- Relazione tenuta il 26 marzo 2018 presso la sede dell’Università degli Studi “Link Campus” di Roma, al Convegno “Corporate Governance and financial markets: pictures from the post-crisis era”. -

Il saggio muove da una ricostruzione definitoria e genealogica dei termini ‘corporation’ e ‘governane’, ponendone in luce le strutturali ambiguità. Per questa via, il primo, ‘corporation’, è presentato quale dispositivo concettuale in grado di minare dall’interno la pretesa unità della Tradizione Giuridica Occidentale; il secondo, ‘governance’, è inteso quale strumento di amministrazione della soglia in cui la corporation è catturata, definendo le mobili relazioni tra pubblico e privato, responsabilità individuale e limitata, proprietà, controllo ed amministrazione. L’endiadi ‘corporate governance’ non può, quindi, che enfatizzare la complessità propria di ciascuno dei due termini costitutivi, risolvendosi operazionalmente in una pluralità di modelli. Queste considerazioni consentono di comprendere più a fondo il rapporto tra corporate governance e crisi dei mercati finanziari, così da prospettare alcune soluzioni interpretative.

What is the alchemy that transfixes the idea of corporation? Corporation in itself exhibits a metaphysical surplus: trifling with words, it incorporates a residue of mystery so to become a portentous device of secular magic. Literature abounds with both intriguing and discomforting references to ontological or phenomenological issues: the dichotomies of presence and absence, reality and functionality, death and deathlessness have historically marked the discourses about the nature and the consistence of this odd entity. If Edward Coke portrayed a “negative form”, something that cannot be seen, has no soul, does not expiry, and that edifies its proper perfection precisely on the repudiation of all the natural limitations, [1] the unparalleled genius of William Maitland could claim for “the mere ghost of a fiction”, [2] perhaps after returning from an evening at Hamlet. [3] Actually, a kind of visual echo of the Hamletian anguish persists in the conceptual folds of legal corporation, whose unnatural body emerges from the dust of the tensions between being and seeming, acting and appearance, outward and inward. On the Continent, a deeper understanding of the law of corporations brings to the fore a plot of struggle and competition: different models fought one against the other and gave intellectual nourishment to cultural rivalries. Otto von Gierke constructed the clear contraposition between a Germanic and a Roman paradigm of corporation: [4] the first based on the idea of corporation as a fellowship, with a group personality and a group will; the second built around the conception of corporation as an institution whose identity is created by a higher political authority, principally by the imperial one. That Gierke’s narrative was rhetorically imbued with exaggeration is strongly affirmed by those who have found in the German jurist both the stuff of the artist, who delights in emphasizing the dependence of Roman corporations on the State, and the voice of the prophet, who announces the advent of a new order at the centre of which stood the free German Genossenschaft. [5] The clash in question was not a mere exercise of philosophical speculation; at the very end it was a dividing means for political affirmation and the transplant of Gierke’s thought through Maitland’s translation became a kind of geopolitical content. [6] The global nomos was dissected and sized into contending factions: those who turned corporation into the key instrument for the assertion of collectivist views and those who constructed the artificial entity theory to pose corporation at the ground of a “methodological individualism”. [7] On the Old Continent, Gierke spoke on behalf of Romantic conservatives: like them, he was inspired by a fierce aversion to the atomistic features of modern industrial life and by a strong desire [continua..]