Private Government

A short book based on Anderson's Tanner Lectures of 2015, with four commentaries and her reply. Anderson argues that most workers live under 'private government': employers hold wide, often arbitrary authority over them, which can reach their speech, dress, toilet breaks and life outside work. She compares many workplaces to small dictatorships. Her first lecture is historical. Early defenders of free markets, from the Levellers to Adam Smith, Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln, were egalitarians who expected markets to free people from masters by making self-employment widespread. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of large firms broke that expectation, but the language of free markets stayed. Her second lecture argues that the freedom to quit does not justify this authority, and proposes remedies such as legal protections and a voice for workers in how firms are governed. The commentators, Ann Hughes, David Bromwich, Niko Kolodny and the economist Tyler Cowen, push back in different ways.

It changes how many readers see the workplace, as a site of government and power rather than simple free exchange, and it is a concise example of egalitarian political philosophy.