Shareholder Primacy's Corporatist Origins: Adolf Berle and 'The Modern Corporation'

Abstract

Many corporate law discussants think of themselves as picking up where Adolf Berle and E. Merrick Dodd left off in a famous, precedent-setting debate in the 1930s. The generally accepted historical picture puts Berle in the position of the original ancestor of today's shareholder primacy position while Dodd is cast as the original ancestor of today's corporate social responsibility (CSR). This Article shows that both categorizations amount to mistaken readings of old material outside of its original context. The Article corrects the mistakes, offering new readings of some of corporate law's fundamental texts, texts that recently reached their 75th anniversaries and include Berle's famous book with Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Seventy-five years ago the normative issue of the day was the appropriate policy response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Both Berle and Dodd addressed the issue from a corporatist perspective which views the corporation as an entity that operates as an organ of the state and assumes social responsibilities. In so doing Berle took on the fundamental question "for whom is the corporation managed" at a time when the answer had crucial implications for social welfare. In answering the question, Berle articulated a political economy that integrated a theory of corporate law within a theory of social welfare maximization. It was a great accomplishment, but it was in a context very different from today's debates about corporate management and responsibility. Accordingly, Berle was not advocating shareholder primacy as we understand it today. Nor is there a strong claim that Berle was a CSR advocate; he never did make the final jump of advocating reorganization of the legal firm as a social welfare maximizer. His unqualified statements on the subject all presupposed a strong regulatory state and a public consensus against a corporate profit maximand. Dodd does not present a clear picture either. Dodd's Depression-era writing, once contextualized, offers only indirect support to today's CSR advocates. He is most plausibly read as a managerialist, and social responsibility within management's discretion is not what CSR tends to be about. The biggest lesson from this analysis is that the shareholder primacy school impairs its own position by making a claim on Berle.