Volume 9, Number 5 · September 28, 1967
Same Old New Class
By Christopher Lasch
Power in America: The Politics of the New Class
by David T. Bazelon
New American Library, 396 pp., $7.50
David T. Bazelon's first book, The Paper Economy, was an analysis of the corporation, in which he showed that corporations, although ostensibly private institutions, are in effect governments themselves; they tax and plan, although these functions are given other names. The failure to recognize power when it takes the form of 'private' property seemed to Bazelon a characteristically American evasion of reality, alternately amusing and appalling. Not content with criticizing this absurdity and the other absurdities that follow from it, he tried to show how so radical a misconception had come about—how the sense of the corporation as a public body chartered to carry out some specific communal purpose gradually gave way to the fiction, finally enshrined by the Supreme Court as a hallowed principle of constitutional interpretation, that corporations are 'persons' with all the rights of other persons under the law. In elucidating this and kindred mysteries enveloping the economic order, Bazelon showed great shrewdness, imagination, and wit, as well as an enviable ability to set out difficult subjects clearly, without oversimplification.
Review, 2309 words
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