Corporate personhood is an incoherent but necessary legal fiction.

Evidence

“In an ‘individualistic’ period,” Dewey argues, which he defines as “an era chiefly concerned with the rights of private property and contract,” the identification of a corporation as a legal person “might even enlarge its rights, privileges and immunities.” Regardless, when it comes to arguing between the existence of corporations as persons against the belief they are not, “each theory has been used to serve the same ends, and each has been used to serve opposing ends.” Corporate personhood, for Dewey, is ultimately an incoherent idea without ontological grounding, an idea that can only be grasped through the specific ends that equating corporation and person performs. The corporation–as a legal entity–is always, to some extent, a “person,” because it is only through legal understandings of personhood that a corporation can be given legal rights and responsibilities but also be punished for violating these rights and responsibilities. It is a necessary fiction: a corporation is not literally a “person,” but it is a person in the same way that other fictional legal entities are. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 383

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dewey’s conclusion that opposite theories of corporate personhood serve the same ends is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting insight about legal ontology.
• XREF: The ‘necessary fiction’ framing directly parallels how the influencer’s self-as-firm is itself a performed fiction. — connects to: Corporations depend on a fiction that nobody individually believes