Review Essay: Life Beyond Work: On the Political Theory of Capitalism

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128989
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 271 –278

© The Author(s) 2022

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Book Review

Book Review

Abstract

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to

imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks

backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not

reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field

nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly

virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge

production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it,

reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to

late night conversations and confabulations.

Life Beyond Work: On the Political Theory of Capitalism

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It),

by Elizabeth S. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, 224 pp.

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries,

by Kathi Weeks. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 304 pp.

Reviewed by: Steven Klein, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London,

London, UK

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128989

“It’s the economy, stupid!” James Carville’s famous quip from Bill Clinton’s

1992 presidential campaign captures the contradictory zeitgeist of the 1990s

and early 2000s. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War solidified neolib-

eralism as a governing theory, reducing political conflict to the technical

management of economic growth. Politics was reduced to the economy. Yet

at the same time, the economy was imagined as a domain cleansed of power,

conflict, and, well, politics. Academic political theory was not immune to this

tendency. The challenge of this new world order was whether triumphant

liberalism could accommodate difference and diversity, be it in the softer

1128989PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128989Political TheoryBook Review

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