"I'm a man without a corporation"

A single sentence from Paddy Chayefsky, "I'm a man without a corporation", carries the weight of an entire social critique. Standing alone, the phrase reveals a speaker detached not only from a business but from the very institutions that define contemporary identity, power, and purpose. The language is precise: the lack of a corporation isn’t just about not having a job or a business to one’s name, but rather suggests estrangement from a network of allegiances, and access, that corporations grant individuals in society. In the late 20th century, when Chayefsky was writing, corporate culture represented not simply work or profit but a new kind of tribal belonging, protective, dominating, totalizing.

To be "without a corporation" becomes a statement of existential homelessness. Personal agency and social power are increasingly mediated through institutions; a “man” without the referent of corporate ties finds himself outside the machinery that determines success and even legitimacy. The remark may carry a tone of both liberation and lament. On the one hand, eschewing corporate structures implies a stance of independence, a rejection of conformism, of being absorbed into a faceless economic behemoth. On the other, it acknowledges alienation, the sense of being unmoored from the engines of collective action and financial security that corporations provide.

Chayefsky’s writing, especially in works like "Network", dwells on individuals caught between personal moral imperatives and vast, impersonal systems. This tension is encapsulated in such a phrase: human beings risk being reduced to functions of the corporation, shorn of nuance and complexity. The declaration resonates in an era where identity is too often bound up with the brands and companies we serve. Without a corporation, the speaker navigates a society where meaning, community, and power are negotiated via these entities, left to find value, dignity, and survival outside the prescribed structures of the corporate world.