If you were to travel back in time to ten years ago, found me in college, and handed my twenty-year-old self a book subtitled: “How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.”, I would have laughed in your face. To my radical libertarian self, corporations were fine–exemplars of the free-market, although I had some minor issues with subsidies, etc. All of that anti-corporate stuff thrown out on fliers was something that I happily ignored.

Thankfully, over the past few years I’ve realized that while corporate entities are sometimes representative of the free-market, more often than not they are as much a part and parcel of government as the most intrusive agency. Rules, regulations, tax codes–they are all, in many ways, set up so that certain favored companies fail while rivals are stalled at the gate. No matter what city you travel to in America, you can always go to Applebee’s or Burger King or Pizza Hut or Wal-Mart or Home Depot thanks to these rules.

Which is why I’m glad that I’ve read this book now, because where Doug Rushkoff’s Life, Inc. excels is in its explanation of how the corporation came to be the dominant economic form in the Western world, and how those corporations have led to the world we live in today.

Now I know at this point you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “uh oh–crazy conspiracy book.” And there’s no question that Rushkoff flirts with the conspiracy line sometimes. But refreshingly, Rushkoff demonstrates that it’s primarily the institutions surrounding the corporation that create liberty and happiness defeating results, and how those institutions can change to help us lead more productive lives.

For instance, one aspect of the book that Rushkoff hits heavily is the fact that during the Late Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, life in Europe for average people was generally pretty good. The rising merchant classes had improved trade, there were more schools, and generally more wealth in communities. People were healthier than at any other time in Europe before, and local communities and trade were on the rise. All of these things, though, were at the detriment to the rule of Lords and Kings.

Rushkoff argues that the corporate charter was an invention of monarchies to enable them to extract wealth from thriving merchant communities and instead feed dying feudal institutions. Corporate charters forced monopolistic trade practices, which were aided by policies demanding the centralization of currency and the outlawing of local money.

Indeed, fighting against monopolistic corporations was one of the things that drove our Founding Fathers to revolution. John Hancock was a smuggler, for one. And after the Revolution, as Rushkoff points out, they took pains to limit the scope of corporate power:

This is why the founders so carefully limited the reach and scope of corporate power in newly independent America. Corporations were to be chartered by states, not by the federal government, so that their actions could be governed locally by those affected.

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Just like Adam Smith, they hated big government and big corporations alike, envisioning the ideal business landscape characterized by locally scaled firms and farmers, unencumbered by large, dehumanizing monopolies. Thomas Jefferson considered “freedom from monopolies” one of the fundamental human rights. James Madison praised self-sufficiency and appropriately scaled enterprises. “The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.”

Of course, Rushkoff here is limiting the scope of the Founders’ vision to the early Democratic-Republican Party as opposed to the Hamiltonian Federalists, but I think that point is still an important one.

Overall, Rushkoff doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about the corporate institutions and their detrimental effects. What he does instead is focus on an outline of history, an outline that shows one disaster after another as wealth is being continuously extracted from productive use and funneled instead into moneymaking games. Indeed, where Rushkoff truly succeeds is in his accurate portrayal of the runaway financial class in the United States, where some of the wealthiest people became so without actually creating anything of value. All thanks to institutions that stretch back to the Renaissance.

For me, the most important thing about Life, Inc. is that it’s opened my eyes to a history I’ve always kind of glossed over and never understood well–economic history. Especially the history of money, and how different types of money can produce different societies and economies. I look forward to further exploring some of these ideas in the articles and books that are footnoted in the back of this book. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Life, Inc. for yourself.