COLOSSUS: How the Corporation Changed America.

• Author: ROWE, JONATHAN
• Position: Review

COLOSSUS: How the Corporation Changed America Ed. Jack Betty Bantam Doubleday, $30.00

Corporate irresponsibility? Predatory behavior? Blame the charter--and rewrite it.

IT IS A SIGN OF IMMERSION THAT THE thing immersed doesn't notice. The fish, famously, is not aware of water. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush cannot see past their allegiance to the oil industry because it's all they know--their water.

So it is with the corporation. Over the last century and a half, the corporation has become the dominant institution of American life, the "envelope of existence," as one writer put it. It defines work, entertainment, politics, transportation, the way people think about their bodies and the world. Increasingly it dominates the cognitive environment of daily life. For all the kvetching about government, the corporation permeates our lives in much more basic ways.

Yet the more pervasive the corporation becomes, the less we seem to notice. It's just the way things are, the new normal, and rapidly it is becoming the norm for the entire world. This has been the subtext of recent trade agreements, and the implicit agenda that has inspired the opposition to the World Trade Organization. Protestors in Seattle and elsewhere have not been opposing trade per se. One might as well oppose the morning. The issue rather is who controls this trade, under what terms and to what ends.

As it has evolved over the last 150 years, the American corporation is more than just a mode of business. It is an agenda, the organizing principle for an entire society--the embedding in the institutional matrix of the single-minded quest for monetary gain. Apologists may protest to larger aims, or at least effects. But the soul of the corporation is the charter, and corporate charters speak for themselves. They say that the company exists to make money and for no other reason. The question today is whether that governing concern is large enough to serve as organizing principle for the entire world.

The question may seem eccentric, even naive, in these economically triumphant times. Yet back in the days when the corporation was still new and its impact clear, the question was of obsessive concern. President Lincoln expressed this in a 19th-century version of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex speech. "Corporations have been enthroned," Lincoln said. "An era of corruption in high places will follow ... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed."

Lincoln knew a thing or two about threats to the Republic. The question continued as farmer-populists and Progressives led the drive for regulations and restraints. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson all called for federal chartering of large corporations, as Madison, with unusual foresight, had urged at the Constitutional Convention. Roosevelt even created a Federal Bureau of Corporations because of these concerns.

But soon enough the corporate economy became simply "the economy" in the majestic singular. It was helped greatly by a fledgling advertising industry, which cast it in friendly and even patriotic terms, and by an economics profession which served as apologist and booster. Most important of all, prosperity had a quieting effect--the sedation of Huxley's Brave New World as opposed to the statist oppression of Orwell's 1984. The 1990s were such a time, of course. But as regularly happens, the wheel is turning once again. The stock market is no longer a money machine for the masses, and the jazzy new technology--the microchip--is becoming a bit old hat.

The energy situation, moreover, has brought dirty old industries such as oil and coal back to center stage. After Clinton's off-and-on embraces, the Bush administration has seized the role of Monica to the suits. At the same time, corporations are showing a degree of raw aggression that is unsettling to say the least. They are claiming new territory in virtually every dimension of existence, from the personal space that is assaulted by huckstering and cell phones to the Star Wars initiative which will stake a commercial claim to the furthest reaches of outer space. They are taking control of the quest for knowledge at universities, and are moving even to claim the gene pool and the processes of life itself.

Perhaps this helps explain why the looming...