Having built a large organization to manufacture, market, and distribute the safety razor (with disposable blades, his crucial innovation), King Camp Gillette (1855–1932) may be forgiven for promoting a new world order along the lines of his own great achievement: a massive corporation. Like other reformers and progressive industrialists of his time, Gillette deplored the political corruption, wasteful competition, and social degradation of laissez-faire capitalism—even if he would become one of its beneficiaries. His solution was a radical reorganization of the world’s productive activities into a single monopolistic “World Corporation,” or “People’s Corporation,” that would eventually subsume all the world’s material assets, displace its governments, and reshape its human communities.
Gillette’s proposal called for new urban and architectural forms that served as both the settings and mechanisms for the new social and economic relationships that he prescribed. He planned to recentralize the global population in several massive cities; the inventor...
University of California Press