Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

240 What To Make of Itlitical office. But democracy requires other restrictions ofcorporate political participation—that is, other applicationsof the same principle. The designation of corporationsas legally fictitious persons stands in the way.Societies do not permit their taxing authorities or theirmilitary forces or their ministries of agriculture to claimthe civil rights of individual citizens. They are instead constrainedto pursue their assigned purpose and no others. Byany usual definition, democracy similarly requires similarconstraint on corporations and other kinds of organizations.Unlike individual persons, organizations are presumablyservants, neither fellow citizens nor masters. Contrastthat democratic requirement with the position of an organizationlike Unilever, which like all large corporations, insome respects acts more like a state than like a person orservant. Only with a legal status and a set of rules appropriateto its functions will it and other corporations meet therequirements of political democracy. In a democracy, a corporationwould not go into court as an injured person but inits role as a social institution.Corporations in the International OrderIn the emerging international order, the corporation has becomeincreasingly visible as a challenge to democracy. Asignificant change in its political role may be riding theback of new structures of international trade and finance,the spread of multinational corporations over the world,and the energies of governments engaged in protecting andpromoting them.Among the corporations, we have already noted, aremany whose resources and volume of production are