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Joel Bakan Quotes

Joel Conrad Bakan is an American-Canadian writer, jazz musician, filmmaker, and professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia.Born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised for most of his childhood in East Lansing, Michigan, where his parents, Paul and Rita Bakan, were both long-time professors in psychology at Michigan State University. In 1971, he moved with his parents to Vancouver, British Columbia. He was educated at Simon Fraser University , University of Oxford , Dalhousie University and Harvard University .

He served as a law clerk to Chief Justice Brian Dickson in 1985. During his tenure as clerk, Chief Justice Dickson authored the judgment R. v. Oakes, among others. Bakan then pursued a master's degree at Harvard Law School. After graduation, he returned to Canada, where he has taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University and the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. He joined the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law in 1990 as an associate professor. Bakan teaches Constitutional Law, Contracts, socio-legal courses and the graduate seminar. He has won the Faculty of Law's Teaching Excellence Award twice and a UBC Killam Research Prize.Bakan has a son from his first wife, Marlee Gayle Kline, also a scholar and Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia. Professor Kline died of leukemia in 2001. Bakan helped establish The Marlee Kline Memorial Lectures in Social Justice to commemorate her contributions to Canadian law and feminist legal theory. He is now married to Canadian actress and singer Rebecca Jenkins. His sister, Laura Naomi Bakan is a provincial court judge in British Columbia, and his brother, Michael Bakan, is an ethnomusicologist. Wikipedia  

✵ 1959
Joel Bakan photo
Joel Bakan: 15 quotes1 like

Famous Joel Bakan Quotes

“A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 5, Corporations Unlimited, p. 135

“Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 2, Business As Usual, p. 36

“These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 5, Corporations Unlimited, p. 138

“As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 17

“The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 158

“The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 3, The Externalizing Machines, p. 69

Joel Bakan Quotes

“The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries, was - and is - its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 8

“As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 3, The Externalizing Machines, p. 60

“The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 153

“Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 25

“By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 22

“The corporation's legally defined mandates to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others. As a result, I argue, the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.”

Joel Bakan

Introduction, p. 2
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004)

“As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 4, Democracy Ltd., p. 85

“The notion that business and government are and should be partners is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and repeated like a mantra by leaders in both domains. It seems a compelling and innocuous idea - until you think about what it really means.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 4, Democracy Ltd., p. 108

“Deregulation freed corporations from legal constraints, and privatization empowered them to govern areas of society from which they had been previously been excluded. By the end of the century, the corporation had become the world's dominant institution.
Yet history humbles dominant institutions.”

Joel Bakan

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 139

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