Business
Contrary to their critics' fears, the biggest multinationals have been losing economic power rather than gaining it. Even the weakest state remains politically stronger than any multinational, and the company may no longer be the economy's basic building block.
The company was a political creation: government granted collective rights and responsibilities to a body so it could fund major projects and investments without holding the money itself. Early chartered companies were therefore a long way from modern shareholder capitalism.
The organization that most shapes modern life is not the state, the commune or the party but the company. It is where most people directly or indirectly earn their living, and it reaches into culture well beyond the goods it sells.
A company is a distinct legal entity, treated in some respects like a human being and kept separate from the people who make it up. That separation lets it outlive its members, own things, and take on obligations in its own name.
Capping what investors can lose at the amount they put in let companies gather capital on a vast scale. That one legal innovation helped the company grow into a force able to rival religions, monarchies and even states.
A company makes sense only while the cost of buying things through the market is higher than the cost of running a hierarchy to do it in-house. When dealing in the market gets cheaper, the case for big integrated firms weakens.
The causes of capitalism and of the company are inseparable: each has advanced by means of the other. Defending or attacking one is in practice defending or attacking the other.
Because the company's rights are granted by society, it operates on something like a franchise that society can revise. That raises a standing question of what the company owes in return, and the bigger danger may be what society does to companies rather than what companies do to society.