Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

MAN: What do you think the role of law is generally in the whole scheme of control? Well, law is a bit like a printing press—it’s kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things. MAN: So you don’t think there’s any legal basis for the hegemony of American corporations, especially in the way that the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted to consider them individuals, with individual rights? Well, you know, “legal basis” is a funny notion: what has a legal basis is a matter of power, not law—like, the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say anything about corporations. During the nineteenth century, there was just a change in the legal status of corporations—a change which would have absolutely appalled Adam Smith, or Thomas Jefferson, or any other Enlightenment thinker. In fact, Smith warned against it, and Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings of it—and what he said is, if what he called the “banks and moneyed incorporations” got the rights that they in fact ended up receiving, we would have a form of absolutism worse than the one we thought we were fighting against in the American Revolution.34 And those rights simply were granted—they weren’t granted by Congress, and in other countries they weren’t granted by Parliaments; they were granted by judges, lawyers, corporate representatives, ...