The Modern Corporation and Private Property (book) - Introductory

Introductory

Introduction by Murray Weidenbaum and Mark Jensen

Murray Weidenbaum and Mark Jensen have added their introduction to more recent editions of the text. It casts a thoroughly skeptical perspective on the book, since the two came from very different academic perspectives, generally more orthodox and conservative in their outlook politically.

Property, Production and Revolution - A Preface to the Revised Edition by Adolf A. Berle

For the 1967 Revised Edition, Berle added a new Preface, updating the picture and bringing in new arguments and observations. He summed up the whole point of the book at the same time, making it a valuable adjunct to the text. "Why have stockholders?" he asked.

"What contribution do they make, entitling them to heirship of half the profits of the industrial system, receivable partly in the form of dividends, and partly in the form of increased market values resulting from undistributed corporate gains? Stockholders toil not, neither do they spin, to earn that reward. They are beneficiaries by position only. Justification for their inheritance must be sought outside classic economic reasoning.”

The position of stockholders' profit, said Berle,

“can be founded only upon social grounds. There is... a value attached to individual life, individual development, individual solution of personal problems, individual choice of consumption and activity. Wealth unquestionably does add to an individual’s capacity and range in pursuit of happiness and self-development. There is certainly advantage to the community when men take care of themselves. But that justification turns on the distribution as well as the existence of wealth. Its force exists only in direct ratio to the number of individuals who hold such wealth. Justification for the stockholder’s existence thus depends on increasing distribution within the American population. Ideally the stockholder’s position will be impregnable only when every American family has its fragment of that position and of the wealth by which the opportunity to develop individuality becomes fully actualized.”

Implications of the Corporate Revolution in Economic Theory by Gardiner C. Means

Preface (1932)

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