Curtis Yarvin is the court philosopher of the New Right. Once a figure haunting the margins of the right-wing blogosphere, Yarvin has crept into the limelight during the second Trump administration, several members of which are avowed fans of his writing. In recent months, he has been showered with attention from The New York Times and The New Yorker, and heralded as the spokesman of a rising generation of conservatives disillusioned with liberal democracy.
Defenders of democracy have spilled plenty of ink denouncing Yarvin, attempting to dissuade those disgruntled with actually existing liberal democracy from being seduced by his ideas. Above all, these critiques tend to emphasize the immorality of his political program. Be that as it may, Yarvin’s political theory is based on a fundamental misapprehension of how corporations work. What he sees as “monarchy” is something else entirely.
One of Yarvin’s favorite arguments is that our love for the iPhone is proof-positive that we routinely accept the existence of monarchism in daily life. This is because, according to Yarvin, Apple has a CEO; the CEO’s rule is monarchical; therefore, monarchy must be efficient—and don’t we all love efficiency?
This equation of corporate governance with monarchy is no passing rhetorical flourish. In an article Yarvin wrote around the time Charles III ascended to the English throne, he stated: “Monarchy is … the universal form of private-sector governance (all corporations have CEOs).” The existence of monarchy makes your consumerist lifestyle possible, so why not scale it up?
The problem with this argument is that the CEO is not, in fact, sovereign; on the contrary, the corporation—like the state—is. In reality, the ostensible CEO-monarch is subject to greater constraints than the elected leaders of the democracies Yarvin despises. Moreover, corporate governance renders corporations in some respects more democratic than present-day democracies. If the fantasy of the state as corporation came to fruition, it would morph into the other form of government he loathes: oligarchy.
When a corporation is formed, its incorporator creates what common law lawyers term a company constitution—which American lawyers would call a certificate of incorporation. Right out the gate, the notion of nation as corporation hits a major snag: Who exactly should be anointed as a country’s incorporator? In the American context, we might revert to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution they promulgated. But Yarvin wishes to “dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish”—his derisive shorthand for American constitutional pieties.
Without an incorporator, Yarvin’s proposed sovereign corporation (“sovcorp”) is stillborn. But let’s assume the nation has been duly “incorporated.” The next stage—the issuance of shares—creates even more problems. Under both Delaware and UK corporate law, shares must be voluntarily acquired by private actors in the market. No analog exists in the context of nations.
“These problems metastasize when we turn to corporate governance.”
These problems metastasize when we turn to corporate governance. Not only does the relevant set of procedures resemble the democratic processes Yarvin scorns, but the inherent transferability of shares also entails that, irrespective of who they are initially issued to, the nation is subject to the perennial risk of teetering into oligarchy—against which corporate monarchy is supposed to stand as a bulwark.
Corporate law dictates that companies must hold Annual General Meetings at which shareholders appoint or re-elect new members to the board of directors. The shareholders of the corporate monarchy will thus be required to hold annual elections to determine who sits on the nation’s board of directors. In turn, the CEO-monarch serves at the pleasure of this board and can have his authority “revoked … in whole or part” as the board deems fit.
Two critical observations can be made here. First, the shareholders in the CEO-monarchy vote in elections more frequently than citizens in any system of democratic government presently in existence. Far from delivering the sleek efficiency Yarvin promises, his model would reproduce and indeed exacerbate the gridlock experienced in present-day democracy, with a nation’s direction potentially rewritten on an annual basis as a new board is elected. Second, the board, having been elected by the shareholders, wields absolute power over the CEO. Far from being sovereign, in other words, the CEO serves at the will of the board, and is therefore a convenient scapegoat on whom all the blame for any problems may be affixed.
In other words, constituting a nation on the basis of corporate law looks suspiciously like a parliamentary democracy, where elected representatives choose and are empowered to depose a prime minister. The most likely result would be good old managerial democracy in corporate drag.
Corporate monarchy runs up against yet another problem when we recall that because shares are a species of property, they are inherently transferable. This means no matter which individuals possessed shares in the first place, conglomerates or magnates can gain possession of them by shelling out exorbitant amounts in exchange for obtaining the voting rights which shareholding bestows. If such an entity acquires a majority of the shares, it will thereby establish an iron-clad veto on selecting directors. Should members of the board of directors prove incorruptible, the majority shareholder can simply lie in wait until the next Annual General Meeting to have them deposed and replaced by loyalists.
The prospects for Yarvin’s model grow even bleaker when we realize that an entity’s acquisition of a majority of shares also bestows upon it the power to alter the corporation’s constitution. In Britain, section 21(1) of the Companies Act 2006 allows for a corporate constitution to be amended by way of special resolution. In turn, a special resolution is defined by section 283 of the same Act to denote a resolution passed by not less than 75 percent of the corporation’s total voting rights. By contrast, according to Delaware law, a corporation’s constitution may be altered through the votes of at least a majority of the outstanding shares entitled to vote. Transposed to the context of a nation, this means that an entity in possession of a majority of outstanding shares or a supermajority, as the case may be, can encroach upon the rights of individuals at will.
Yarvin and his acolytes might respond that the right to “exit” will forestall these risks. A key tenet of neoreactionary political thought is that like consumers of a product who can shift their preferences at will, thus sending a market signal to the company producing it, subjects of a given sovcorp will be able to decamp for competitors as soon as they object to the way they are being governed. The threat of competition will discipline those in charge, much as the market disciplines corporations. The problem here is that it’s unclear who or what guarantees the universal right to exit. Should a supermajority of shareholding be concentrated in the hands of a singular entity or a strategically aligned consortium, this would also grant those shareholders the legal power to rewrite the sovcorp’s “constitution” so as to foreclose the capacity of subjects to exit if they wished. Further, even if the possibility of exiting is not prohibited internally, one’s ability to join a competing sovcorp also turns on its constitution. If, for instance, the most desirable competitor enjoins immigration, the liberty to emigrate would be meaningless.
If we map corporate law directly onto the rules for governing nations, entities can thoroughly restructure a nation’s direction, ethos, and the rights it enumerates simply by acquiring a supermajority of shares. This is oligarchy plain and simple. Thus, corporate monarchy does not prevent the restoration of the same governing structure Yarvin denounces in the “Cathedral system.” It simply erects a new façade, gilded in the language of sovereignty, but still ruled by the few.
Even if we disregard these defects, Yarvin’s model founders at a deeper conceptual level. At the core of corporate law is a doctrine that has been seared into the minds of law students all over the common law world: The corporation is a separate legal person. This doctrine holds that “once the company is legally incorporated it must be treated like any other independent person with its rights and liabilities appropriate to itself.” This entails that the motives of the company’s incorporators, directors, officers, and anyone else who may have taken “part in the promotion of the company are absolutely irrelevant in discussing what those rights and liabilities are.” When we inquire into the incidents of corporate personhood, we find that, pursuant to Delaware law, the corporation has the capacity to “sue and be sued”; “acquire, hold, improve, employ, use and otherwise deal in and with real or personal property”; and “incur liabilities.”
“A company is its own sovereign entity.”
In other words, a company is its own sovereign entity. Not only is the corporation not a fiefdom lorded over by a monarch, it is an entity that exists independently of any natural person. The CEO is not sovereign at all: He is constrained by fiduciary duties and disposable at the board’s pleasure. Rather, corporate law’s true sovereign is the corporation itself, an abstract juridical being which persists even as the identities of its officers, board members, and shareholders change.
In the name of casting the Leviathan that is the administrative state into the dustbin of history, Yarvin inadvertently proposes erecting an even more totalizing sovereign: a state in which power is vested in no one. His CEO-monarch, meant to embody decisive authority and steely efficiency, is a mere cog in a machine serving an entity which no one truly owns. The vision of a corporate monarchy crumbles under the weight of corporate law’s uncompromising logic.
Yarvin’s political thought revives an age-old tradition that exposes the faultlines in liberalism’s marriage with democracy. Liberalism champions pluralism, individual liberties, ownership of property, and participation in a free market. Democracy does not necessarily undermine these pillars of liberalism, but it possesses within it latent power that can be weaponized for precisely such ends. Those influenced by the libertarian tradition, as Yarvin claims to be, tend to emphasize the complexity of economic systems, which makes it difficult for governments to exercise effective oversight. But Yarvin fails to acknowledge such complexity.
What makes Yarvin’s model perplexing is his attempt to reconcile decentralized market logic with Caesarist politics. As has been evident in Donald Trump’s erratic attempt to restructure the economy through tariffs, price floors, and partial nationalizations, the centralization and expansion of executive power tends to come at the expense of the anarchic pluralism of market economics. By describing corporations as monarchies, Yarvin attempts to salvage the fusion of Caesarism with the market by deeming dictatorships supremely efficient. Despite the inaccuracy and incoherence of this effort, it is exercising an influence on the current administration. What began as a populist revolt against progressive dogmas risks degenerating into a Caesarist enterprise. Yarvin’s case for this emerging order is unconvincing.