485370

research-article2013
PTX41410.1177/0090591713485370Political TheoryGourevitch

Symposium: The Republican Inheritance Reconsidered

Political Theory
41(4) 591­–617
Labor Republicanism © 2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713485370
of Work ptx.sagepub.com

Alex Gourevitch1

Abstract
In the nineteenth century a group of “labor republicans” argued that the
system of wage-labor should be replaced by a system of cooperative
production. This system of cooperative production would realize republican
liberty in economic, not just political, life. Today, neo-republicans argue that
the republican theory of liberty only requires a universal basic income. A
non-dominated ability to exit is sufficient to guarantee free labor. This essay
reconstructs the more radical, labor republican view and defends it against
the prevailing the neo-republican one. It argues that neorepublicanism lacks
an adequate conception of structural domination, which leaves it without
theoretical resources to address certain forms of economic domination.
The concept of structural domination allows us to comprehend the
coherence of the nineteenth century, labor republican view and identify its
relevance to modern labor markets. Labor republicanism takes us beyond
a universal basic income to a concern with control over productive assets
and workplace organization. As such, it shows us how the republican theory
of liberty can support an argument for the transformation of work, not just
the escape from it.

Keywords
republicanism, republican liberty, work, freedom, non-domination, labor

1Brown University
Corresponding Author:
Alex Gourevitch, Political Science Department, Brown University, Box 1844, 36 Prospect
Street, Providence, RI 02912.
Email: [email protected]
592 Political Theory 41(4)

Recent protests on Wall Street and elsewhere might be viewed as contests

over the distribution of income. Protesters blame the 1 percent for possessing
too much, and for using their wealth to secure the passage of laws that safe-
guard their unjust accumulation. Some of the most well-known signs, dis-
playing vivid graphics of increasing inequality and declining social mobility,
express this claim about social injustice.1 However, there is another set of
signs floating around the protests that is rooted in a different concern. These
signs express a desire for a “transformed work.”2
The demand for “transformed work” or control over work activity is dif-
ferent from a call for a just distribution of income and wealth. It is an aspira-
tion for a kind of freedom that a higher income or more access to basic goods
like health care, education and housing cannot supply. In political theory, the
demand to transform work is most commonly associated with the Marxist
theory of alienation, or with New Left theories of self-realization. However,
there is another source for the demand to transform work: the republican
commitment to liberty.
That the republican theory of liberty can articulate concerns about unfree-
dom at work might seem counterintuitive. Such a view runs counter to those
critics, such as John McCormick and Daniel Kapust, who attack the republi-
can tradition as inegalitarian and aristocratic,3 as concerned primarily with
the defense of private property,4 and as historically committed to slavery.5
My claim might also surprise neo-republicans such as Philip Pettit, Quentin
Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli,6 who often elide economic issues. On the few
occasions when neo-republicans do address economic life they keep well
short of arguing for anything like transformed work.7 In fact, both critics and
neo-republicans have missed the full implications of the republican theory.
As I will show in this essay, the republican theory of liberty delivers a power-
ful critique of economic domination, and leads to arguments for various kinds
of democratic control over work. These arguments emerge most forcefully
from republicanism when we appreciate the need for a conceptual evolution
in the republican theory of liberty itself. In particular, I will show that the
republican theory can and does comprise a theory of not just personal but
structural domination. It is this theory that leads to arguments for transform-
ing work.
In making these arguments I distinguish myself from those sympathetic
critics of neo-republicanism, such as Patchen Markell and Sharon Krause,
who argue that the neo-republican theory is insufficient and who seek to
“reconstruct a political and theoretical vocabulary . . . that could thereby
serve as a supplement to the overstretched ideal of non-domination.”8 Instead,
I show that the republican theory of freedom is more expansive and demand-
ing than its most prominent defenders acknowledge. A contemporary account
Gourevitch 593

of republican liberty should include a critique of various kinds of economic

domination and thus extend to a normative concern with access to productive
resources and control over work.
I call this approach “labor republican” after a group of late nineteenth-
century American labor reformers who made the argument against structural
domination central to their demand to transform work. In the first section, I
reconstruct the labor republican argument against wage-labor and for a sys-
tem of co-operative production. This historical reconstruction gives us reason
to think that contemporary republican theory can incorporate a conception of
structural domination within its overall framework. In the second section, I
develop a more fully worked out labor republican theory and contrast it with
current, neo-republican accounts of economic non-domination. Where neo-
republicans argue that eliminating economic domination requires a basic
income, labor republicans require that we transform control over productive
assets and work activity.

Labor Republicanism in History

Why the Nineteenth Century?
The success of the republican revival has also been a limitation. Most schol-
arship has focused on the period beginning with the fifteenth-century Italian
city-states through and the transmission of Italian republicanism to seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American thinkers.9 This archaeologi-
cal exercise has transformed our understanding of the development of modern
political thought10 and has inspired the theoretical rehabilitation of republi-
can political theory.11 Unfortunately, the richness of this scholarship sanc-
tions the view that the meaningful developments in republicanism end with
the Age of Revolutions and that we learn nothing conceptually relevant about
the republican theory of liberty if we extend our understanding into the nine-
teenth century.12
This is a mistake. It means that the curtain falls just before a key set of
actors take the stage: working-class appropriators of republican ideals. Like
their predecessors, these historical actors applied inherited concepts to new
situations, thereby illuminating and resolving problems of meaning and inter-
pretation that went unnoticed in prior eras.
For instance, it is only in the early modern context that republicanism
became explicitly anti-monarchical, and a “republic” exclusively identified
with self-government.13 This conceptual development was a result of parlia-
mentarians appropriating republicanism in a way that sharpened an ambiguity—
whether republican liberty was consistent with any rule under law or with
594 Political Theory 41(4)

self-government only.14 Likewise, as we shall see, working-class appropria-

tors of republican ideals in the nineteenth century produced their own moment
of conceptual intensification when they turned to questions of economic
order rather than political form. In so doing, they drew attention to ambigui-
ties in the theory of domination and developed new ways of thinking about
republican liberty in an industrial setting. Let us turn to these new actors.

The Labor Republicans

Labor republicanism developed out of farmers’ and urban artisans’ reaction
to the rise of capitalism. Initially a response of small farmers and petty pro-
prietors to indebtedness, concentrated wealth, and financial crisis,15 over the
course of the nineteenth century it came to identify permanent wage-labor
and loss of control over productive property as the central concern.16 Of
course, as far back as Cicero, it was common to say “all those workers who
are paid for their labour and not for their skill have servile and demeaning
employment; for in their case the very wage is a contract to servitude.”17 But
such cast-off thoughts never held much significance for republicanism until
wage-laborers took hold of them in the nineteenth century. The full history of
that ideological appropriation has been told elsewhere.18 The relevant histori-
cal point here is that, while some form of “agrarianism” rooted in the indi-
vidualist, petty-proprietor tradition remained the predominant expression of
the republican critique of capitalism up through the Civil War,19 the critique
of “wage-slavery”20 gradually developed into a republican argument for the
transformation of industrial relations. This labor republican view took root in
a group of late nineteenth-century editors, reformers, and activists, concen-
trated mainly around the Knights of Labor. It is on the shoulders of this group
that this essay stands.
The Knights of Labor was the first major national political organization of
labor that, unlike its later competitor, the American Federation of Labor,
organized skilled and unskilled workers together, rather than exclusively on
a craft basis.21 Key figures included Terence Powderly, the leader of the
Knights of Labor in its heyday; George McNeill, a labor press editor; William
H. Sylvis, a labor organizer; and Ira Steward, a famous eight hours cam-
paigner. As a group, they drew attention to the contradiction between repub-
lican political forms and unfree economic relationships. For instance, George
McNeill worried that “our rulers, statesmen and orators have not attempted to
engraft republican principles into our industrial system.”22 It was, in particu-
lar, the dependence of permanent wage-laborers that they found incompatible
with republican freedom. Any serious application of republican principles to
the “industrial system” produced the conclusion that “there is an inevitable
Gourevitch 595

and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican
system of government.”23 In the words of Ira Steward, the condition of wage-
laborers called for “a republicanization of labor, as well as a republicaniza-
tion of government.”24 The only solution was “to abolish as rapidly as
possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore.”25
What set the labor republicans apart from earlier republican critics of
capitalism was their attempt to reorganize rather than reject industrialize
life. The scale and collective character of industrial production appeared to
mean a loss of the ideal of independent proprietorship even as it heralded
the rise of a permanently dependent wage-labor class. As historian Leon
Fink puts it, “the fact that by 1870 two-thirds of the American workforce
were hirelings posed a stark ideological dilemma for a culture in which the
lack of property and independence was associated with slavery or ‘wage
slavery.’”26 The ideological dilemma was whether an increasingly indus-
trial economy could offer the prospect of independence to all, or merely to
a few property-owners.
Labor republicans responded to this challenge by elaborating a critique of
the new forms of economic domination of industrial capitalism. There were
at least two features to this economic domination or “wage-slavery.” Inside
the workplace, they found their choices about the work activity to be subject
to the arbitrary interference of new masters—bosses and owners. This sub-
jection expressed itself not only in individual cases of harassment and abuse,
though that mattered, but also through organization of the workplace accord-
ing to rules that laborers themselves had little influence in shaping. Terence
Powderly articulated this complaint in its typical form:

The village blacksmith shop was abandoned, the road-side shoe shop was deserted,
the tailor left his bench, and all together these mechanics turned away from their
country homes and wended their way to the cities wherein the large factories had
been erected. The gates were unlocked in the morning to allow them to enter, and
after their daily task was done the gates were closed after them in the evening.27

The reorganization of work “separated specific tasks hitherto the responsibil-

ity of one artisan among teams of workers,”28 meaning work had become an
integrated social process, unlike the autarkic autonomy of the idealized
farmer or artisan of the early radical agrarians.29 These conditions drove fig-
ures like Powderly to condemn the new order as one that was “making slaves
of men who proudly, but thoughtlessly, boast of their freedom—that freedom
which they claim came down to us from revolutionary sires as a heritage. . . .
Are we the free people that we imagine we are?”30
596 Political Theory 41(4)

Labor republicans connected domination at work with a second, wider

form of what we can call structural domination. Lacking access to land or
tools, increasing numbers found themselves forced to sell their labor to
employers to earn a living. Most immediately, this manifested itself in low
wages and long hours. Bad on its own, this poverty reflected the underlying
subjection of laborers to employers—a subjection to which they gave the
name “wage-slavery.” This slavery was not that of the chattel slave, who is
directly and legally dependent on a particular owner. Labor republicans were
proudly aware of their formal, legal freedom and saw it as a constituent fea-
ture of full independence. Yet they believed the distribution of property meant
that they lacked reasonable alternatives to selling their labor to their employ-
ers and thus made them slaves in the relevant, republican sense.
For instance, an article titled “Wages Slavery and Chattel Slavery” pub-
lished in the Journal of United Labor, the Knights’ official press, asserted
that “when a man is placed in a position where he is compelled to give the
benefit of his labor to another, he is in a condition of slavery, whether the
slave is held in chattel bondage or in wages bondage, he is equally a slave.”31
Despite their legal ownership of their bodies, the unequal control over pro-
ductive assets forced those without such property to sell themselves to
some employer or another. As George McNeill put it, workers in a labor
contract “assent but they do not consent, they submit but do not agree.”32
Through this distinction between voluntary “assent” and economic inde-
pendence labor republicans attempted to grasp this new form of domina-
tion. Though nobody’s legal property, wage-laborers were still forced to
sell their labor to someone else. The complexity of their situation, then, was
that they were dominated by a number of agents, but not any single, given
agent in particular.
It was only once the economic sphere was differentiated from private and
political life as a domain of free individual exchange, marked by the buying
and selling of labor, that this analysis of the wage-laborer’s dependence
became possible. Earlier republicans, from Cicero to Jefferson,33 condemned
wage-labor simply by assimilating it to slavery rather than by viewing it as a
distinct and novel form of unfreedom. In these prior periods, wage-labor
existed mostly in the interstices and pockets of the economy, not as a settled
condition of an entire class. For labor republicans, on the other hand, wage-
labor was the condition of the mass of republican citizens.
It was not just their identification of structural domination and its connec-
tion to unfreedom at work that distinguished labor republicans, but also their
emphasis on co-operation as the republican solution. When arguing for the
virtues of co-operation, they did not reject the large-scale, collective charac-
ter of the modern economy but sought instead to realize the potentials
Gourevitch 597

immanent to it. The cooperative system included the use of public power to
regulate employment, through maximum hours laws, nationalize transporta-
tion and communication, and redistribute land, credit, and property to support
the creation of cooperatively owned and run stores and industries.34 As stated
in the Journal of United Labor “integral co-operation is the whole or com-
plete organization of production and distribution for the benefit of the whole
body of those concerned in the production . . . the members of which employ-
ing their own labor and consuming their own products would be self-sustain-
ing, therefore independent of the money-market and of the wage-market.”35
Cooperation required both that the democratic state use its power to alter the
distribution of control over productive assets and that workers control enter-
prises themselves. As one labor republican put it, the aim of cooperative pro-
duction was so that “each man can feel that he is a proprietor; when he can
feel that he is working for himself and not for a master; when he can feel and
know that his brain and muscle weighs equally in the scale.”36 Terence
Powderly made the link between independence and productive control
explicit: “the method by which we hope to regain our independence . . . [is]
by embarking in a system of COOPERATION which will eventually make
every man his own master—every man his own employer.”37 Though the
nerve of the argument remained securing the independence of each citizen,
labor republicans no longer identified independence with the individual pro-
prietor or earlier agrarianism. Rather, the cooperative ideal secured indepen-
dence in terms consistent with large-scale industrial production: through
equal control of work activity and productive assets. This was what it meant
to “engraft republican principles into our industrial system.”38
The labor republican response to their historical circumstances produced a
reflexive moment in the republican tradition. Labor republicans identified an
ambiguity or undertheorized aspect of the republican theory itself. The
Roman law presents servitude as a condition of direct, personal, and legal
subjection to another. To be a slave, on the Roman view, is “not to be sui iuris
but instead to be sub potestate, under the power or subject to the will of some-
one else.”39 Servitude is a legal status that “consists in rightlessness and sub-
jection to dominion.”40 Too quick a reading of the Roman law of slavery can
make servitude appear merely as a dyadic relation between a particular mas-
ter and a particular slave. As we shall see, something like that narrow inter-
pretation of the Roman view influences the contemporary, neo-republican
theory of liberty and limits its sensitivity to structural domination. However,
the original master–slave relation was the product of a legal and economic
structure, itself supported by many agents. This structural dimension of dom-
ination remained buried historically until the rise of industrial capitalism
brought a distinct economic sphere of formally free laborers into existence,
598 Political Theory 41(4)

and when those laborers politicized their dependence on employers. Since

current republican theory has not attended to this period, it has missed the
conceptual possibilities for thinking about work and economy that these
labor republicans inspire.

Labor Republicanism in Theory

The labor republicans were not, in the first instance, theoreticians. They were
actors. But we can make good theoretical sense of their discursive practices.
Briefly restated, labor republicans analyzed economic unfreedom as a condi-
tion of domination at work and of structural economic domination. The for-
mer involved subjection to specific employers, the latter, however, was not
linked to the intentional interference of any particular individual. Rather, it
was a function of power that owners and employers possessed simply in vir-
tue of the unequal distribution of control over productive assets. This left
workers no alternative but to sell their labor. In this sense, they were structur-
ally dominated by owners. The labor republican theory of economic non-
domination entailed equal rights of residual control over work and for equal
control over productive assets. To be sure, labor republicans did not frame
their criticisms using the words “domination at work” and “structural domi-
nation,” nor did they present their demands as “equal rights of residual con-
trol over the workplace” and “equal control over productive assets.” But these
concepts can help us specify the character of their republican theory.
One way to appreciate the force and substance of the labor republican
view is to develop its formal properties in contrast to the current, neo-republican
theory of liberty and economic domination. Although a few commentators,
like Gerald Gaus, have accused neo-republicanism of presenting us with a
“postsocialist critique of the moral legitimacy of the market,”41 its actual pre-
scriptions are surprisingly limited. Neo-republicans make no argument for
collective ownership of the means of production or democratic control over
productive assets. As I shall contend, this prescriptive narrowness stems from
too narrow a conception of domination. The labor republican theory, in con-
trast, presents us with a more compelling and comprehensive view.

Neo-republicanism and the Limits of Basic Income

In Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government Philip Pettit writes
that “a republican state [that] is committed to advancing the cause of free-
dom as non-domination among its citizens . . . must embrace a policy of
promoting socioeconomic independence.”42 Elsewhere Pettit and others43
have argued that a universal basic income is the best way of guaranteeing
Gourevitch 599

this socioeconomic independence. The reason is that, although workers have

a legal right to quit, they might sometimes be so economically dependent on
an employer that they are still subject to him. For instance, when there are
“few employers and many available employees” workers will be so depen-
dent on a specific employer for a job that they cannot “command a decent
wage” and “would be defenseless against . . . employers’ petty abuse.”44
Their economic need makes them so dependent on their employer that he
exercises arbitrary power over the terms of the contract and working condi-
tions. This condition of subjection to a particular individual, on neo-republi-
can terms, counts as domination. A basic income supplies the economic
means “to leave employment and fall back on a basic wage available uncon-
ditionally from the state.”45 This materially supported ability to exit avoids
“wage-slavery”46 and secures roughly equal bargaining power in the labor-
contract itself.
Notice how Pettit’s interpretation of economic domination is more mini-
mal than the labor republican account. Pettit insists that the republican theory
has nothing specific to say about control over productive assets or work
activity because a basic income is adequate to secure economic non-domina-
tion. Property distributions and workplace control are outside the theory. So
long as each individual makes non-dominated contracts, “the property system
. . . will not be a source of domination so far as it is the cumulative, unin-
tended effect of people’s mutual adjustments.”47 Moreover, though Pettit
defends a universal basic income, it is evident that he does not want to say
that everyone ought to receive this income without working, or on conditions
that allow them to escape ever having to sell their labor. Pettit nowhere dis-
cusses in any systematic way how the basic income is maintained and
assumes those able to work should have to work.48 It is therefore reasonable
to infer that Pettit does not think the basic income ought to be substantial
enough that individuals can withdraw from the labor market completely and
indefinitely. In other words, workers should not be allowed to escape the
structural compulsion to work in some employment or another. In all, then,
the neo-republican theory of economic non-domination has no first-order
views about control over productive assets nor is it inclined to read the tradi-
tional concern with “wage-slavery” as a concern with the nature of the work
activity itself. So long as the laborers are not dominated in the moment of
contracting, a republican theory of freedom is indifferent to the background
structure of control over productive assets and to what kinds of control labor-
ers exercise over the work activity.
There is a deep theoretical reason for Pettit’s exclusive concern with the
contractual relationship. On the neo-republican theory of “freedom as non-
domination”49 domination is defined as the “power of interference on an
600 Political Theory 41(4)

arbitrary basis.”50 We are unfree not when we are actually interfered with, but
when we are subject to this arbitrary power to interfere. Important for our
discussion is that this “power of interference” carries an intentionality require-
ment: “interference . . . always has to be more or less intentional in charac-
ter.”51 This is where the neo-republican argument begins to separate from the
labor republican view. Pettit interprets intentionality to mean only when the
dominator knowingly (or foreseeably) can worsen a dominated person’s
choices. An agent interferes intentionally when he knows, or at least ought to
have known, that he has the power to interfere in the choices of a known,
specific agent. Hence Pettit concludes that “I do not interfere with you . . . just
through doing something that has the unforeseen effect of hindering you. Nor
do I generally interfere with you just through allowing such an obstacle to get
in your way.”52 It is this idea that lies behind the conclusion that “the property
system . . . will not be a source of domination so far as it is the cumulative,
unintended effect of people’s mutual adjustments.”53 Since the overall distri-
bution of property is unintentional, whatever obstacles it places in the way of
a person’s life plans—such as forcing him to sell his labor rather than find
some other means of living—do not compromise that person’s freedom.
The labor republican view takes a broader view of domination, both in
terms of the relevant agents and the relevant sense of intentionality. One way
to grasp the labor republican view is to begin with the thought that neo-repub-
licans base their view about the intentionality of dominating agents on a nar-
row reading of the Roman law of slavery. Recall that, according to the Roman
law, a slave is unfree he is “sub potestate, under the power or subject to the
will of someone else.” This condition of is a formal, legal status—sub potes-
tate, under another’s power. The legal standing of the slave appears to single
out the relevant, dominating will (the particular master’s) and to define the
scope of intention (with respect to the knowable choices of a particular ser-
vant). On one reading, an agent dominates when that agent knows the conse-
quences of his actions and knows the particular agent with whose choices his
actions will interfere. To be subject is not merely to be affected by choices or
decisions, but affected in a way that the agent could have predicted. Hence
subjection must always in some way be personal subjection, because only in
that way can the dominator have intentions towards the subjected person. As
Pettit puts it, only when a particular employer can interfere with a known
employee does that employer dominate: “in a well-functioning labor market
. . . no one would depend on any particular master and so no one would be at
the mercy of a master: he or she could move on to employment elsewhere in
the event of suffering arbitrary interference.”54 A person is only in position to
interfere rather than merely affect someone’s choices if they can have inten-
tions about that particular person’s choices. Thus domination is always and
Gourevitch 601

only by particular masters. This view is a vivid example of the transposition

of a narrow reading of the Roman master–slave relation onto a modern labor
market. But it is inadequate.

Beyond Basic Income: Structural Domination and Productive

Assets
The labor republican objection to this view begins with the claim that neo-
republicanism is grounded on a misreading of the situation of the classical
Roman slave. To be sure, in the classical republics, there is a master and a
slave. But there are actually two kinds of dominating relationships, with dif-
fering agents and degrees of intentionality, collapsed into the classical master–
slave relationship. One relation is the interpersonal one between master and
slave. The other is the relation of the slave to the “many masters” (Roman
citizens) who create and sustain the legal order. In Rome it was this legal
order that not only granted power to the master to dominate the slave, but
which also ensured that the slave had no other options but to remain enslaved.
Of course, Roman citizens had no knowledge of and no direct hand in deter-
mining which specific slave would be subject to which specific master. But
they intentionally created and maintained the institution of slavery. They did
so by supporting the law of persons, of which “the first division is into free
men and slaves” and which asserts that “slavery is an institution of the law of
nations.”55 They also engaged in various social practices—such as the cap-
ture and punishment of runaway slaves, laws limiting or banning slave own-
ership of property, or the use of selective emancipation of slaves to discipline
them—to maintain the social order required to stabilize the institution of
slavery.56 These citizens were dominating agents at a different order of inten-
tionality from the master. They knowingly (or foreseeably) maintained the
law and institution of slavery. They acted with the intention of creating legal
and economic obstacles that left no reasonable option to slaves but their
enslavement. Slaves were thus dominated by these “many masters.” These
many masters created a structure of relations that bound a slave not just to a
master’s will but also to their will.
Thus, when it comes to the original relationship of freedom–unfreedom on
which neo-republicans base their theory—the Roman law of persons—they
have been too narrow in interpreting what counts as intentional interference
and thus by whom a person can be dominated. To be fair, the “structural”
aspects of the Roman relationship—the many masters—is less immediately
visible than the mastery of the specific slave-owner. It is only when an econ-
omy emerges in which the master–slave relation is formally abolished, and
602 Political Theory 41(4)

wage-labor takes its place, that a need for any further theoretical elaboration
of these structural relations of domination appears necessary.
It is here that the concept of structural domination must be introduced. The
labor republican view is that a form of domination arises when there is an
unequal structure of control over productive assets. Specifically, this domina-
tion appears when this structure is so unequal that some group of owners
privately controls all of society’s productive assets. Those who do not own
are economically dependent on employers for jobs, wages, and thus their
livelihoods. Non-owners are thereby forced by the legally protected distribu-
tion of productive assets to sell their labor to some employer or another. Non-
owners are forced in the sense that they have no reasonable alternative to
selling their labor: they cannot steal, they cannot rely on the charity of those
with wealth, and even if some can become owners not all can. This is what
labor republicans meant when they said workers “assent but they do not con-
sent, they submit but do not agree”57 to the wage-labor contract. Under condi-
tions of structural domination, the labor contract is voluntary but not free; the
contract reflects a voluntary agreement, but laborers do not sell their labor
freely.58 As labor republicans put it, a worker is “driven, from necessity”59 to
sell his labor to an employer.
A reason for calling this structural domination is that the unfreedom of
the laborer is not a product of his situation vis-à-vis a specific employer, but
rather of his dependence on some employer or another for livelihood.
Unlike the classic slave, the worker is not forced to work for a particular
employer, and may not be subject to that particular employer’s will. It is the
absence of reasonable alternatives to selling one’s labor that guarantees
propertyless workers have to sell their labor to some employer or another.
That absence of alternatives is created by the distribution of control over
productive assets, a distribution that is secured by legal protection of pri-
vate ownership. Of course, the owners who defend these property rights do
not have to intend that any specific employee work for a specific employer,
nor have intentions about the specific conditions of that employment. All
that owners need to intend is to defend the unequal, private ownership of
productive assets. But this is an intention that all owners have, consciously
insofar as they actively defend it or foreseeably insofar as a defense of pri-
vate ownership, and the unequal distribution that ensues, is a necessary
presupposition of any owner’s use of his productive assets. To be clear,
owners do not need to intend the exact, empirical distribution of control
over productive assets. They need only intend that property rights be
respected even if the overall distribution of control over productive assets
means that some will be forced to sell their labor to others. So, like the
Roman slave in relation to the “many masters” who defend the law of
Gourevitch 603

slavery, so too the wage-laborer in relation to the owners intending the legal
defense of the distribution of private property.
Although the compulsion of the worker is the paradigmatic case of struc-
tural domination, it is not only workers who find themselves subject to deci-
sions by owners of productive assets. Consider, for example, the decision
about where to locate a car factory. Such a decision not only affects those
who are already employed, but also those who could benefit from employ-
ment. Since all communities need some source of employment, they are
dependent upon the decision of some employer or set of employers for their
survival. For instance, whether a plant decides to locate in downtown Detroit
or the suburbs of Atlanta has a lot to do with state labor, tax, and environmen-
tal law, as well as local union practices and wage demands. Simply that a
plant might locate—or leave—puts pressure on the local population to alter
its political and economic behavior. Race-to-the-bottom decisions regarding
tax codes and environmental laws, as well as special subsidies on real estate
and exemptions from labor laws are familiar moves that cities, counties, and
states—even countries—make in order to attract investment.
Activity in which groups of individuals alter their behavior in order to
curry favor with those wielding disproportionate power is precisely the “ten-
dency of the enslaved to act with slavishness” that republicans despise.60 It
is the kind of behavior that vivifies the condition of subjection to arbitrary
power. But note, these acts of economic prostration are not attempts to
please a particular firm or employer but “firms” or “employers” as such.61
That is what makes this scenario different from the one that Pettit models in
which a single employer dominates the labor market and is able, in virtue of
his monopsony, to treat workers as if they were slaves. The dominated agents
(workers, communities) are not subject to a particular firm; indeed, there
may not even be a specific firm in mind when certain laws are passed to
attract investment. Nevertheless, there is still real domination here, arising
from the fact that laborers and the wider community must attract investment
in order to survive—and then keep that employment once the investment is
made. They are subject to a power that owners exercise in a way that may
appear unintentional.

Some Objections to the Concept of Structural Domination

Neo-republicans might object that the labor republican view works with too
expansive a conception of domination, one that makes the very fact of our
interdependence a source of unfreedom. For instance, Philip Pettit argues that
604 Political Theory 41(4)

I may be dependent on others for access to some of the things necessary for a
decent quality of life without necessarily being dominated by them. I may not be
dependent on any given individual or group, for example—my dependence may be
anonymous, as it were—and so may not be exposed to domination by any agent in
particular.62

The reasonable thought is that independence cannot mean radical economic

autarky, a romantic, agrarian republican view out of step with the modern
economy. The other reasonable thought is that domination is not mere depen-
dence but subjection to particular wills. Subjection requires unequal depen-
dence of one person on another, whether his inequality of power is a product
of legal status or economic need. The virtue of a modern labor market, assum-
ing each laborer has a basic income supporting his ability to exit, is that it
prevents our “anonymous” interdependence from becoming a source of per-
sonal subjection. Recall Pettit’s view that “in a well-functioning labor market
. . . no one would depend on any particular master and so no one would be at
the mercy of a master: he or she could move on to employment elsewhere in
the event of suffering arbitrary interference.”63 Here, then, is why the neo-
republicans insist on viewing domination as personal subjection. If we
expand our definition of domination to include other kinds of agents beyond
personal masters then we run the risk of collapsing the distinction between
unintended consequences and intentional interference. That, in turn, threat-
ens to transform our anonymous interdependence, our very social existence,
into domination. Then nobody could be truly free. Worse, this over-extension
of the concept of domination wins us the ability to say everybody is unfree at
the expense of being able to identify any particular conditions of unfreedom.
We lose the trees for the forest.
Happily, this is not the labor republican view. Structural domination is an
intermediate condition between personal subjection and anonymous interde-
pendence. It is a concept that explains how unequal control over productive
assets converts anonymous interdependence into the domination of wage-
laborers by owners without this domination taking the form of personal sub-
jection. After all, neo-republicans agree that any kind of compelled labor is
dominated labor. That is why, for instance, Pettit supports an unconditional
basic income. However, as mentioned previously, Pettit must assume that the
basic income he calls for is insufficient to allow workers to withdraw from
the labor market indefinitely. It must be low enough that at least as much
work is performed as is necessary to sustain a basic income for everyone—
plus all additional social requirements. This, however, means that economic
compulsion arising from the structural domination of wage-laborers remains.
Laborers are still forced to work for the class that controls society’s
Gourevitch 605

productive assets, even if any given laborer is relatively free to leave any
given job. Being free to leave any particular job does not address the ability
to avoid being forced to sell one’s labor to another. What distinguishes anon-
ymous interdependence from structural domination, then, is that the interde-
pendence is systematically or “structurally” unequal when one section of
society controls all of the productive assets. The labor republican view there-
fore is not a critique of our interdependence but of how that interdependence
is organized.
Note that the labor republican objection to structural domination is not
related to particular economic outcomes but to the kinds of power to which
it subjects individuals. After all, employers could choose to make hiring,
investment, and production decisions on a cooperative basis and include
consultation with local communities. Owners could even hand over deci-
sions on the day-to-day operations to a workers’ collective itself. In fact, any
particular owner seized with the fever of republican freedom could, as John
Stuart Mill once hoped, simply “lend their capital to the associations [of
workers] . . . and at last, perhaps, even . . . exchange their capital for termi-
nable annuities,” thus creating an economy of workers’ cooperatives.64
Significantly, though, that owners could do this only further illuminates the
degree to which they dominate non-owners. It is all at their whim. The deci-
sion about whether to give workers equal control over productive assets is
arbitrary, a matter of each owner’s discretion, not a matter of the equal, and
thus non-dominated, relations among individuals. This is a characteristic
feature of domination itself—not that the master interferes, but that some are
subject to the possibility of interference, regardless of whether that interfer-
ence is philanthropic or self-interested. The master might only interfere in
beneficial ways, including emancipating his slave, but that makes the slave’s
emancipation subject to the master’s discretion. So too, on the structural
domination analysis, the distribution of control over productive assets is
dependent on the discretionary will of many private owners, not on control
rights that individuals equally possess.
A virtue of the foregoing analysis is that it allows us to meet a class of
further objections that anti-republican critics might raise to the concept
of structural domination. A critic might say that I have been describing a kind
of unfreedom, but that it is not republican unfreedom. It may very well be
true that the lack of reasonable alternatives to selling one’s labor means that
workers are forced to sell their labor, but this is not a kind of compulsion that
a republican theory can comprehend. There are several reasons why a repub-
lican theory might not comprehend structural domination. One would be
either that structural domination is a theory of domination without agents, or
a theory that imputes intentionality and agency to structures. Both positions
606 Political Theory 41(4)

are inconsistent with republicanism because the latter necessarily connects

domination to the agency of persons. But neither of these objections works
because I am not claiming that a structure can have intentions or doing the
dominating, but rather that there are dominating agents who dominate by
creating certain structures through intentional actions. Nevertheless, one
might still insist that the appeal to “structural domination” gives away the
game because it suggests we need some theory of how agents are bearers of
structures, not merely intentional actors. As Sharon Krause has put it, there
are forms of unfreedom that emerge from “patterns of social interaction that
are fully human . . . but are nevertheless largely unintentional at the individ-
ual level.”65 Or, as Patchen Markell has argued, the appeal to this form of
unfreedom that I am calling “structural” reveals that we need to supplement
the theory of domination rather than expand it. We need, for instance, the
concept of “usurpation” to complement “domination” in order to grasp the
ways in which valuable choices can be displaced such that we lack important
freedoms even when not dominated.66 For either of these sympathetic critics,
the thought is that “there are other threats” to freedom besides domination,
and focusing only on domination leaves us unable “to recognize and respond
to instances of unfreedom such as these.”67
Powerful as these criticisms are in exposing the limits of neo-republican-
ism, they fall with less force on the labor republican view. That is because the
idea of structure in “structural domination” does not contrast structure to
agency. Rather, the concept of structural domination is distinguishable from
the category of direct, personal domination with which neo-republicanism
exclusively works, and it also captures something of the phenomenology of
this form of republican unfreedom. Structural domination appears as anony-
mous and unintentional, even beyond social control, because there are only
voluntary agreements. The actual distribution of control over productive
assets seems just as Pettit describes—the unintentional outcomes of mutual
adjustments. And the compulsion of workers appears to lack agents. But it is,
in fact, maintained through the intentional actions of many owners, and not
just intentional actions in the way all actions are in some way intentional, but
rather in the sense that the background structures are necessary conditions for
the specific intentions owners have as owners. To be sure, their intentionality
operates at a level that does not specify where each specific individual falls
in this distribution of control. But that is part of the point of the structural
character of the domination. This kind of social domination can be exercised
without having to specify which subjects will be bound to which masters.68
Non-owners are accorded a degree of freedom. Indeed, the kind of structural
domination with which labor republicanism is concerned would not function
Gourevitch 607

without the qualified freedom of the wage-laborer. There would be no labor

contracts without that freedom.
The concept of structural domination illuminates why it is wrong to argue
that a basic income is sufficient to guarantee economic freedom, and why it
is wrong for neo-republicans to claim that “the property system . . . will not
be a source of domination so far as it is the cumulative, unintended effect of
people’s mutual adjustments.”69 The property system can be a source of dom-
ination, given a certain distribution of productive assets. It can be a source of
domination in part because we can identify the agents and relevant intentions
that secure this distribution, even if nobody has an intention about the exact
distribution that exists at any given moment.

Structural Domination and the Transformation of Work

The concern with structural domination and the proposal for co-operative
control over work are the most distinctive conceptual features of labor repub-
licanism. In the foregoing discussion I presented the concept of structural
domination in arid, analytic terms in order to redeem the republican view
from the theoretical limitations of current debates. But for labor republicans,
structural domination was no abstract idea or disembodied imperative, it was
a part of the daily experience of work. Structural domination would have
been of less interest otherwise. By identifying the structural character of
labor’s dependence, labor republicans could explain why workers were sub-
ject to the commands of bosses and why they found themselves pitted against
each other. Structural domination also explained why nothing short of a
structural change in control of productive assets could fully transform work.70
It was difficult to conceive of how free conditions at work could be secured
without addressing the overall distribution of control over productive assets.
Transformation of work was a total social process. “Co-operation” was both
a systemic ideal of ownership and control and an ethical principle for the
organization of the workplace.
In their commitment to co-operation, labor republicans alert us to a fur-
ther limit of the neo-republican focus on non-dominated contracts: the prob-
lem of workplace domination. Recall Powderly speaking mournfully about
how “the gates were unlocked in the morning” to let wage-slaves in. The
issue here is that contracts can never fully specify the nature of the job. They
are necessarily vague, spelling out pay, hours, and benefits in exchange for
workers ceding control over their activity.71 This raises the question of who
possesses residual authority to specify those underdetermined terms and
conditions of employment. In Terence Powderly’s day, the loss of control
over the job was reflected in the speeding up of work, dangerous working
608 Political Theory 41(4)

conditions, and distribution of tasks. But disputes about “the job” can be
very wide-ranging. Are the political views, Facebook postings, off-hours
recreational activities, and health conditions of employees a reasonable
basis for being fired?72 Is it part of the job to be required to pee in a cup for
drug-testing but also be denied bathroom breaks?73 Can a worker be denied
the right to read a newspaper during lunch?74 Should employees have to
listen to the political opinions and participate in political activities of their
employers, or is this irrelevant to the employment relationship?75 If an
employer controls these decisions then workers are personally subject to his
will. The employer may be benevolent or malevolent, he might monitor
lunch breaks or not, but it is at his whim how to exercise his power. This is
why labor republicans thought that loss of control over work was loss of
independence. They were not only structurally dominated, but once the con-
tract was made, they were also personally dominated at work. As labor
republicans knew well, but current theorists elide, work is a continuous,
dynamic process, over which authoritative control is exercised regularly, not
determined by a one-off contractual agreement. That control can be orga-
nized in dominating or non-dominating ways.
A neo-republican might argue that a basic income increases the worker’s
bargaining power in such disputes because the worker can threaten to leave a
job. But this threat is often either not credible or inadequate. It cannot com-
pensate for all of the costs of leaving a job76 and threatening to leave a job is
a kind of nuclear option that is simply not credible in many low-level dis-
agreements. If the threat to leave is not credible, then the worker does not
have equal power relative to the boss. In other words, exit is an inadequate
substitute for voice. Yet neo-republicans pass over this problem. They tacitly
assume bosses enjoy residual control over disputed workplace issues—back-
handedly re-affirming a form of subjection rather than criticizing it. The
vagueness of contracts, coupled with the standard assumption that employers
should decide those issues, is a key moment at which structural domination
translates into personal domination at work.
The labor republican ideal of co-operation directly addresses the problem
of residual authority at work, and the fact that work is not just a relationship
between an individual and his tools, but also an intersubjective relationship.
Indeed, from a labor republican standpoint, the current desire for a “trans-
formed work” is not just an abstract, utopian aspiration for new ways of
organizing production, but a very concrete response to the actual modalities
of domination of the contemporary workplace. That is how we can interpret
the numerous aforementioned, sometimes quite contentious, controversies
about things like expressing political views at work, lunch break activities,
and Facebook postings. So long as bosses possess residual authority over
Gourevitch 609

defining the job and controlling the workplace, not only is each worker sub-
ject to the employer’s will, but each worker is pitted against each other. So
long as there is unequal control of productive assets, bosses will be able to
retain their residual authority. But if each possesses equal control over the
workplace, or “co-operates” as labor republicans put it, no single individual
can arbitrarily make the decisions affecting each other—a republic at the
level of the firm. As Henry Demarest Lloyd, another labor republican, put it
in his appropriately titled Wealth Against Commonwealth, “there is to be a
people in industry, as in government.”77 There is no space here to give any
precision to this view of the “cooperative commonwealth,” in part because it
would depend upon decisions made by workers themselves. But it would
involve a mixture of control rights at the national and local, firm level. At the
very least, it would include democratic control over productive assets and
equal worker control over the conditions and processes of work.

Conclusion: The Moral Dimension of Transforming

Work
It must be emphasized that the labor republican principle of co-operative
ownership and control was the legal expression of a wider view of moral and
social change. This change was intimately tied to the belief that only the col-
lective efforts of workers themselves could realize a new social order.78 As
William Sylvis regularly insisted “But let us not forget that success depends
upon our efforts. ‘It is not what is done for people, but what people do for
themselves, that acts upon their character and condition.’”79 At one level,
this emphasis on worker agency reflected a political judgment about what it
would take to introduce these changes. Current owners would not voluntarily
give up their property. A view running back to the earliest days of labor
republicanism held that only the political action of the dependent classes was
likely to create and preserve a republican society.80
But beyond this political judgment lay an aspiration that speaks directly to
how we began this essay—the desire for a transformed work. If work could
not be eliminated, it could at least be organized in a way that expressed the
contribution of each to a joint effort. This did not mean subordination of the
individual to the collective so much as a change in his relationship to his fel-
lows. As Lloyd put it, “Men’s expanding powers of co-operation bring them
to the conscious ability to unite for new benefits; but this extension of indi-
viduality is forbidden in the name of individuality.”81 Rather than each com-
peting with each other “in the name of individuality” while also struggling
against his employer, each would recognize the freedom of all fellow laborers
610 Political Theory 41(4)

as a condition for his own. Otherwise, still operating with the view that he
was in competition with others, each worker would simply instrumentalize
his new powers for his own advantage, narrowly conceived. The ethical
dimension of this view is that it requires not just new laws or types of eco-
nomic organization but new desires and forms of human solidarity. It requires
that we see others not as the obstacle to our own achievement nor even just as
equally important contributors to social life, but as potential “co-operators,”
as fellows in a joint enterprise. Hence the new property and labor laws must
grow out of the social activity and political efforts of those lacking the desired
freedom.
Here the defense of republican liberty links the absence of domination to
the creation of new cultural, not just legal, relationships. Individual freedom
depends upon spontaneous recognition of equal interdependence. These rela-
tions leave the individual free from domination and free to exercise will and
judgment in new ways, together with others. Even to the contemporary mind
the labor republican position is unsettling and demanding. All the better for a
time when we search for new ideals. Perhaps the ideas of a vigorous, self-
organizing political movement from the not-so-distant past can contribute to
the current attempt to rethink the way we work.

Acknowledgment
I would like to thank the following for their comments on drafts of this paper:
Daniela Cammack, Prithviraj Dhatta, Isabelle Ferreras, David Grewal, Pablo
Gilabert, Javier Hidalgo, Sean Ingham, Sharon Krause, Matthew Landauer, Charles
Larmore, Tamara Metz, Peter Ramsay, Genevieve Rousseliere, Emma Saunders-
Hasting, Lucas Stanczyck, John Tomasi, Kevin Vallier, Daniel Viehoff, and two
anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Notes
 1. The graphic can be found here at http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/
income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph.
  2. For instance, http://zunguzungu.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/work.jpg.
Gourevitch 611

  3. Eric Ghosh, “From Republican to Liberal Liberty,” History of Political Thought

29, no. 1 (2008); Daniel Kapust, “Skinner, Pettit and Livy: The Conflict of the
Orders and the Ambiguity of Republican Liberty,” History of Political Thought
25, no. 3 (2004); Graham Maddox, “The Limits of Neo-Roman Liberty,”
History of Political Thought 23, no. 3 (2002); John P. McCormick, “Machiavelli
against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's ‘Guicciardinian Moments,’”
Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003).
  4. Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 1–18, 49–86. I should note that Nelson is not a critic of
the Roman republican tradition, though he does identify it with a defense of pri-
vate property that is aristocratic in origin.
  5. Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin Books,
1992); Moses Finley, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 6, no. 3 (1964); Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea
at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1968), 1–31. On the early modern connection between repub-
lican liberty and slavery, see Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders
Made (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 165–94; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery,
American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of
American Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2010), 79–93.
  6. In this essay, I will use neo-Roman and neo-republican interchangeably. On the
neo-Roman theory, see John W. Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World
(Oxford: Polity, 2003); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom
and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Quentin Skinner,
“Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,” in Republicanism and Political
Theory, ed. Cecil Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Quentin
Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998); Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
A helpful summary can be found at Cecil Laborde and John Maynor, “The
Republican Contribution to Political Theory,” in Republicanism and Political
Theory, ed. Cecil Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2008). For the neo-Aristotelian approach, see Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's
Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
  7. E.g. Philip Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics
5, no. 2 (2006); Richard Dagger, “Neo-republicanism and the Civic Economy,”
Politics, Philosophy & Economics 5, no. 2 (2006). Ironically, it is a critic who
has most worried about the radical implications of the republican theory for
the organization of economic life. Gerald Gaus, “Backwards into the Future:
Neorepublicanism as a Postsocialist Critique of Market Society,” Social
Philosophy & Policy 20 (2003).
  8. Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-domination,” Political Theory 36,
no. 1 (2008): 23, emphasis added. Patchen Markell and Sharon Krause have
both given powerful reasons for thinking that, however attractive, the republican
612 Political Theory 41(4)

theory needs to be coupled with other conceptual resources if we want to grasp

the full dimensions of the relationship between freedom, power, and responsibil-
ity. Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-domination.” Sharon Krause, “Beyond
Non-domination: Agency, Inequality, and the Meaning of Freedom,” Philosophy
and Social Criticism (forthcoming 2012); Sharon Krause, “On Non-sovereign
Responsibility: Agency, Inequality, and Democratic Citizenship,” in Association
for Political Theory (University of Notre Dame: 2011).
  9. E.g. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought
and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003); Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; Viroli, Republicanism; Gordon
S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s
Discontent is a partial exception, since it deals with some of the labor republi-
cans I discuss below. There is no space here for me to lay out my disagreement
with Sandel, but suffice to say he reads them as neo-Aristotelians concerned
primarily with virtue, where I think their prime concern was freedom.
10. See prior footnote as well as Ira Katznelson and Andreas Kalyvas, Liberal
Beginnings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Nelson, The Greek
Tradition in Republican Thought; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century
Commonwealthman (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004); Quentin Skinner,
Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008); Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli's Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins
of Republican Ideas,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Quentin Skinner,
Gisela Bock, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993).
11. Pettit, Republicanism : A Theory of Freedom and Government. See also Maynor,
“The Republican Contribution to Political Theory.”
12. A claim sometimes made explicit, as in Kalyvas and Katznelson, who have
argued that in the nineteenth century republican ideas blend and evolve into lib-
eral ones. Kalyvas, Liberal Beginnings, 1–17, passim.
13. James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-monarchical Republic,”
Political Theory 38, no. 4 (2010).
14. A still unresolved debate, it must be said. Compare for instance Werner
Maihofer, “The Ethos of the Republic and the Reality of Politics,” in Machiavelli
and Republicanism, ed. Quentin Skinner Gisela Bock, and Maurizio Viroli
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). And Quentin Skinner, “The
Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed.
Quentin Skinner Gisela Bock, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
15. I have discussed the early, post-revolutionary republican critique of economic
inequality in my essay on William Manning. Alex Gourevitch, “William Manning
and the Political Theory of the Dependent Classes,” Modern Intellectual History
9, no. 2 (2012). See also Robert Maxwell Brown, “Back Country Rebellions
and the Homestead Ethic in America, 1749-1799,” in Tradition, Conflict, and
Gourevitch 613

Modernization: Perspectives on the American Revolution, ed. Richard Maxwell

Brown and Don Fehrenbacher (New York: Academic Press, 1977); W. J.
Rorabaugh, “‘I Thought I Shall Liberate Myself from the Thraldom of Others’:
Apprentices, Masters, and the Revolution,” in Beyond the American Revolution:
Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young
(Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993); Alan Taylor, “Agrarian
Independence: Northern Land Rioters after the Revolution,” in Beyond the
American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed.
Alfred F. Young (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). On the
highly fluid nature of early republican conceptions of “class” and “order” and
their implications for political economy, see Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of
Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995); Drew Mccoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in
Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
16. Elsewhere, I have discussed the internal struggle within republicanism to deal with
wage-labor and reconstructed the republican features of the early workingmen’s
parties. See Alex Gourevitch, “Labor and Republican Liberty,” Constellations
18, no. 3 (2011). I discuss these themes at length in my forthcoming book on
labor republicanism. The best treatments of the early response to wage-labor by
republican-minded workers, especially in and around the workingmen’s parties
of the 1820s and 1830s are David Montgomery, Citizen-Worker: The Experience
of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Edward
Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor
Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967); Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class,
1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For later nineteenth-
century worker republicanism see William Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free
Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review 1985, no.
4 (1985); Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America
(New York: Vintage, 1976); Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labour, and
the Republican Community (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005);
David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans
1862-1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); David Montgomery, “Labor and
the Republic in Industrial America: 1860-1920,” Le Mouvement social 111, no.
Georges Haupt parmi nous (1980); Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom,
176–235; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,”
The Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992); Sean Wilentz, “Against
Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement,
1790-1920,” International Labor and Working Class History 26 (1984).
17. Cicero, On Duties, trans. E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), [I.150] 58. For the influence of On Duties on the development of the
neo-Roman theory of liberty, see Skinner, “Machiavelli's Discorsi and the Pre-
humanist Origins of Republican Ideas.”
614 Political Theory 41(4)

18. See references in footnotes 15 and 16.

19. “Agrarianism,” The Atlantic Monthly III, no. XVIII (1859). For a nuanced treat-
ment of nineteenth-century agrarianism as not merely backward looking, see
especially Lause, Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican Community.
20. On the trajectory of the concept of wage-slavery see Eric Foner, The Story of
American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 58–68, 124–28.
21. For articles and books dealing specifically with the Knights of Labor and their
republicanism see Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor
and American Politics (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985);
Steven Leikin, The Practical Utopians: American Workers and the Cooperative
Movement in the Gilded Age (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004);
Richard Oestreicher, “Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and Artisanal
Republicanism,” in Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and
Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
22. George E. McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of to-Day (New York:
M. W. Hazen, 1892), 456.
23. Ibid., 459.
24. Ira Steward, “Poverty,” in Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics
of Labor, ed. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston: Wright &
Potter, State Printers, 1873), 434.
25. S. M. Jelley, The Voice of Labor (Chicago: A.B. Gehman, 1887), 203.
26. Leon Fink, “From Autonomy to Abundance: Changing Beliefs about the Free
Labor System in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Terms of Labor: Slavery,
Serfdom, and Free Labor, ed. Stanley L. Engerman (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 128.
27. Terence V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor 1859-1889 (Columbus, OH:
Excelsior, 1889), 26.
28. Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker (Arlington Heights,
IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985), 4.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Quoted in Leon Fink, “The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical
Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony and the Case of the Knights of Labor,” The
Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 115.
31. (unsigned), “Wages Slavery and Chattel Slavery,” The Journal of United Labor
V, no. 2 (1884).
32. Quoted in Oestreicher, “Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and Artisanal
Republicanism,” 42.
33. For Jefferson’s view, see Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American
Paradox,” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972).
34. The best discussion of the “practical utopianism” of these measures, as well as
the day-to-day workings of some of these actual cooperatives is Leikin, The
Practical Utopians: American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the
Gilded Age.
35. (unsigned), “Integral Co-Operation,” Journal of United Labor IV, no. 11 (1884).
Gourevitch 615

36. Jelley, The Voice of Labor, 261.

37. Terence Vincent Powderly, The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V.
Powderly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 269.
38. McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of To-day, 456.
39. Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British
Academy 117, no. 237 (2002): 248, emphasis added.
40. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and
Early Principate, 1.
41. Gaus, “Backwards into the Future: Neorepublicanism as a Postsocialist Critique
of Market Society,” 64.
42. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 158–59.
43. Pettit, “Freedom in the Market.” Philip Pettit, “A Republican Right to Basic
Income?,” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007). David Casassas, “Basic Income
and the Republican Ideal: Rethinking Material Independence in Contemporary
Societies,” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007); Dagger, “Neo-republicanism
and the Civic Economy.”
44. Pettit, “A Republican Right to Basic Income?,” 5.
45. Ibid.
46. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 141–42.
47. Pettit, “A Republican Right to Basic Income?,” 139.
48. Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” 142–43.
49. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 51–79.
50. Ibid., 52. Skinner, “Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power.”
51. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 52.
52. Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” 135.
53. Pettit, “A Republican Right to Basic Income?,” 139.
54. Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” 142, emphasis added.
55. The Institutes of Justinian, trans. J. B. Moyle (BiblioBazaar, 2008), I.iii.2.
56. On the social practices maintaining slavery see Keith R. Bradley, Slaves and
Masters in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
57. Quoted in Oestreicher, “Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and Artisanal
Republicanism,” 42.
58. For a formal analysis of the distinction between being free to do something
and doing it freely, especially as it regards forced labor, see G. A. Cohen, “Are
Disadvantaged Workers Who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous
Jobs?,” in History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx, ed. G. A. Cohen
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). On this point, labor republicanism and
Marxism are very similar.
59. Jelley, The Voice of Labor, 279.
60. Skinner, “Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,” 92.
61. I would like to thank Daniel Viehoff for suggesting this formulation to me.
62. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 159, emphasis
added.
63. Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” 142.
616 Political Theory 41(4)

64. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998 [1871]), 155.
65. Krause, “Beyond Non-domination: Agency, Inequality, and the Meaning of
Freedom.” Krause, “On Non-sovereign Responsibility: Agency, Inequality, and
Democratic Citizenship,” 6. I am grateful to Sharon Krause for sharing with me
her work on agency, intentionality, and responsibility in republican and non-
republican theories of freedom. To be clear, my aim is not to reject her criticisms
of neo-republicanism but that there is more space in the republican theory to deal
with some of these issues than even neo-republicans have been willing to admit.
66. Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non-domination,” 24–31.
67. Krause, “Beyond Non-domination: Agency, Inequality, and the Meaning of
Freedom,” 5–6.
68. In this sense, the argument may be compatible with Krause’s theory of non-
sovereign responsibility, since one is holding certain agents “responsible” for
outcomes that they may not consciously intend or anticipate. However, since I
believe we can trace this “responsible agency” to a kind of intentionality, I do
not see that this takes us beyond a republican theory itself. Indeed, as I have
suggested, this kind of generalized and structured intention to establish some
system of domination—be it in the form of slave law or unequal access to pro-
ductive assets—has always been a part of republicanism, but simply overlooked
or at least undertheorized by neo-republicanism. On republicanism and non-sov-
ereign responsibility, see Krause, “On Non-sovereign Responsibility: Agency,
Inequality, and Democratic Citizenship.”
69. Pettit, “A Republican Right to Basic Income?,” 139.
70. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify the con-
nection between structural domination and work organization.
71. On the inherent incompleteness of contracts, see Oliver Hart, Firms, Contracts and
Financial Structure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). On its relevance to
workplace republicanism, see Nien-hê Hsieh, “Rawlsian Justice and Workplace
Republicanism,” Social Theory and Practice 31, no. 1 (2005). See also my co-
authored discussion in Alex Gourevitch, Chris Bertram, and Corey Robin, “Let It
Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace,” in Crooked Timber (2012).
72. These are listed and discussed in Gourevitch et al. “Let It Bleed: Libertarianism
and the Workplace.”
73. For a discussion of this and related interferences in personal life on the job, see
Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 237–39.
74. Russell, Jesse. “Who Owns You While on Lunch Break,” Workers Independent
News, August 16, 2012.
75. For examples of these controversies, see Josh Eidelson, “Kochs to Workers:
Vote Mitt or Else!,” in Salon, October 18, 2012; Alex MacGillis, “Coal Miner's
Donor,” The New Republic, October 4, 2012.
76. These costs are well documented elsewhere, but include the cost of simply being
unemployed, of having sunk costs in terms of skilled training, of need to stay
Gourevitch 617

in a certain area because of family and friends, of loss of community and work
ties, and so on. For a discussion of these costs, see Hsieh, “Rawlsian Justice and
Workplace Republicanism,” 128–32.
77. Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth against Commonwealth (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1963 [1894]), 183.
78. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I make explicit
the connection between labor’s political agency and its cooperative ideals.
79. William H. Sylvis, “Address Delivered at Chicago, January 9, 1865,” in The
Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, ed. James C. Sylvis
(Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1872), 169.
80. On the early American origins of the “theory of the dependent classes” see
my essay, Alex Gourevitch, “William Manning and the Political Theory of the
Dependent Classes,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 2 (2012).
81. Lloyd, Wealth against Commonwealth, 178.

Author Biography
Alex Gourevitch is currently an assistant professor of political science at Brown
University. His research interests are in the history of political thought—especially
republicanism, slavery, free labor, and the history of economic thought—and in con-
temporary theories of freedom and economic organization. Recent publications
include an article in Modern Intellectual History that reinterprets early American
republican responses to economic inequality through the figure of William Manning,
and an article in Constellations that refines our understanding of republicanism
through a reconstruction of nineteenth-century debates about republicanism and free
labor. He has a book on contract with Cambridge University Press on the relationship
between freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century republicanism.