3
God. The fact that not all Persons are human opens up the troubling fact that
not all humans have been recognized as Persons. This is troubling because
the Person is not merely a descriptive term, but is also used normatively to
identify one worthy of a particular standing amongst a community of other
Persons. To be designated a ‘Person’ was to be distinguished from a ‘thing’,
as a subject not an object, with autonomy and the expectation of both respect
and accountability.
All this is a heavy weight to place upon a word that originally was
used in the ancient world to designate the mask (persona) worn by actors in
a play.
3
Early on, the term was used in the legal field. Jurists even today
call a Person, in the wonderfully concise phrase offered by Frederic
Maitland, a “right and duty bearing unit.”
4
Despite the cleanness of this
definition, it can hardly stand as the last word on the issue. There is a
second tradition, one that defines the Person as an individual rational being,
with a status that is divine. Contained in this most seemingly pedestrian of
words are two separate but often intertwined lineages, one jurisprudential
and the second theological. The former refers to the mask of legal status and
the later indicates the unchanging substance that stands behind and gives
security to those masks.
It is not my purpose here to present a full Begriffsgeschichte of the
Person.
5
Rather, I shall offer an account of one critical moment in the long
history of the term, a debate that developed in Britain and, to a lesser extent,
the United States, during the first decades of the twentieth century, which
cast these philosophical problems in a contemporary context. The debate
concerns the social and legal status of groups. Were groups, associations,
and corporations properly understood as Persons? This question had been
brewing amongst jurists in France and Germany in the late nineteenth
century, and was concentrated around the full ramifications of the idea of the
persona ficta. When the controversy over the fictitious or real nature of
groups and corporations erupted in Britain, it did not remain a strictly legal
or academic matter, for the questions touched on many current controversies
such as the power of churches to reform their creed or the ability of labor
3
See the entries for persona in The Oxford Latin Dictionary (ed.) P.G.W. Glare (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984); A New Latin Dictionary (revised) Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1879).
4
Frederic William Maitland. “Moral Personality and Legal Personality” in Selected Essays. (eds.)
Hazeltine, Lapsley, and Winfield. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1936) pg. 225.
5
See Reinhart Koselleck. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1985) especially pp. 73-91.
Convention