis) · Capitalism · Corporation · Discretion · Economics · Law and economics · Liberalism · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Trope (literature) · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism