Here’s a sentence that would’ve sounded wild to me before reading this book:
Your boss has more control over your life than any elected official — and you have fewer rights in the workplace than you do in a 7-Eleven parking lot.
Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) is one of those deceptively slim books that completely recalibrates your sense of how power works. It’s not long, not flashy, and not particularly emotional. But it is absolutely devastating. And once you absorb her central thesis, it becomes impossible to unsee: the modern workplace is a pocket dictatorship, and we’ve all been taught to call that freedom.
Anderson is a philosopher, not a polemicist, so she’s careful and measured in her tone. But don’t let that fool you — this book is radical in the way a clean X-ray can be radical. It shows you the broken bone you’ve been walking around on for years and calmly explains how long it’s been broken, how everyone’s been pretending it’s fine, and how we could’ve fixed it a long time ago if we’d just been honest.
Let’s start with Anderson’s big framing move: she argues that most people in capitalist democracies live under two governments. The one we vote for, and the one we work for. And only one of them pretends to care what we think.
She defines a “government” not by whether it’s public or official, but by whether it exercises authority over people. And by that standard, a firm or corporation — especially in the U.S. — is absolutely a government. It sets rules. It enforces discipline. It controls access to resources. It can punish and expel you. And for most of us, it governs a huge chunk of our waking lives.
But here’s the kicker: it’s not a democratic government. It’s a private government. Meaning unaccountable, authoritarian, opaque. And it’s hiding in plain sight.
Anderson traces how, historically, the early defenders of free markets — people like Adam Smith or Thomas Paine — imagined a system where workers would be self-employed, or at least free to shop around for employers like consumers shop for goods. They thought markets would be a liberating force against domination.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, we got a world where most people spend most of their adult lives under the rule of bosses they didn’t elect, policies they didn’t vote on, and surveillance systems they can’t escape. And all of it is wrapped in the language of freedom, flexibility, and entrepreneurship.
One of Anderson’s strongest critiques is aimed at the way we talk about markets — especially in America. The myth goes something like this: when you enter into a job, you’re making a free, rational contract with your employer. If you don’t like the terms, you can just leave. Nobody’s forcing you.
Anderson obliterates that idea.
She points out that most employment contracts are not negotiated — they’re one-sided. You don’t get to write in clauses. You don’t have leverage unless you’re rare and highly skilled. For most people, the choice is “take it or starve.” That’s not a market — that’s coercion wrapped in a handshake.
She compares it to the old notion of a “free labor contract” under feudalism or indentured servitude. Just because something is technically voluntary doesn’t make it fair or free. Especially when the consequences of refusal are so steep.
And here’s the wild part: the same libertarians who freak out about “big government” will defend the absolute right of a boss to control what you say, what you wear, who you date, even what you post on social media outside of work. That’s not freedom. That’s just authoritarianism with an HR department.
Anderson says we’ve inherited this massive blind spot from classical liberalism — a kind of tunnel vision where the state is the only thing that counts as coercive power.
This is why we have whole legal frameworks around protecting citizens from the government, but almost none around protecting workers from their employers. We have due process in court, but not at work. We have rights to speech, religion, privacy — until we clock in.
It’s like we’ve drawn a big circle around the public sphere and said, “Here’s where democracy applies,” and then left everything else — including the thing that dominates most of our lives — to fend for itself under the invisible hand.
Anderson doesn’t buy that. She argues that if we care about freedom — real freedom — we have to look beyond the ballot box. We have to look at where people actually spend their time, where they actually get ruled, where power actually lives. And that means looking at the workplace.
Another eerie part of the book is how Anderson anticipates — or at least sharply describes — the rise of workplace surveillance before it got quite as dystopian as it is now.
She talks about how private employers can monitor your keystrokes, track your bathroom breaks, install GPS on your vehicle, or fire you for things you do on your own time. And how all of that is perfectly legal under most employment contracts. Because the default assumption in U.S. labor law is that the employer owns your time — and sometimes, your self — as long as you’re on the clock.
The logic is simple: they pay you, so they control you.
Anderson just calmly walks you through the implications of that. You don’t need to embellish it. It’s horrifying all on its own.
That’s the question in the subtitle, and it’s a good one.
Why don’t we talk about the workplace as a site of authoritarianism?
Why do we act like freedom is only about voting, or protesting, or free speech in the abstract — when the place we’re most likely to get punished for speaking out is the office?
Anderson’s answer is that we’ve been sold a very narrow definition of freedom — one that equates market participation with autonomy. So if you chose your job, you must be free, right?
She dismantles that idea piece by piece. And once it’s gone, you’re left with this huge, aching absence: a public discourse that has almost no language for workplace injustice outside of “labor rights,” and even that is treated like a niche issue.
It’s like we built this beautiful democracy, and then outsourced half our lives to little kings.
Anderson isn’t utopian, but she’s not defeatist either. She makes the case for workplace democracy — not as a fantasy, but as a logical extension of democratic principles. If we believe in self-governance, we should believe in co-governance at work.
That could look like co-determination (like in Germany), or union representation on corporate boards, or employee ownership models, or stronger protections for speech and autonomy inside firms. There are many flavors. But the key is this: stop treating the workplace as a black box.
Expose it to daylight. Subject it to scrutiny. Democratize it.
She’s not saying abolish markets. She’s saying stop confusing markets with liberty. Because liberty without accountability is just another name for domination.
This book wrecked me in the best way.
It doesn’t yell. It doesn’t rant. It doesn’t offer a listicle of hot takes. What it does is calmly reveal a kind of mass gaslighting that we’ve all been complicit in — the idea that work is neutral, that bosses are just part of life, that employment is freedom because it’s not literal slavery.
And once you sit with that, you start to realize how much of your own life has been shaped by a logic you didn’t agree to.
You start to think about all the things you didn’t say at work, the parts of yourself you left at the door, the time you gave away in exchange for the right to survive.
And you get angry. But not in a chaotic, hopeless way. In a clear-eyed, “we can build something better” way.
Anderson doesn’t just diagnose the problem. She gives you a way to talk about it — to name it, frame it, and imagine a world beyond it.
Put this book on the shelf next to The Overworked American, Bullshit Jobs, and Capitalist Realism. It’s not a call to quit your job and go feral (though, hey, no judgment). It’s a call to look around and ask: who’s in charge here, and why do we pretend it’s not a problem?
Private Government doesn’t give you hope in the sugary, motivational sense. But it gives you clarity. And sometimes, that’s the most powerful thing there is.