## Metadata - Author: [[Elizabeth Anderson]] - Full Title: Private Government - Category: #books ## Highlights - we must get beyond a narrow interpretation of egalitarianism in terms of current ideas about distributive justice.15 Egalitarianism, more fundamentally, is about dismantling or taming social hierarchy. ([Location 372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=372)) - Humanity’s inherent proclivities toward sin justified comprehensive external constraint. Every sinner—every person—needed someone with authority over them to keep them in line.25 Original sin rationalized absolute authority over others, and was the traditional justification for slavery. ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=411)) - Although the Levellers are mostly remembered for their constitutional demands to limit the authority of king, lords, and Parliament, and to make the state accountable to the people, their egalitarianism challenged other social hierarchies as well: the authority of the Church of England, and priests more generally, over parishioners; of men over women; of guilds and mercantile monopolies over artisans. ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=427)) - Even as the Industrial Revolution was bringing the presocialist era of egalitarian labor radicalism to an end in Europe—Chartism breathed its last gasp in 1848—the dream of a free society of equals built on independent small producers continued in the United States through the Civil War. This was the ideal on which the antebellum Republican Party was founded. Its central principle, anti-slavery, was based not so much on the moral wrong slavery inflicted on the slaves (although this was acknowledged), as it was on the threat slavery posed to the self-employed worker. The central platform of the antebellum Republican Party was to prohibit the extension of slavery in the territories. The creation of gigantic slave plantations in the territories would absorb land that would otherwise be available for free men to make it on their own as yeoman farmers, and consign them to wage labor for the rest of their lives. ([Location 708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=708)) - President Lincoln articulated the view of his party. He rejected the theory that all workers must either be wage workers or slaves—either hired or bought by capital—and, if hired, “fixed in that condition for life.” This he condemned as the “mud-sill” theory of society—the idea, advanced by proslavery Senator James Hammond of South Carolina, that every society needed an inferior class of people consigned to drudgery, on which to base civilization, just as every soundly built house needs to rest on a mudsill. ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=715)) - the Civil War, which ended slavery in the name of independent labor, ironically propelled the very forces that put the universalization of that ideal further out of reach, even for the class of white men. It was a powerful driver of industrialization, and hence of the triumph of large enterprises using the wage labor system over the small proprietor. ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=747)) - Lincoln’s disparaging judgment of wage laborers is akin to blaming those left standing in a game of musical chairs, while denying that the structure of the game has anything to do with the outcome. Thus, what began as an egalitarian ideal ended as another basis for esteem hierarchy: to raise the businessman on a higher plane than the wage worker. ([Location 755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=755)) - The Industrial Revolution shattered the egalitarian ideal of universal self-government in the realm of production. Economies of scale overwhelmed the economy of small proprietors, replacing them with large enterprises that employed many workers. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=759)) - Smith’s greatest hope—the hope shared by labor radicals from the Levellers to the Chartists, from Paine to Lincoln—was that freeing up markets would dramatically expand the ranks of the self-employed, who would exercise talent and judgment in governing their own productive activities, independent of micromanaging bosses. No wonder Smith’s optimistic representation of market relations focused on the butcher, the brewer, and the baker—all independent proprietors. Free market society could be championed as “left,” as an egalitarian cause, so long as “by far the most important”of its effects was “the liberty … of individuals … who had before lived almost in a continual state of … servile dependency upon their superiors.” ([Location 794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=794)) - Smith, who despised selfishness, disparaged the quest to accumulate vast fortunes, and cited “the disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful … [as] the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” would not have approved. ([Location 801](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=801)) - government exists wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in one or more domains of life. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=881)) - Let us not fool ourselves into supposing that the competitive equilibrium of labor relations was ever established by politically neutral market forces mediated by pure freedom of contract, with nothing but the free play of individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences determining the outcome. This is a delusion as great as the one that imagines that the workplace is not authoritarian. Every competitive equilibrium is established against a background assignment of property rights and other rights established by the state. ([Location 1148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=1148)) - Consent to an option within a set cannot justify the option set itself. ([Location 1167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B06XKGWT56&location=1167))