Overview

In a unique exploration of how corporations appropriate the rights and identities of people, Richard Hardack unearths the unexpected consequences of corporate America’s quest to dominate every aspect of our culture. Not only do corporations govern our economy, but corporate personas define our identities and shape our relationships with people and the world around us. In a timely and wide-ranging study, Hardack recontextualizes the inordinate influence of corporations and corporate advertising as a legal, political, psychological, and sociological phenomenon. He connects a surprising array of topics, including advertising, pop culture, representations of nature, science fiction, legal history, the history of colonization and slavery, and the longing to transcend individuality, to show how the principles of corporate personhood—the idea that corporation are people—allow corporations to impersonate and displace actual people. Throughout, Hardack also provides a novel reassessment of the pernicious role and effect of advertising in our daily lives. The book makes accessible a complex topic and integrates many pressing issues in the U.S., including the privatization of the public sphere; the escalating polarization of wealth and rights; unchecked corporate power, influence and monopoly; and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding, and entertainment. Hardack treats the assumptions that foster corporate personhood as both cause and effect, driver and symptom, of a series of transformations in U.S. society. Awakened to this foundational way corporations infiltrate most human activities and interactions, readers can better understand and safeguard themselves against systemic changes to the American economy, culture, and politics.

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9781538177730

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Reviews

Richard Hardack approaches the topic of corporate personhood through a unique perspective that focuses on the primary means by which corporations attempt to capture our attention--their use of advertising. His lucid and nuanced discussion ranges across history, law, literature, philosophy, and popular culture to provide a novel analysis of this timely subject.--Simon Stern, professor of law and English, University of Toronto

Author Information

Richard Hardack, who holds a Ph.D. and JD from Berkeley, has applied his love of history, law, and literature to projects such as NASA’s History of the Juno Mission to Jupiter; a book titled Not Altogether Human: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance; and the courses he’s taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges.

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