Nineteenth-century vitalism imagined the corporation as a literal organic body.

Evidence

In European debates, Machen claimed, some scholars, like Maitland and Smith, saw a corporation as a legal fiction created by the state, while others saw the corporation as a pure fiction, “merely an abbreviated way of writing the names of several members.” Still others drew on vitalist claims to argue that a corporation should be understood as an “organism,” an “animal,” which even “possesses organs like a human being. It is endowed with a will and with senses. It even possesses sex: some corporate organisms, like the church, are feminine, while others, such as the state, are masculine.” Like other vitalisms common throughout the 1800s, derived in part from scientific discoveries related to blood circulation, the corporation became a literal body in which the movement of some “substance,” such as capital, would act like a vital fluid that maintained the body’s health. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 380

Categorization

• XREF: Vitalist corporate body relates to the four infrastructures as a body-of-organized-life framing.