During the fellowship year, David Ciepley plans to write a book on the two-hundred-year effort of Americans to keep their corporate economy compatible with constitutional democracy. His central contention is that corporations are not purely private associations, but rather, are little governments created by the state in its own image, then placed in private hands. Corporations are “replicants” of the state, designed to augment the collective power of private parties, originally to advance public ends.

Ciepley is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He was previously associate professor of political science at the University of Denver. He holds his PhD from the University of Chicago. In 2019-20, he is a Berggruen fellow at CASBS.