Afterword: What Kind of a Person is the Corporation?

An impressive ideological power attaches to concepts that are compounded of opposites. The idea of fighting war to keep peace, for example, appeals to the values of war and peace simultaneously, conjoining hawkish and dovish positions to claim a Janus-faced sweet spot where these are transcended. Opposed possibilities are similarly united in the Christian doctrine that God is one and yet plural, composed of three distinct persons (the Holy Trinity). How much faith has been tested, and theologizing called forth, by the felt need to reconcile the contradictory standpoints this abiding mystery brings together! A worldly analog is Adam Smith’s celebrated dictum that private selfishness serves the general good, making it in effect its own opposite, public altruism, so that vice becomes virtue. The moral alchemy that fuses these contrarieties is famously credited to an “invisible hand,” whose identification with the capitalist market system has in the last half century become an article of faith in the secular creed of U.S. national politics.