Adolf A. Berle Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

The property owner who invests in a modern corporation so far surrenders his wealth to those in control of the corporation that he has exchanged the position of independent owner for one in which he may become merely recipient of the wages of capital... [Such owners] have surrendered the right that the corporation should be operated in their sole interest...

Adolf A. Berle
In its new aspect the corporation is a means whereby the wealth of innumerable individuals has been concentrated into huge aggregates and whereby control over this wealth has been surrendered to a unified direction. The power attendant upon such concentration has brought forth princes of industry, whose position in the community is yet to be defined. The surrender of control over their wealth by investors has effectively broken the old property relationships and has raise the problem of defining these relationship anew. The direction of industry by persons other than those who have ventured their wealth has raised the question of the motive force back of such direction and the effective distribution of the returns from business enterprise.

Adolf A. Berle
Now appears the fourth stage. In this situation emerge the newer mechanisms, the fiduciary institutions, by which these dispersed stockholdings are at once more becoming concentrated.

Adolf A. Berle
We live in a system described in obsolete terms. We have come to believe our own repeated declarations that our society is based on individual initiative – whereas, in fact, most of it is no more individual than an infantry division. We assume that our economic system is based on private property. Yet most industrial property is is no more private than a seat in a subway train, and indeed it is questionable whether much of it can be called property at all. We indignantly deny that we are collectivist, yet it is demonstrable that more than two-thirds of our enterprise is possible only because it is collectivist: what is really meant is that the State did not do the collectivizing.

Adolf A. Berle
No large concentrated stockholding exists which maintains close relationship with the management or is capable of challenging it, so that the board of directors may regularly expect a majority... to follow their lead. Thus they need not consult with anyone when making up their slate of directors... They select their own successors.

Adolf A. Berle
Essentially these stockholders, though still politely called "owners", are passive. They have the right to receive only. The condition of their being is that they do not interfere in management.

Adolf A. Berle