On the limited government conception of the Rule of Law, it is axiomatic that the state may only act for the public good according to law, and not arbitrarily, on pain of forfeiting its authority. That axiom is a great legacy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' anti-absolutist revolutions. The same period yielded another axiom, seldom noticed though nonetheless momentous. It is the belief, usually tacit, that the Rule of Law should not address the potentially arbitrary power of employers. This Article explores the origins of that axiom in the work of John Locke, one of the fountainheads of the limited government tradition. According to the way of seeing power that Locke propagated, there seems to be no reason to wonder whether the constitution of the modern employment relationship is hospitable to arbitrary power, in the limited government sense. Equally, there seems to be no point in asking whether the legitimacy of the employment relationship should depend upon its being constituted according to limited government constraints. However, as I demonstrate, such impressions are at odds with key moral and empirical features of Locke's own analysis. Those tensions represent a challenge not only for Locke's analysis, but also for the liberal Rule of Law project that Locke helped to found. It is a challenge that the tradition is yet to address.
The phrase "corporate tyranny" might seem to be nothing more than empty rhetoric, a muscular slogan with a plausible ring, but one lacking principled roots in the great tradition of political language which it echoes. In this Article, I aim to show that, on the contrary, it is indeed meaningful to apply the term tyranny in connection with contemporary corporate power-meaningful, that is, according to the criteria governing the use of that term within the limited government tradition's Rule of Law discourse. I also aim to demonstrate that, according to traditional criteria, certain terms used to lament the harms occasioned by manipulative state power-namely, arbitrariness, slavishness and corruption-might plausibly be employed against the large business corporation. The implications are significant. If the present constitution of corporate power were shown to be hospitable to those ills, then the legitimacy of corporate power would have been called into question on distinctive Rule of Law grounds. The notion that economic power is a limited government problem was a central and recurrent theme in public debates in the United States from the American Revolution until the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, however, the notion of "limited government" has become synonymous with the limitation of state, rather than "private", power; indeed, "limited government" has become a byword for the social philosophy that professes a belief in "small government"-a philosophy which, in effect, supports
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