Rethinking Libertarianism: Elizabeth Anderson’sPrivate Government

Abstract

In her recent book, Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson makes a powerful and pragmatic case against the abuses experienced by employees in conventional corporations. The purpose of this review-essay, says the author, is to contrast Anderson's pragmatic critique of many abuses in the employment relationship with a principled critique of the relationship itself. Can we really rent ourselves to our employers? This principled critique is based on the theory of inalienable rights, a theory that was the basis for the abolition of the so-called voluntary slavery in today's democratic countries. When understood in modern terms, that same theory applies as well against the voluntary "self-rental" that is the basis for our current economic system. This essay develops certain arguments in political theory in the course of reviewing Elizabeth Anderson's interesting new book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It). The format of the book is itself noteworthy. There are two chapters by Anderson (who is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan) and one chapter each by four commentators-Ann Hughes, David Bromwich, Niki Kolodny, and Tyler Cowen-and then a closing chapter by Anderson answering her commentators. The overarching theme of the book, as the title indicates, is the governance of the workplace and what she sees as the many abuses of power by employers (or their managerial representatives). As a political philosopher, her position might be described as a classical liberal who has rethought and reacted against many of the positions held by "social justice libertarians," for example, those held by the none defined

The Inefficiency of Employment and the Case for Workplace Democracy

“…As a long-standing critic of this relationship, Ellerman (1993Ellerman ( , 2018 correctly observes 'that all the people who work in an enterprise, employees and working employers, are jointly de facto responsible for using up the other inputs and producing the products.' However, he continues with the invalid claims that 'the employer legally appropriates the whole product', and then, because workers' natural or de facto responsibility for the whole product cannot in fact be 'alienated', that the employment or 'human rental' relationship is invalid -'a legalized fraud'.…”