Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives and Why We Don’t Talk about It, By Elizabeth Anderson (2019) New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 224 pages. ISBN: 978-0-69117-651-2

Members of the labour movement and the IR community have frequently noted (and railed against) the disconnect between the status of working people as citizens of a democracy and as employees of large private enterprises. In the political arena, working people have constitutionally protected rights. They have the right to participate in the governance of the state. They have the right to elect governors who are responsible to them. When entering the workplace, however, those democratic rights melt away and those persons become subordinates, “order takers” subject to the dictates of bosses to whom their labour is a resource, a commodity, much like capital and land. The “theory of the firm”, developed by Richard Coase and widely accepted by the dominant clique of contemporary economists, insists that this situation is necessary in order to ensure the productive efficiency on which our high standard of living is based. Leading figures from that tribe admit to no inconsistency between the situation at work and political democracy. The terms of the employment contract, they argue, are the result of negotiations entered into freely between managers of the firm and individual workers who may, if they do not like what is on offer, go elsewhere. In Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson, a distinguished professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, carefully dissects that defense and poses the question: Why, when it is so patently flawed, is that justification so widely accepted? Her answer breaks new ground in our understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the contemporary labour-management relationship. Anderson takes us back to 17th century England and the thinking of the so-called Levellers. Prominent writers from that group of “independent householders of the ‘middling sort’” (p. 83) argued in favour of the free market as the road, not only to a higher standard of living but, also, to a greater level of equality and freedom. Free enterprise would break down medieval structures of domination and subordination, and lead to a better life for all, or at least for most. For about two centuries, that strategy seemed to be working. Rationalizations for a system in which everyone was subject to the largely arbitrary authority of someone over them fell away. As free enterprise advanced, the king lost “absolute authority over all of his subjects” (p. 10); the church lost much of its control of the laity; husbands were denied autocratic control over wives, children and servants. This breaking of the “great chain” of domination and subordination did not result in catastrophic disaster as had been predicted. Among those who championed the cause of the free market as an egalitarian strategy, according to Anderson, were, in addition to prominent Levellers, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith and Abraham Lincoln. In the context of a world where production operations were generally small and workers in them could look forward to opportunities to become their own boss, the theory seemed to make sense. Then, the industrial revolution happened. Its dominant effect was the emergence of the large enterprise with workforces that had to be coordinated. For this development to be economically successful, Anderson grants that managers did require considerable leeway to organize production and react effectively to contingencies as they arose. But it did not require Private Government as she, drawing on a passage in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, defines it. Here are Private Government’s critical elements (p. 37-39): almost everyone has a superior they must obey; there is no rule of law, instead orders may be arbitrary and can change at any time without prior notice or appeal; superiors are unaccountable to those “they …