Adolf Augustus Berle Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Adolf Augustus Berle (1895–1971) was an American corporate lawyer, political advisor, diplomat, academic educator, and scholar. Berle’s astonishingly wide-ranging and prestigious career began after his completion of a law degree at the age of twenty-one at Harvard University. Already cast into public life at the age of twenty-four, Berle joined Woodrow Wilson as a representative of the American delegation at the Treaty of Versailles (1919). In a moment of characteristic political intuitiveness, Berle eventually resigned in protest of the Versailles settlement, warning that the treaty would serve as the cause to further wars as opposed to a lasting peace.

After establishing himself as a successful corporate lawyer in New York, Berle then turned to academia, eventually earning a professorship in corporate law at Columbia University in 1927, a post he would hold until his retirement in 1963. The remainder of Berle’s time in academia would be balanced with a series of high-profile government appointments. The most important of these include various positions as a political advisor to presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, in addition to serving as assistant secretary of state (1938–1944) and ambassador to Brazil (1945–1946).

Berle’s diverse career is reflected in the broad scope of his scholarly interests, which include extensive writing on political economy, Latin American affairs, and New York State politics. His most influential and important contribution has been his work on American capitalism, particularly in the realm of corporate governance. Coauthored with economic historian Gardiner Means, Berle’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) still stands as the central reference point in studies of the relations between key actors within the joint stock company. The main argument of this study is that the historical rise of the corporation from the middle of the nineteenth century has transformed American capitalism by gradually separating ownership from control and power from private property.

Berle’s work on corporate governance was interested in changes that had taken place that led to an empowerment of a managerial class separate from labor and capital, its position bolstered by the growing concentration of wealth in the corporate sector and the increasing dispersion of stock ownership across society. Concerned with the implications of managerial power and uncertainties over whose interests it was meant to serve, Berle recommended that certain legal limits be placed on management so that its power should be exercised in the interests of those subjected to its growing influence, including shareholders, employees, and civil society. Through the advancement of the proper legal framework, Berle believed that a culture of corporate responsibility could be instilled that directed managerial power toward the benefit of public interest and society as a whole. In his unique position as architect and practitioner of corporate liberalism, a form of capitalism that purports to be a middle way between the unbridled free market and state socialism, Berle stands as one of the most important political and academic figures of his era.

Bibliography:

Berle, Adolf A. Power without Property: A New Development in American Political Economy. New York: Harcourt, 1959.
Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle. New York: Harcourt, 1973.
Berle, Adolf A., and Gardiner Means. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. London: Transaction, 1932.
Mizruchi, Mark S. “Berle and Means Revisited: The Governance and Power of Large U.S. Corporations.” Theory and Society 33, No. 5 (2004): 579 617.
Schwarz, Jordan A. Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era. New York: Free Press, 1987.
Van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan, and Laura Horn. “The Marketisation of European Corporate Control: A Critical Political Economy Perspective.” New Political Economy 12, no. 2 (2007): 211–235.
Zeitlin, Maurice “Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class.” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 5 (1974): 1073–1119.