It's Not Business, It's Personal: Implicit Religion in the Corporate Personhood Debate

Debate surrounding the United States Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC is ostensibly about the legal rights of corporations. However, I argue that the debate about corporate personhood is infused with religious concerns, rooted in the Protestant Reformation, about the prop...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:  
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. VerfasserIn: McClendon, David Michael (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
Verfügbarkeit prüfen: HBZ Gateway
Journals Online & Print:
Lade...
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Veröffentlicht: Equinox [2014]
In: Implicit religion
Jahr: 2014, Band: 17, Heft: 1, Seiten: 47-61
weitere Schlagwörter:B Protestant Reformation
B Corporate personhood
B law and society
B United States politics
Online Zugang: Vermutlich kostenfreier Zugang
Volltext (Resolving-System)
Volltext (doi)
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Debate surrounding the United States Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC is ostensibly about the legal rights of corporations. However, I argue that the debate about corporate personhood is infused with religious concerns, rooted in the Protestant Reformation, about the proper identification of agentive subjects and the consequences of misidentification for human personhood. Focusing on the language used by opponents and defenders in the popular media, I show how both sides are animated by Protestant notions of human agency, and share similar anxieties about the threats to that agency posed by abstract corporate or governmental entities. Attending to this fundamentally religious dimension not only improves our understanding of the moral stakes in the debate over corporations' legal rights: it also illuminates the implicit religious underpinnings of American political discourse.
ISSN:1743-1697
Enthält:Enthalten in: Implicit religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1558/imre.v17i1.47