This is a collection of pieces from The New Republic. As the collection's editor notes, this "is more than the greatest hits of he magazine. [] It was put together in the spirit of the magazine that it anthologizes: it is an argument about what matters." Id. at xxvi-xxvii. Due to my being in the process of putting together a course on International Trade Law to teach next fall, thinking about International Law generally, and regularly teaching Corporation Law (or Business Organizations), a passage from Hans J. Morgenthau's November 9, 1974 piece, "Power and Powerlessness: Decline of Democratic Government," struck a note. Perhaps Citizens United is also in the back of my mind.
"It has become trivial to say--because It is so obvious and has been said so often--that the modern technologies of transportation, communication and warfare have made the nation-state, as principle of political organization, as obsolete as the first industrial revolution of the steam engine did feudalism. While the official governments of the nation-states go through their constitutional motions of governing, most of the decisions that affect the vital concerns of the citizens are rendered by those who control these technologies, their production, their distribution, their operation, their price. The official governments can at best marginally influence these controls, but by and large they are compelled to accommodate themselves to them. They are helpless in the face of steel companies raising the price of steel or a union's striking for and receiving higher wages. Thus governments, regardless of their individual peculiarities, are helpless in the face of inflation; the relevant substantive decisions are not made by them by by private governments whom the official governments are unwilling or unable to control. Thus we live, as was pointed out long ago, under the rule of a 'new feudalism' whose private governments reduce the official ones to a largely marginal and ceremonial existence.
"The global corporation (misnamed 'multinational' is the most stroking manifestation of this supercession of national governments not only in their functional but territorial manifestations, For while the territorial limits of the private governments of the 'new feudalism,' as first perceived about two decades ago, still in great measure coincide with those of the nation-state, it is a distinctive characteristic of the global corporation that its very operations reduce those territorial limits to a functional irrelevancy.
"The governments of the modern states are not only, in good measure, unable to govern, but where they still appear to govern (and appearances can be deceptive) they are perceived as a threat to the welfare and very existence of their citizens. [] For it is the great political paradox of our time that a government, too weak to control the concentrations of private power that have usurped much of the substance of its power, has grown so powerful as to reduce the citizens to impotence."
