The Shareholder Society

Summary

Around the same time as Hobbes was writing his De Cive, - i.e. in the early 1640s - the Dutch scholar Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (1612-1653) was teaching a range of subjects to his students at Leiden Univeristy that together comprise his political ideas. Central to these ideas is the thought that man is not a social being, and hence that the commonwealth (respublica or 'state') is an artificial product, made by men and 'permeated by the same laws for the sake of the advantage of all together and each individually'.1 This 'advantage of all together', - i.e. the 'common good' - is a compound of all private advantages together: 'the private advantages form the public one'.2 This means that everbody has a stake in the well-being of the commonwealth, but some more than others. I call this concept 'the shareholder society'.3

In a shareholder society it makes sense that the people who hold the most 'shares' should also have the most to say. For them, the 'stakes' are the highest if some calamity befalls the commonwealth. Hence, the rich should rule, for they have the most to lose.
What Boxhorn did not seem to have realized, however, is that shares can easily be sold off and money transferred to other locations, outside the commonwealth. Unlike real estate, money is mobile. In case of an emergency, the rich can transfer their wealth, and thereby their 'interest' and loyalty, to a different location, making them less reliable to govern. The commonwealth can lose, but the rich can still hold on to their wealth which has been tranferred elsewhere.4

1. Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae (1668), I.2.1, p. 8. ‘Respublica est corpus multorum ad agnoscendam eiusdem Imperii Majestatem, iisdem legibus, omnium & singulorum utilitatis causa, inbutum.’

2. Ibid., I.2, p.14. ‘Cum enim privatae utilitates constituant publicam, necesse est, quomodo se habent privati actus, ita se habere publicas constitutiones. 

3. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a shareholder is  "an owner of shares in a company or business". A stakeholder is "a person or company that is involved in a particular organization, project, system, etc., especially because they have invested money in it". The difference between the two is that "Shareholders are always stakeholders in a corporation, but stakeholders are not always shareholders. A shareholder owns part of a public company through shares of stock, while a stakeholder has an interest in the performance of a company for reasons other than stock performance or appreciation. (They have a "stake" in its success or failure.) As a result, the stakeholder has a greater need for the company to succeed over the longer term." (Copied from investopedia). It seems that to people like Boxhorn and later the brothers Johan and Pieter de la Court, their is an intimated relationship between the self-interest of an individual, expressed in terms of money and wealth (e.g. in the form of real estate), and the public interest, because the individual 'owns' a part of the public interest. Hence his private interests coincide with the public interest, and the more he owns, the more it does. Theories like these might explain why in the seventeenthy century, even the most 'radical' of thinkers like Franciscus van der Enden and Spinoza, all excluded the poor from participating in politics. This line of reasoning held steadfast until the nineteenth century. Traces of it can be found in Thorbecke's concept of the "aristocracy of the mind". 

4. That this concept of the shareholder society first took root in the Dutch Republic is perhaps no surprise, since it was in the Dutch Republic that the first company that issued stoke to the general public - the Dutch East India Company (VOC) - was founded in 1602. Interestingly, in his famous pamphlet To the people of the Netherlands (Aan het volk van Nederland, 1781), the Dutch nobleman Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol (1741-1784), explained his concept of popular sovereignty, by comparing a people or nation to a 'great society, a company and nothing else', whose members, - i.e. 'the entire nation, or the whole people' - held power. 'Because not the directors, but the participants are the true owners, lords and masters of the company or society'. His prime example of such a company? The VOC.

Date: 23/06/2023. Last modified: 29/11/2023