For Smith, corporations are legal state-created bodies distinct from entrepreneurs

Evidence

For Smith, the corporation is to be contrasted with the entrepreneur, whose individual acts cannot possibly insulate against risk as a corporation does. In other words, the corporation is an entity produced by law, by the state, to act as an individual. It is a body assembled out of many separate parts, performing as one unified being, a being that necessarily appears to exceed the material existence of any singular actor. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: Canonical definition of the corporate form from Wealth of Nations—essential anchor for explaining corporate personhood to a reader.
• XREF: Directly needed to frame the influencer reversal: Smith’s corporation is pluribus-unum, while the Corpocene makes one person into a distributed corporate entity. — connects to: Supply-side economics descends directly from Smith’s saving-drives-investment theory — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 296; Nineteenth-century nationalism and capitalism’s own success forced a more interventionist state than Smith imagined. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 310; Adam Smith’s economic man arises from language, reason, and interdependence, not naked self-interest. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 185