On History and Global Capital

Keith Hart,The Hit Man's Dilemma or Business, Personal, and Impersonal. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005, 126 pp. The Hit Man's Dilemma is a 112 page essay on "the historical relationship between human personality and impersonal society" (4) in western (now global) capitalist society. Opening with an unnamed (cinematic) hitman's final words to his intended victim—"don't take this personal, it's just business"—Hart reflects on the problem of finding a meaningful role for human individuality in societies that conduct business through impersonal markets and reject personalized governance in the name of impartial justice and equality before the law. As capitalism has evolved historically, from post-feudal efforts (35ff) to separate the personal economy of the domestic sphere from the impersonal workings of the market, to monopoly capitalism, to the digital revolution (which has made communication so cheap that information has become de facto a public good), the alternate expansion and contraction of personal autonomy vis a vis corporate and/or state power has blurred the distinction between private and public, creating an enduring "human crisis" of confusion between "business" and the personal. The last third of the text speculates on possibilities offered by the digital revolution for expanding the scope of personal agency by eroding corporate monopoly power, and advocates a revitalized humanism which "works through the medium of money, [End Page 997] markets and machines" (104) that drives capitalist political economy, to reconnect individuality with impersonal norms such as equality before the law, and hold corporate power to public account. In developing his argument, Hart draws on his own extensive reading in classical political economy and 19th and early 20th century social theory, tracing the influence of major thinkers, from Locke and Rousseau to Weber, Simmel and Heidegger, on changing legal and popular interpretation of "persons," and the transformation of the institution of private property from "a source of personal autonomy in a citizen commonwealth" to "a means whereby a few huge corporations seek to dominate world economy." (4) In chapter 4, one of the best documented (and, for this reader) most interesting in the book, Hart succinctly sketches the history of legislative acts and judicial rulings which extended the status of legal personhood to corporate entities. Ironically, it was the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1868 to guarantee equal protection before the law to formerly enslaved African Americans, which provided the legal framework for the Supreme Court's ruling, in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railway (1886), that "the defendant corporations are persons within the intent of...the 14th Amendment...which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."(quoted on p. 53) Since then, courts in the U.S. have treated both individuals and huge corporations (Walmart, Microsoft) as legally equivalent "persons," despite the vast differences in their wealth and power, and the practice has spread to other parts of the world. In the early chapters, The Hit Man's Dilemma identifies the problem of recognizing human individuality in a world of increasingly impersonal forms of communication (beginning with the invention of writing), exchange (via money), law and governance as an inherently political one, adding that the "cultural effort required to keep the two spheres (domestic and market) separate...is huge."(29) That "cultural effort" remains undefined, however, and Hart's discussion of politics is limited to broad structural categories such as absolute monarchy and liberal democracy, viewed through the single lens of changing legal and practical interpretations of private property. Like its catchy title, The Hit Man's Dilemma is written in a concise, colloquial style that catches the reader's attention, but tends to frame complex issues in formulaic terms which sometimes verge on superficiality. The hit man's dilemma, Hart explains, centers on the "tension between morality and politics"(18) in capitalist society, where business and the law often require participants to overlook, or transgress, individual rights and feelings. [End Page 997

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