We talk to our friend Joe Costello about Trump’s tariffs, democracy, deindustrialization, the Yeltsinification of America, and the innate human desire for a communal life… We discuss globalization, why being against it has been such a political taboo until Trump, and why these tariffs will probably ultimately fail.
Minor quibble but the foundations of modern or post-modern corporations arguably exist in the methods used by clerical authorities to manage church property “on behalf of the poor” via abstract legal agreements and plans laid out in religious tracts by the likes of St. Augustine of Hipo. The new clerical class took management, if not direct ownership of, the church’s increasing wealth using legal theories that were already existent, if not fully developed, in Roman law. These systems of indirect ownership via managers who oversaw distant agricultural or mining interests and semi-public but privately created infrastructure had long been the subject of lawsuits and pleas to officials and emperors. The ideas were already existent and evolving in late antiquity. Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Loved your commentary. Just had to put in plug for the ancient or almost ancient origins of corporations and other pieces of our political economy. Obviously what we have now is of entirely different order and magnitude. We have to start our historical narrative somewhere, meaningful to the audience, even if that is arbitrary.
Minor quibble but the foundations of modern or post-modern corporations arguably exist in the methods used by clerical authorities to manage church property “on behalf of the poor” via abstract legal agreements and plans laid out in religious tracts by the likes of St. Augustine of Hipo. The new clerical class took management, if not direct ownership of, the church’s increasing wealth using legal theories that were already existent, if not fully developed, in Roman law. These systems of indirect ownership via managers who oversaw distant agricultural or mining interests and semi-public but privately created infrastructure had long been the subject of lawsuits and pleas to officials and emperors. The ideas were already existent and evolving in late antiquity. Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
thanks, hadn’t been aware of this thinking, there’s always a certain arbitrariness to where we start history
Loved your commentary. Just had to put in plug for the ancient or almost ancient origins of corporations and other pieces of our political economy. Obviously what we have now is of entirely different order and magnitude. We have to start our historical narrative somewhere, meaningful to the audience, even if that is arbitrary.
Great podcast. Thanks for haviing Joe Costello as a guest. He's my favorite political/social analyst.
Thank you for that link to the 1961 Schlesinger memo re: CIA.
https://web.goodnotes.com/s/EdZRpsVuhjIUw0XVhIqLoL#page-12
I'll read the J. Robert Oppenheimer material next-