Background
Adolf Berle was born in Boston, on January 27, 1895. He was the son of Mary Augusta (Wright) and Adolf Augustus Berle.
( Written more than a half-century ago, The Modern Corpo...)
Written more than a half-century ago, The Modern Corporation and Private Property remains the fundamental introduction to the internal organization of the corporation in modern society. Combining the analytical skills of an attorney with those of an economist, Berle and Means raise the central questions, even when their answers have been superseded by changing circumstances. This volume remains of valuable to all those concerned with the evolution of this major social institution.
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Diplomat educator lawyer author
Adolf Berle was born in Boston, on January 27, 1895. He was the son of Mary Augusta (Wright) and Adolf Augustus Berle.
He entered Harvard College at age 14, earning a bachelor's degree in 1913 and a master's degree in 1914. He then enrolled in Harvard Law School. In 1916, at age 21, he became the youngest graduate in the school's history.
After a year of law practice in Boston, followed by a year with the United States commission to negotiate the peace with Germany, Berle moved to New York City in 1919 to become a member of the law firm of Berle, Berle and Brunner, where he remained, taking frequent leaves for public and diplomatic service. He was professor of corporation law on the faculty of Columbia Law School from 1927 until he retired as professor emeritus in 1964. He was a member of the board of directors of such public, civic, and educational institutions as SuCrest and the Twentieth Century Fund of New York City, and École de l'Europe Libre, France. He was also chamberlain of New York City during 1934-1938.
In 1933 he began a long and distinguished career of high-level government assignments. He was a member of the original "brain trust" in the early years of President Franklin Roosevelt's first administration. He served as special counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1933-1938), assistant secretary of state (1938-1944), United States ambassador to Brazil (1945-1946), chairman of the Task Force on Latin America (1961), and consultant to the secretary of state (1961-1962). At intervals throughout this period he also served as United States delegate to the Inter-American Conference for Maintenance of Peace (Buenos Aires, 1936-1937); and two Pan American conferences (Lima, Peru, 1938; Havana, Cuba, 1940). He was president of the International Conference on Civil Aviation and chairman of the American delegation (Chicago, 1944).
Berle's scholarly works include numerous law texts, legal, social, and economic commentaries, and treatises on the United States corporate economy. By far the best-known and most frequently cited of these works are The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932, coauthored with Gardiner Means), The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (1954), and Power without Property (1959).
In The Modern Corporation, Berle and Means presented an analysis of the structure of the American economy, showing that the means of production were highly concentrated in the hands of the largest 200 corporations, that this concentration was increasing, and that within the large corporations which so dominated the economy there was a clear divorcement of ownership from control. Since the American private-property legal system had been based on the assumption that those who owned property possessed the rights and power to use it for their own benefit, the Berle and Means thesis called into serious question the operability of the legal system on which the private-enterprise economy had been built.
In the two later volumes Berle advanced the companion thesis that management of large corporate enterprise, in addition to having become liberated from the control of corporate owners (stockholders), had acquired sufficient power to have become liberated from the market forces of competition as well. He concluded, therefore, that much of the economic theory pertaining to the functioning of the marketplace, which served as a rationale for the free-enterprise market economy, had been rendered obsolete by the accumulation of immense power in the hands of corporate management. This provocative thesis generated much debate among economists and legal scholars, a debate that still continues.
Berle died in New York City on Febuary 17, 1971.
( Written more than a half-century ago, The Modern Corpo...)
Berle theorized that the facts of economic concentration meant that the effects of competitive-price theory were largely mythical. While some advocated trust busting, breaking up the concentrations of firms into smaller entities to restore competitive forces, Berle believed that that would be economically inefficient. Instead, he argued for government regulation and became identified with the school of business statesmanship, which advocated that corporate leadership accept (and theorized that they had, to a great extent, already accepted) that they must fulfill responsibilities toward society in addition to their traditional responsibilities toward shareholders. Corporate law should reflect this new reality, he wrote in The Modern Corporation: "The law of corporations, accordingly, might well be considered as a potential constitutional law for the new economic state, while business practice is increasingly assuming the aspect of economic statesmanship. "
Adolf Berle married Beatrice Bishop (1902–1993), the daughter of Cortlandt Field Bishop (1870–1935) and Amy Bend (1870-1957), in 1927. Beatrice was the granddaughter George Hoffman Bend (1838–1900), a member of the New York Stock Exchange and prominent in New York Society. Adolf and Beatrice had two daughters, and a son, who in turn, had 10 children.
After his death his wife edited and published selections from his diaries posthumously in 1973 as Navigating the Rapids: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle.
(1902–1993)
She married Clan Crawford, Jr. in 1949.
She married Dean Winston Meyerson in 1953.
(December 8, 1937 – November 1, 2007)
