76 CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N Opinion of STEVENS, J. make a corporation a formidable political presence, even though the power of the corporation may be no reflection of the power of its ideas.’ ” 494 U. S., at 659 (quoting MCFL, 479 U. S., at 258).72 It might also be added that corporations have no con­ sciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not them­ selves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established. These basic points help explain why corporate election­ eering is not only more likely to impair compelling gov­ ernmental interests, but also why restrictions on that electioneering are less likely to encroach upon First Amendment freedoms. One fundamental concern of the First Amendment is to “protec[t] the individual’s interest in self-expression.” Consolidated Edison Co. of N. Y. v. Public Serv. Comm’n of N. Y., 447 U. S. 530, 534, n. 2 (1980); see also Bellotti, 435 U. S., at 777, n. 12. Freedom of speech helps “make men free to develop their faculties,” Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357, 375 (1927) (Brandeis, —————— 72 Nothing in this analysis turns on whether the corporation is con­ ceptualized as a grantee of a state concession, see, e.g., Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 (1819) (Marshall, C. J.), a nexus of explicit and implicit contracts, see, e.g., F. Easterbrook & D. Fischel, The Economic Structure of Corporate Law 12 (1991), a mediated hierarchy of stakeholders, see, e.g., Blair & Stout, A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law, 85 Va. L. Rev. 247 (1999) (herein­ after Blair & Stout), or any other recognized model. Austin referred to the structure and the advantages of corporations as “state-conferred” in several places, 494 U. S., at 660, 665, 667, but its antidistortion argu­ ment relied only on the basic descriptive features of corporations, as sketched above. It is not necessary to agree on a precise theory of the corporation to agree that corporations differ from natural persons in fundamental ways, and that a legislature might therefore need to regulate them differently if it is human welfare that is the object of its concern. Cf. Hansmann & Kraakman 441, n. 5.