Rethinking Autocracy at Work

Professor Elizabeth Anderson’s outstanding Tanner Lectures, recently published as Private Government, aim to bring the problem of workplace governance back into the exalted domain of political theory and political discourse, where it resided a century ago. Highlighting the expansive power that employers exercise over employees at and even beyond the workplace, she asks: How is it that a democratic society devoted to individual freedom came to tolerate the private outposts of autocratic rule and unfreedom in which most citizens spend their working lives? And once we recognize the conflict between workplace autocracy and ideals of democratic accountability, what is to be done?