Biography adolf berle thomas

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. Adolf Berle was born in Boston, Mass. He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in and his master's in He then entered Harvard Law School, from which he received his degree in , at the age of 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 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 until he retired as professor emeritus in He was also chamberlain of New York City during In 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 , assistant secretary of state , United States ambassador to Brazil , chairman of the Task Force on Latin America , and consultant to the secretary of state He was president of the International Conference on Civil Aviation and chairman of the American delegation Chicago, Berle died in New York City on Feb.

Berle's scholarly works include numerous law texts, legal, social, and economic commentaries, and treatises on the United States corporate economy.

Adolf Augustus Berle Jr was an

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 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.