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Home Business Resources
The Modern Corporation and Private Property
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.740973
EAN: 9780887388873
ISBN: 0887388876
Label: Transaction Publishers
Manufacturer: Transaction Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 426
Publication Date: 1991-01-01
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Studio: Transaction Publishers
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worthy of study today, as well as when it was written!
Comment: I was lucky to have Professor Berle as a teacher at the Columbia Law School. I read the book then (in the early 1960s) and re-read it recently. It is timely reminder that the corporation--that great engine of our prosperity--has undergone significant (and not for the better) changes--not only from when the book was written, but also in the forty-four years since I read it last.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: worthless classic, error-ridden and misleading, even in 1932
Comment: This book was NOT the first to stigmatize giant corporations for "the separation of ownership and control." Rather, the key to the book's success was the timeliness of its appearance, during the Great Depression, not because it had anything new to contribute to our understanding of publicly traded big businesses. Far from being a riveting spellbinder, the prose is dry and never eloquent. But it possesses far more serious defects, e.g. that the alleged novelty of 20th century corporations -- that passive owners contribute funds to an enterprise that is run by others, professional managers -- is hardly anything new. The same status has always existed for limited partners in a firm with a managing partner; they must keep silent, exercising no voice or vote in management, lest they lose their limited liability status. The "innovation" actually began five centuries earlier in the great Italian merchant ventures: noblemen, clerics, widows and others unsuited to business affairs or uninterested in business decision- making, entrusted their wealth to entrepreneurs, in exchange for a share of the resulting profits. Berle & Means never acknowledged that dividing investment and management into two distinct functions is an example of specialization or division of labor-- and that everyone's participation is voluntary. Common sense asks: if shareholders really are being systematically shortchanged or abused, why do people continue to buy shares in giant corporations, and why do they buy new stock issues or reinvest their dividends in these companies? For a devastating dissection of the Berle & Means book, see Robert Hessen's essay, "The Modern Corporation and Private Property: a Reappraisal," in the Journal of Law and Economics, June 1983. Or, more accessibly, see Hessen's 1979 book, IN DEFENSE OF THE CORPORATION, in which he rebutted the Berle & Means thesis which Ralph Nader had invoked to justify federal chartering of corporations.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Unvarnished Truth
Comment: About 6 years ago I visited the White Eagle Conference Center in beautiful central New York. This is a quaint place that must have been a real marquee in its time. On one of their obviously long under used book shelves (seemed like nothing had been touched for at least 2 decades) I noticed this book, an original copyrighted 1932 version. I couldn't put it down. It presented a thoroughly well written, seminal treatment of the conflicts that senior leaders exhibit even today, a full 75 years later. It explained in vivid detail the deeply entrenched, inextricible human behavior that is observed consistently by senior leaders from organization to organization today. The plain and simple bottom line is that unless you're an insider, you're nothing more than overhead to be tolerated. The SEC was created by sheer necessity to protect the public. Businesmen 'talk' about how they care about other people but the unvarnished truth is that their friends and family are the only ones who matter. This book is great foundational work providing insight to the reasons why we need a strong SEC. The only thing that has changed in the human conditon is technology. The DNA that drives human behavior hasn't changed for thousands of years.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dated Classic
Comment: "The Modern Corporation and Private Property" was hailed as an instant classic when it appeared in 1932. To my knowledge, it was the first book to spell out how modern corporate capitalism is characterized by pervasive oligopoly and the separation of management from ownership. These points are still valid today, and remind us that modern capitalism has little in common with the social system analyzed by Adam Smith and other Classical economists. However, most of "The Modern Corporation and Private Property" is taken up with an out-of-date, pre-SEC review of corporate finance law as it existed in 1930. As a result, the book will be of little interest to most modern readers, even though it is a "must" purchase for any serious library of books on economics or corporate governance.
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