Abstract

This article discusses some recent debates on questions of the social ontology of firms and on the question of group minds related to the idea of a corporation, its authority and jurisdiction. The aim of the article is to provide a critique of the idea of corporation by revisiting an alternative ontology of social groups based on the concept of a trust, as this is developed in the legal and political thinking of English pluralist theory, which advances an alternative to Schmittian political theology. The article connects this conception of trust (as antithetical to corporation) to recent biopolitical theories of the commons and of use without ownership.