Description
What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the work ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today.
Table of Contents
Preface; 1. The dual nature of the Protestant work ethic and the birth of utilitarianism; 2. Locke and the progressive work ethic; 3. How conservatives hijacked the work ethic and turned it against workers; 4. Welfare reform, famine, and the ideology of the conservative work ethic; 5. The progressive work ethic (1): Smith, Ricardo, and Ricardian socialists; 6. The progressive work ethic (2): J. S. Mill; 7. The progressive work ethic (3): Marx; 8. Social democracy as the culmination of the progressive work ethic; 9. Hijacked again: Neoliberalism as the return of the conservative work ethic; 10. Conclusion: What should the work ethic mean for us today?; Acknowledgments; Major works cited; Notes; Index.
