Over the last year, I've spent a lot of time reading populists like the Southern Agrarians and Catholic social thought. It strikes me that both share a preference for an economy comprised mainly of small communities of yeoman farmers and artisans that would be more familiar to fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Shire than most modern developed nation workers. Case in point:
It is certainly true that it is difficult to describe the large public corporation as a community of shared values. Such corporations in fact resemble the nanny state—a large, impersonal bureaucracy with the power to terrorize, but no ability to nurture.
But so what?
Must every human institution "foster human development"?
Perhaps the large corporation has a different role to play in an ordered society. Most people belong to a host of communities with the potential to inculcate virtue and other communal values: churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and the like. While it may be unrealistic to think of a large multinational corporation as constituting such a community, it is perfectly plausible to think of the corporation as an intermediary institution standing between the individual and Leviathan. In other words, while virtuous citizens are developed by smaller institutions with roots in the local community, the corporation still can act as a vital countervailing force against the state. Only the large corporation has the power to withstand assaults from the modern state, which allows it to serve as a focus of resistance to the state.
