ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two influential social liberal political thinkers, John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, and how they conceive of the corporation. The corporation is marginal as a topic to both thinkers, which is also representative of the tendency to exclude the corporation from political philosophical thinking in the 20th century. Rawls is deliberately vague about the limits of the basic structure. The literature following A Theory of Justice offered several points for critical reappraisal. The influence of Habermasian thinking in the business ethics literature is slightly different from how Rawls has been debated despite the fact that they share the broadly social liberal approach to political philosophy and are often seen as defenders of social justice and the welfare state. With regard to corporations and corporate responsibility, two aspects are striking in Habermas’s work. The first is his distinction between the system and the lifeworld, and the second is whether corporations can participate legitimately in deliberative democracy.
