Princeton University Press
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)
Key Metrics
- Elizabeth Anderson
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691192246
- 8.4 X 5.4 X 0.7 inches
- 0.65 pounds
- Philosophy > Political
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Professor Elizabeth Anderson specializes in moral, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality.
She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, and, most recently, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It), as well as articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, feminist and social epistemology, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics (focusing on Kant, Mill, and Dewey). Professor Anderson is currently working on a history of egalitarianism.
Professor Anderson is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She designed and was the first Director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at UM.
- Education
- 1987, Ph.D., Philosophy, Harvard University
1984, A.M., Philosophy, Harvard University
1981, B.A., Philosophy with minor in Economics, High Honors, Swarthmore College
Source: University of Michigan
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