Corporate personhood discourse only emerged around 1900 via Maitland

Evidence

An entrepreneur, as a single individual, is a “natural person.” The entrepreneur, as an individual, is legally responsible for all investments and debts occurring in daily economic activities. Of course, many of the rights and responsibilities given to an entrepreneur have nothing to do with the individual’s economic existence as an entrepreneur. But, when it comes to legal, economic culpability for their business dealings, law can, usually without question, understand the entrepreneur as a person. A corporation, given that it is a singular “individual” made up of many other individuals, cannot be said to be a “person” in the same way as an entrepreneur. Yet the corporation is, legally, fictionally, a “person” in the eyes of the state for reasons of legal culpability—a conflation that descends from not only basic definitions of the corporation advanced by Smith but from questions about the rights and abilities of ecclesiastic bodies in the thirteenth century. Almost any modern definition of a corporation presumes it to be legally equivalent to a person, though the discourse of corporate personhood was only popularized in the United States and other Anglophone countries around 1900, through the writings of English legal historian Frederic William Maitland and his summarizing of corporate personhood as accepted in common law. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 378

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that corporate personhood is a legal fiction restricting the corporation to right-and-duty-bearing status, distinct from natural personhood.
• XREF: Fits the reader’s thesis that the entrepreneur (natural person) and corporation (legal person) are the two poles the influencer collapses.