LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY |
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| Authors: | ROBERT FREDONA SOPHUS A REINERT |
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| Institution: | 1. The York Management School, University of York;2. Harvard Business School, Harvard University
The authors greatly profited from the assistance of staff at the Kroch Library at Cornell University;3. the Baker, Houghton, and Ernst Mayr Libraries at Harvard University;4. and the Library of Congress. Elizabeth Leh and Mikayla Schutte provided tireless and expert assistance in acquiring images and image rights. Incomparable encouragement, insights, and assistance were received from Rawi Abdelal, Sven Beckert, John Brewer, Giovanni Favero, Walter Friedman, Bernard Harcourt, Peter Katzenstein, Diana Kim, Julius Kirshner, Steven Press, Erik S. Reinert, Laura Phillips Sawyer, John Shovlin, Jacob Soll, Philip Stern, Richard Vietor, Andre Wakefield, Sophie Wilkowske, and especially Quinn Slobodian and Carl Wennerlind. We heartily thank them all. Robert Fredona's research was supported in part by a grant from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 793583. |
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| Abstract: | In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken. |
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| Keywords: | Leviathan Kraken political economy the state corporations monsters metaphors the sea Norway |
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