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E-book
Author Turner, Henry S.

Title The Corporate Commonwealth : Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651
Published Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2016

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Description 1 online resource (338 pages) : illustrations
Contents List of Figures; Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Corporation as Common Constitution; 2. The Political Economy of Sir Thomas Smith; 3. Richard Hooker's Corporate Christians; 4. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Corporation; 5. Dekker and Company; 6. Shakespeare's Thing of Nothing; 7. Francis Bacon's Political Ecology; 8. Leviathan, Incorporated; Coda: Universitas, 1216-2016; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Summary The Corporate Commonwealth traces the evolution of corporations during the English Renaissance and explores the many types of corporations that once flourished. Along the way, the book offers important insights into our own definitions of fiction, politics, and value. Henry S. Turner uses the resources of economic and political history, literary analysis, and political philosophy to demonstrate how a number of English institutions with corporate associations--including universities, guilds, towns and cities, and religious groups--were gradually narrowed to the commercial, for-profit corporation we know today, and how the joint-stock corporation, in turn, became both a template for the modern state and a political force that the state could no longer contain. Through innovative readings of works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among others, Turner tracks the corporation from the courts to the stage, from commonwealth to colony, and from the object of utopian fiction to the subject of tragic violence. A provocative look at the corporation's peculiar character as both an institution and a person, The Corporate Commonwealth uses the past to suggest ways in which today's corporations might be refashioned into a source of progressive and collective public action
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Corporations -- Political aspects -- England
Corporations -- England -- History -- 16th century
Corporations -- England -- History -- 17th century
State, The -- Philosophy
LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
Corporations
Corporations -- Political aspects
State, The -- Philosophy
England
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 022636349X
9780226363493