Question

In charting the evolution of corporate personhood, legal historiography frequently highlights the late nineteenth-century shift from the Concession Theory—which posited that corporations are mere legal fictions artificially created by state charter—to the Real Entity Theory. Spearheaded by scholars like Otto von Gierke, the Real Entity Theory contended that corporations are pre-existing sociological realities, organisms with their own collective will that the state merely recognizes rather than creates. Modern critical legal historians, most notably Morton Horwitz, have argued that this conceptual shift was a strategic, anti-regulatory maneuver. According to these critics, corporate lawyers eagerly adopted the Real Entity Theory to shield burgeoning monopolies from government regulation; by framing the corporation as a natural entity, they successfully argued that it possessed inherent constitutional protections against state interference.

While it is indisputable that the Real Entity Theory was eventually weaponized to insulate corporate power, the modern historical claim that this was its inherent theoretical trajectory represents a retrospective distortion. The initial architects of the Real Entity Theory sought to achieve precisely the opposite effect. By conceptualizing the corporation as a real, social organism rather than a soulless artifact of the state, these early theorists intended to saddle corporations with the same moral agency, vicarious liability, and social responsibilities expected of natural persons. Their explicit objective was not to grant corporations constitutional immunity, but to ensure that corporate entities could not evade accountability by hiding behind the veil of a state-granted fiction.

Based on the passage, the author explicitly attributes which one of the following objectives to the initial architects of the Real Entity Theory?