Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government—and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead

The antagonism between the state and overweening corporations brewed for centuries before coming to a head in this unfocused historical study. Rothkopf (Superclass), a former U.S. trade official, surveys the business corporation from medieval Sweden’s Stora Kopparberg mine through the private empire of the British East India Company to today’s giant multinationals. It’s too broad a canvas; much of the meandering narrative rehashes the emergence of the modern state out of conflicts with church and aristocracy before finally reaching the main topic—the modern, American-style corporation, à la Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs, with global reach and arrogant political sway. Working from misleading comparisons of corporate sales and workforces to national GDP and populations, Rothkopf overhypes the degree to which corporations have supplanted the “post-sovereign” state. His rather crude analysis of corporations’ legal status as “artificial persons” and “supercitizens” with constitutional rights overlooks crucial distinctions and treats businesses as autonomous monoliths, rather than as companies run by real people to further the interests of their wealthy owners and managers. Though Rothkopf has cogent things to say about the balance between private and public power, his unrealistic model of corporate power obscures more than it reveals. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Zachary Schuster Harmsworth. (Mar.)