Corporate Spirit describes the development of corporate institutions in the United States and the earlier history of corporate organization from which American institutions emerged. Beginning with the origins of legal incorporation in Roman antiquity, the book traces the development of corporate idealism and its violations in European and American history. It highlights the kinship between churches and commercial entities and the importance of corporate structures for understanding wealth and expansion in both areas. The book emphasizes the continuing influence of idealism about corporations as voluntary associations, rooted in the trope of a body and its cooperating members. Religious appeals to a supernatural world, combined with the separation between commercial and nonprofit organization in American law, make the kinship between churches and commercial institutions easy to overlook. But as corporate charters multiplied, the separation of church and state leveled the legal terrain on which both religion and business operated, expediting the flow of ideas between them and the development of common strategies. Problems of accountability run through this narrative, as corruption and demands for reform shaped and reshaped corporate institutions and their historical development. This book shows how contemporary questions about corporate regulation have emerged from a history of debates over corporate accountability and from related major developments in the history of corporate law. It sets recent trends in corporate growth, innovation, and malfeasance in the context of the long, disputatious history of corporate institutions.