Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It): Summary & Key Insights

Let me begin with history, for the roots of today’s workplace governments lie in the shift of meaning that accompanied liberal thought over the past three centuries. Early liberals like Adam Smith and Thomas Paine understood economic freedom as a condition of independence. The free worker was someone who owned their own tools, controlled their own labor, and answered to no master. In Smith’s time, the social ideal of the masterless man stood at the center of liberty. Yet by the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution and the proliferation of wage labor, this meaning changed. Freedom came to be equated with the mere ability to choose among employers – not with autonomy once employed.

This historical shift marks the decline of what I call republican equality in economic life. In classical republican thought, freedom meant not being subject to arbitrary power. But as economic relations became increasingly mediated by contracts, liberal theorists began treating all voluntary exchanges as inherently free, regardless of the power imbalances they created. Once one signed away their right to independent labor, the resulting subordination was no longer viewed as political. Workplaces were seen as private entities — outside the realms of democracy or civic participation.

We inherited from that period the notion that the employer’s authority is fundamentally private, shielded from scrutiny. Yet in essence, employers govern: they issue rules, monitor compliance, enforce discipline, and sometimes dismiss dissenters. Recognizing this historical transition is critical because it reveals how our concept of freedom became narrow and depoliticized. What our ancestors fought to abolish — arbitrary mastery — returned dressed in a different garment, that of corporate management. Understanding this journey allows us to see why our economic arrangements feel natural and inevitable today, and why they continue reproducing inequality under the banner of choice.

With industrial capitalism came a transformation of work that redefined human relationships. The factory system concentrated workers under hierarchical control. The autonomy of artisans gave way to the regimented pace of wage labor. This evolution brought greater productivity, but at a moral and political cost. The new discipline of industry subordinated the individual not to the market directly, but to the employer. The promise of self-directed work was replaced by compliance with corporate rules.

For many, the rise of capitalism was accompanied by a rhetoric of liberation. The merchant replaced the lord, the contract replaced the command. But the lived reality often contradicted the ideal. Within factories and offices, employees followed detailed commands governing their behavior, speech, and even beliefs. Loyalty departments monitored political expressions. Some employers dictated what workers could say on social media, whom they could date, or whether they could campaign for certain causes. This authority reaches far beyond production itself.

In tracing this evolution, I have argued that the workplace became a microcosm of governance without accountability. An employer can fire workers for reasons unrelated to performance — for their opinions, their gender identity, or their domestic choices. In political theory, such power would be considered tyrannical. Yet in the private sphere, it is normalized. Industrial capitalism thus did not deliver equal citizenship; it merely relocated the old hierarchies. Freedom exited the gates of the factory and entered only the realm of consumption, where choice meant little compared to subjection endured at work.

Recognizing this historical process helps us see that the problem is not merely economic inequality but political inequality within the structures of production. The market, far from guaranteeing autonomy, enabled new modes of domination that became invisible under the name of private enterprise.