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Biography adolf berle

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Adolf Augustus Berle Jr

Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr. (1895-1971), was an educator, a diplomat, a government official, and a provocative interpreter of the United States corporate economy.

Adolf Berle was born in Boston, Mass., on Jan. 27, 1895. He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1913 and his master's in 1914. He then entered Harvard Law School, from which he received his degree in 1916, at the age of 21.

Years of Public Service

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 1919 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 1927 until he retired as professor emeritus in 1964. He was a member of the board of directors of such public, civic, and educational institutions as SuCrest and the Twentieth Century Fund of New York City, and École de l'Europe Libre, France. He was

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Spartacus Educational

Primary Sources

(1) Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932)

We live in a system described in obsolete terms. We have come to believe our own repeated declarations that our society is based on individual initiative – whereas, in fact, most of it is no more individual than an infantry division. We assume that our economic system is based on “private property.” Yet most industrial property is is no more private than a seat in a subway train, and indeed it is questionable whether much of it can be called “property” at all. We indignantly deny that we are collectivist, yet it is demonstrable that more than two-thirds of our enterprise is possible only because it is collectivist: what is really meant is that the State did not do the collectivizing.

(2) Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932)

In its new aspect the corporation is a means whereby the wealth of innumerable individuals has been concentrated into huge aggregates and whereby control over this wealth has been

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"The 'free market' has been completely displaced as the infallible god, has been substantially displaced as universal economic master, and increasingly ceases to be, or to be thought of as, the only acceptable way of economic life."

Adolph Augustus Berle, Jr. (1895-1971)
Faculty 1927–63

Adolph Augustus Berle, Jr., a child prodigy who became an economic theorist and policy maker, helped craft the banking and securities laws of the New Deal and shaped twentieth-century ideas about property and power. He was born in 1895 in Boston, the son of Christian Zionist Adolph Augustus Berle, and matriculated at Harvard University at the age of 14. He took his B.A. in History, M.A. in History, a law degree, and the bar exam by the age of 21. At 24, Berle attended the Paris Peace Conference as a delegate but resigned over the terms of the treaty.

Even past his adolescence, Berle continued to advise politicians with his trademark frankness and shrewd understanding of political and economic power. In 1932, Roosevelt relied on him as one of th

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