The American fascination with the corporate form is often difficult to understand. On what seems a daily basis, corporations are blamed for economic downturns, environmental degradation, declining wages, and the dismantling of a fair electoral process. At the same time, citizens fight to bring corporations and their promises of economic growth to their communities and willingly welcome the corporate form into their lives by forming structures such as limited-liability companies. Corporations and American Democracy is an excellent overview of that complex American experience with corporations, exploring the good and bad, as well as the missed opportunities and the numerous missteps along the way.

Corporations and American Democracy, edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak, is touted as the first “comprehensive history” that examines the relationship between American democracy and the corporation. The book is the result of the work of a range of scholars from the fields of law, history, and economics brought together through the Tobin Project, which seeks to promote scholarship on issues facing American public life.

The book's purpose is nicely framed by the editors in their introduction. Three general themes are presented as running through the book's ambitious historical agenda: (1) an examination of the complex views about corporations embedded within American society, (2) an attempt to understand how corporate personhood brings with it questions of responsibilities and obligations, and (3) a deeper understanding of the types of organizations that adopt the corporate form. It is not difficult to find a fourth theme: The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decisions in Citizens United v. FEC and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores have embarked American democracy on a new and dangerous journey.

The first two chapters of the book address the early history of corporations in the United States. Eric Hilt's chapter examines data on early American corporations and shareholders and finds that incorporation was often seen as a way of controlling corruption within society. Rather than seeing the corporate form as being something that exists apart from democratic society, Jessica L. Hennessey and John Joseph Wallis argue in their chapter that the corporate form was a reflection of American society. As they note, in the late nineteenth century, there was an expansion of private and public corporate institutions, including governmental entities for managing parks, water, sewage, and irrigation (90).

The second section looks at the attempt to regulate corporations, especially during the Progressive and New Deal eras. Daniel A. Crane's chapter suggests that while many sought to regulate the structure of the corporation, the end result was the regulation of the conduct of corporate persons (110). One of those forms of “regulation,” Novak argues in a separate chapter, is the public utility or public service corporation. A creation of Progressive Era reformers, Novak tracks the expansion and today's neglect of this fascinating corporate form. In the final chapter in this section, Steven A. Bank and Ajay K. Mehrotra examine how tax law was used in the early twentieth century as a form of “social control and restraint” on corporations (177).

The third section of the book looks at the changing form of corporations within American society. Jonathan Levy studies the history of nonprofit corporations. His chapter presents an interesting tale of the nonprofit corporation (and its related idea of freedom of association) as it moves from being about integration to about exclusion and making individual rights of primary importance. Despite the growth in the type and variety of corporations, the chapter by Margaret M. Blair and Elizabeth Pollman examines U.S. Supreme Court cases and concludes that the court's thinking on corporate rights has not evolved sufficiently to address existing differences. As a result, the court fails to develop a “principled and consistent rationale for its expansion of corporate rights” (247). That lack of a consistent rationale is also on display in a chapter by Ruth H. Bloch and Lamoreaux on corporations and the Fourteenth Amendment. They show how the court has steadfastly stuck to its belief that corporations (with perhaps the exception of the press) did not historically enjoy liberty rights. That has changed in recent years, they argue, as the court's decisions present a “serious distortion of history” and a radical move that “shifts the balance of power within American democracy toward corporations” (325).

The final section of the book focuses on current challenges facing the corporate form. Nelson Lichtenstein argues in favor of “vertical integration,” suggesting it as a way to increase corporate accountability within society. In the final chapter, Adam Winkler directly addresses the elephant in the room—the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC. He argues that while the decision changed American elections, it did so not on the basis of corporate personhood as many suggest. It instead was built on a foundation of freedom of association and “listeners’ rights” that he traces back to arguments by consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

I highly recommend this book. If there is a weakness with the book, it is that it fails to directly address how the corporate form influences the culture of democracy. Still, that implicitly emerges through a close reading of the book. For example, Levy's examination of the nonprofit corporation includes a fascinating discussion about the introduction of Return On Investment (ROI) into the cultural discourse. And Lichtenstein's chapter presents an interesting aside about how the introduction of the Universal Product Code (UPC) changed power relationships between retailers and manufacturers. In those ways and many other examples that can be mined in this book, we can begin to understand not only how the corporate form has changed the structure of democracy, but also how it changed the way Americans think and talk about democracy.