God and Man in the Corporation

In: Policy review: the journal of American citizenship, Band 13, S. 9-32

Abstract

While religion has a substantial influence on economic affairs & political economy, few theologians have attempted to reflect systematically on democratic capitalism, & specifically on the corporation, its key institution. The corporation is a communal structure based on a pattern traceable to medieval guilds & monasteries. Corporate structures in business & elsewhere mediate between the individual & the state. Religious misunderstandings of the corporation derive from the ideological use of "poverty," the world view of traditional societies, naivete about transfer payments, the anticapitalist bias of intellectuals, guilt-mongering, & the temptation to seek power for churches through alliances with state authorities. Crucial concepts for a theology of economics include order, emergent probability, sin, practical wisdom, the individual, community, distribution, & scarcity. Christians & Jews have reason to value the corporation because societies with democratic capitalist institutions are the only ones able to meet their own basic needs & the only ones with genuinely democratic institutions. W. H. Stoddard.