The concept of corporation, in its original formulation and use, dates back to the Gregorian reformation in the second half of the eleventh century. The corporation brought a veritable revolution in the fabric of politics by separating power from individuals, regulating it by legal rules and perpetuating it across time. Through the corporation, political authority could be asserted on collective grounds rather than the personal linkages of feudal society. In many respects, the corporation can be thus considered as the prototype experience of state power.

The horizontal axis captures the continuing tension between the social roots of the corporation and its public life -- and development. On the vertical axis, the same tension is analyzed with respect to the economic sphere which will become, by mid-XIXth century, the dominant drive in setting corporations free from their original statutory constrains.