Extended Corporate Citizenship : A Libertarian Interpretation

Abstract

We argue that the idea of ECC (Extended Corporate Citizenship) is more in line with libertarian than liberal thinking. The basic idea of ECC is the dislocation of the provider of citizenship rights from governments to corporations: corporations provide and administrate the same citizenship rights, which governments provided earlier, before the political processes started the privatization of these entitlements (since the 1980’s and 1990’s). According to John Rawls’ liberal viewpoint, citizens’ relations to the public structures of society are supposed to be fundamentally different from their relations to private associations like business corporations. In libertarian thinking (as with Robert Nozick), instead, citizens relations to public institutions do not significantly differ from their relations to business corporations. Both are based on voluntary agreements, bringing forth the idea of a contract-society. Since ECC is backed up by this kind of contract-society, it brings forth libertarian interpretations of the most central political matters - like the basic structure of society, and the concepts of freedom and democracy.