“Islands of Conscious Power”: Louis D. Brandeis and the Modern Corporation

Abstract

In this examination of the beliefs of Louis Brandeis about the twentieth-century corporation, we are given a paradoxical portrait of a man strongly committed to individual liberty and fulfillment who nevertheless became an outspoken advocate of Taylorism. By tracing Brandeis's views on the law and economics of me corporation and placing them against the jurist's belief in the primacy of society's needs, the article reveals the complexities and contradictions in Brandeis's thought as he struggled to visualize an order in which the interests of individuals and society would be identical.