Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government에 대한 서평

Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government is composed of two lectures she has given in Tanner Lectures on Human Values and comments by four scholars in different fields including history, philosophy, politics and economics, with her reply to those comments. The first lecture entitled “When the market was ‘left’” deals with the vision on the market society of the egalitarians, such as the Levellers, Adam Smith, John Locke of England and Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln of America, the frustration of that vision, and the problems of current public discourse about market society. The title of the second lecture is same as that of this book, “Private Government”. The point of the second lecture is to expose the problems and harmful effects of the capitalist employment system in which capitalists or employers can and do exert a sweeping and unaccountable control over laborers’ lives both in and out of the workplace, as well as dominate them not only economically but also personally, and to suggest what is to be done. Since the messages Anderson has delivered can be regarded as somewhat challenging and troublesome, four commentators make considerable vitriolic criticism. In particular, both the criticism by Tyler Cowen and Anderson’s reply thereto, go much beyond the level of a normal academic debate and almost show mutual hostility against each other, which in turn, paradoxically, demonstrates Private Government deserves all the attention. Also, Anderson’s solution to private government that workers need some kind of institutionalized voice at work is worth listening to, even in terms of legal science.