Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

by Elizabeth Anderson

Overview

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it

One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691192246
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Series:	The University Center for Human Values Series , #44
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	379,720
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Her books include The Imperative of Integration (Princeton).

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

Stephen Macedo

Author’s Preface xix

1 When the Market Was “Left” 1

2 Private Government 37

3 Learning from the Levellers? Ann Hughes 75

4 Market Rationalization David Bromwich 89

5 Help Wanted: Subordinates Niko Kolodny 99

6 Work Isn’t So Bad after All Tyler Cowen 108

7 Reply to Commentators Elizabeth Anderson 119

Notes 145

Contributors 183

Index 185

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Anderson explores a striking American contradiction. On the one hand, we are a freedom-obsessed society, wary of government intrusion into our private lives; on the other, we allow ourselves to be tyrannized by our bosses.”—Joshua Rothman, NewYorker.com

“Private Government is a welcome and important call to bring workplace governance back into political theory and discourse, and should be taken seriously if we are to promote greater democracy in the workplace.”—David Cowan, Times Literary Supplement

“Highlight[s] the dramatic and alarming changes that work has undergone over the past century—insisting that, in often unseen ways, the changing nature of work threatens the fundamental ideals of democracy.”—Miya Tokumitsu, New Republic

“The extent of the arbitrary authority of owners and managers over employees is surprisingly neglected by political thinkers, given how much time we spend at work and how little in the polling booth. Elizabeth Anderson provides a much-needed, important, and compelling account of this overlooked subject. Private Government deserves to be widely read and discussed.”—Alan Ryan, professor emeritus, University of Oxford

Editorial Reviews

"[Private Government] is a well-documented, captivating discussion that should be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner, and an excellent starting point to make that happen."

Choice

"Private Government is a welcome and important call to bring workplace governance back into political theory and discourse, and should be taken seriously if we are to promote greater democracy in the workplace."

Times Literary Supplement

"Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher on the warpath. Her Tanner Lectures . . . take aim at the unelected, arbitrary and dictatorial power that employers, particularly in the US where labour laws are flimsy, hold over their work-forces. . . . [Anderson's argument has] subtlety and force."—-Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education

"In Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson . . . explores how the discipline of work has itself become a form of tyranny, documenting the expansive power that firms now wield over their employees in everything from how they dress to what they tweet. . . . [Private Government] highlight[s] the dramatic and alarming changes that work has undergone over the past century—insisting that, in often unseen ways, the changing nature of work threatens the fundamental ideals of democracy: equality and freedom."—-Miya Tokumitsu, , The New Republic

"[Private Government] gives a clear, powerful argument for ideas that many people will have already had in only inchoate form."—-Nate Holdren, History News Network

From the Publisher