Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

304 DEBT
effectively risk-free investments. That was the entire point. By doing so,
Buddhism, unlike Islam, produced something very much like what we
now call "corporations"-entities that, through a charming legal fiction,
we imagine to be persons, just like human beings, but immortal,
never having to go through all the human untidiness of marriage, reproduction,
infirmity, and death. To put it in properly Medieval terms,
they are very much like angels.
Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of
the European High Middle Ages. The legal idea of a corporation as a
"fictive person" (persona ficta)-a person who, as Maitland, the great
British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who
holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those
natural persons of whom he is composed"166-was first established in
canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 AD, and one of the first kinds of
entities it applied to were monasteries-as also to universities, churches,
municipalities, and guilds.167
The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine, incidentally.
I borrowed it from the great Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz,
who pointed out that all this was happening right around the same
time that Thomas Aquinas was developing the notion that angels were
really just the personification of Platonic Ideas.168 "According to the
teachings of Aquinas," he notes, "every angel represented a species."
Little wonder then that finally the personified collectives of
the jurists, which were juristically immortal species, displayed
all the features otherwise attributed to angels . . . The jurists
themselves recognized that there was some similarity between
their abstractions and the angelic beings. In this respect, it may
be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later
Middle Ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bodies,
large and small: they were invisible, ageless, sempiternal,
immortal, and sometimes even ubiquitous; and they were endowed
with a corpus intellectuale or mysticum [an intellectual
or mystical body] which could stand any comparison with the
"spiritual bodies" of the celestial beings.169
All this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assuming
that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of
corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures.
No other great tradition came up with anything like it.170 They
are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation